THE RESTORING SHEPHERD – Wednesday July 12th 2017
Memorise: He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Psalm 23:3
Read: Psalm 23:1-3 (KJV)
23:1 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
23:2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
23:3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
MESSAGE:
For the sheep of the Great Shepherd, the infallible word of God in Psalm 23:3
guarantees restoration of that which is lost. Sometimes, God allows His
chosen ones to experience a loss so that they can have the opportunity
of experiencing Him as the Great Restorer.
Be assured in your heart
therefore that if you experience a loss that you did not cause by an act
of carelessness of disobedience, you can obtain restoration. However,
if you fail to ask for restoration, you may not experience it. In Joel 2:23-26,
God promised to restore all categories of losses. Every good thing that
you have lost shall be restored to you as you hold the Lord to His
word, in Jesus’ Name.
Moreover,
not only does the Great Shepherd restore physical and material losses
to His sheep. He also restores them spiritually. Speaking of spiritual
restoration, virtually all believers need this in some measures. In His
letter to the Church at Ephesus, the Lord Jesus Christ told the brethren
that they had left their first love. In other words, they needed
spiritual restoration so that they could embrace the good things they
did before, which they had abandoned. Revelations 2:5 says,
“Remember
therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first
works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy
candlestick out of his place, except thou repent.”
For
many of us, the zeal, love and fire with which we served God when we
first became saved have since ebbed. Our commitment, dedication and
consecration are no longer the same. In those days, we made some vows to
God such as “No Bible, no breakfast”, but are we still true to those
pledges? We promised to win the world of Christ, saying that no day
would pass without us winning a soul into God’s Kingdom. How true is
that today? Some of us are even so shy or afraid of speaking about Jesus
at God-given opportunities. We prefer to read books, surf the internet,
or visit social media sites than to preach in buses or cabs like we
used to. We sure need spiritual restoration! To be restored, you need to
recall how committed you were in times past, repent of your
lukewarmness and pick up from where you stopped. Go back to consecration
and holiness! Go back to reaching out to the lost on a daily basis! Do
you know that no day should pass without you prospecting for sinners to
be saved into God’s Kingdom? Ask God to restore you today!
Key Point
Words
like consecution, sanctification and dedication which were common place
in Christianity of old are now almost completely out of our vocabulary
today.
Open Heavens Daily Devotional guide was written by Pastor E.A. Adeboye, the General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, one of the largest evangelical Church in the world and also the President of Christ the Redeemer's Ministries.
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