Devoted

   This week, we will be talking about devotion. That seems like a term not used enough in our generation for the fear of evaluating what we are actually devoted to. Recently, I attended Student Life Camp in Cleveland, TN and that was the theme. Devoted. So, I decided to point out some obvious and not so obvious devotions we seem to face in our daily lives. Some devotions seen every day in the life of a high schooler are drugs, food, sex, lies, cheating, stealing, cursing, deception, lust, vanity, self worship, self confidence, discrimination, intimidation, self image, good grades, popularity, music, sports, approval, perfection, intimacy, love, independance and so on. Basically, its like my great bible teacher said, "selfishness is the root of our sin, we sin because we love ourselves." I will expand. We sin becuase we are DEVOTED to ourselves. So now that we realize that our devotion is not Christ generally in our day to day life, the question that we face is, how do we make it Christ? How do we "set our eyes upon Jesus?" The answer is simple, realizing how we were forgiven and are forgiven of our sins daily, therefore letting us die to ourselves, showing in our lives that we are not of this world, is a great devotion to Christ. When we realize that this world has absolutely nothing for us,and that our only hope is the eternal full satisfaction of God Almighty himself, we realize how foolish it is to devote ourselves to other things. This thought process along with the Holy Spirit, in turn will empower us to fully and truly devote ourselves to Christ and His work in our lives.

-AJ