A New Devotion - Correcting Geraldine

Here's a new devotion that I wrote. It's based on the passage below. You can find a recording of this devotion at the bottom of the page.

Galatians 5:16-24 [Contemporary English Version]

If you are guided by the Spirit, you won't obey your selfish desires. The Spirit and your desires are enemies of each other. They are always fighting each other and keeping you from doing what you feel you should. But if you obey the Spirit, the Law of Moses has no control over you.

People's desires make them give in to immoral ways, filthy thoughts, and shameful deeds. They worship idols, practice witchcraft, hate others, and are hard to get along with. People become jealous, angry, and selfish. They not only argue and cause trouble, but they are envious. They get drunk, carry on at wild parties, and do other evil things as well. I told you before, and I am telling you again: No one who does these things will share in the blessings of God's kingdom.

God's Spirit makes us loving, happy, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled. There is no law against behaving in any of these ways. And because we belong to Christ Jesus, we have killed our selfish feelings and desires.

Correcting Geraldine

When I was a kid, we used to watch the Flip Wilson Show. And although I could kind of identify with the preacher, I always enjoyed Geraldine, the Flip Wilson persona who felt that she could avoid accountability for her bad behavior by saying, “The Devil made me do it.” Of course, at the time, I just thought it was funny; little did I know I’d spend the next fifty years dealing with otherwise honest and sincere Christians who seem to believe the same thing. 

In other words, I’m amazed at the number of believers, and I certainly include myself, who feel as though they can avoid both responsibility and accountability by blaming their self-centered actions and bad behavior on someone other than themselves. Of course, I recognize that, within American society, we have plenty of leaders who lie at the drop of a hat to get elected and who’ll throw anyone under the bus if they think it’ll enable them to avoid getting into trouble. And since we continue to support them, they may be right. Sadly, though, this same attitude seems to be alive and well within the Body of Christ, with believers scanning the world for those people, ideas and philosophies they can blame for all the problems they see and face. You see, instead of looking in the mirror for the answers, they choose to look out their windows, assuming that if they can make the blame stick, they’ll be able to convince both themselves and God.

Of course, that’s not how Paul viewed it, not based on what he wrote to the Galatians. You see, all those evil thoughts and desires, you know, like jealousy, anger and selfishness, they come from the inside. Therefore, if we indulge or excuse them, we have only ourselves to blame for the resulting immoral ways and filthy thoughts and shameful deeds. That’s just the way it is, and if this was where it ended, we’d be in big trouble. But God’s Spirit changes things up, because we also have the potential of being “loving, happy, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled.” [Galatians 5:22b-23a, CEV] In other words, God gives us the choice: either we can act like insensitive, irresponsible jerks who'll do anything to avoid accountability or we can claim the Spirit and live as though we really belong to Jesus Christ. You see, regardless of Geraldine and her desire to cast blame, we have the ability to be the people God has created us to be.