Matthew Devotion: 18:8

"... if your hand causes you to sin..."

The Kingdom of God - and the ensuing relationship with the Almighty - is like a waterway. It's banks rim with torrents of icy cold water. There are lagoons of peace and solitude and bays of clarity, wherein the sweetness of Communion between us and our God is such that its description rises above that of human language.

 These pristine Waters need never be polluted - especially when its within our power to keep that from happening. We need to protect them.

Pollution happens when our faith moves away from the Faith of the Child. When we, by the build up of transgressions, find that our heart fails. It simply can no longer live into the simplicity and grace of the Gospel. The accumulation of bitterness, love of this world, pride, and the hardened attitudes of our hearts causes our inner grown-up to distance itself from the Child within.

That is why Jesus is so insistent that we do everything possible to keep small; everything possible to free ourselves from the things that cause others to stumble (v.6), that render attitudes of unforgiveness (v.22), divorce (19:8), and the love of money (19:22) - and all this, for the sake of the little Child within.

What are the influences that draws you away from this pure, childlike Faith? Search them out. Label them. And destroy them. Is it a hand, a foot, a refusal to forgive with the same grace wherein you have been forgiven? These things, if not pulled from the streams of Living Water, will eventually grow into boulders in our hearts and - in their natural progression - soon grow into great stone walls which will cause God in us to be dammed.

Jesus knows this world can be a hard place. He knows all too well the harshness it offers to the hearts of the Redeemed and how easily our precious Child is bruised, torn and afflicted in the hailstorms of this life. The emphasis here is on the preciousness of the Child, the Currents of Fellowship, the Intimacy of the Lagoons, and  the Joy of Morning's Dawn - things so precious that it is worth sacrificing anything and everything, just in order stay in the sweet showers of God's Blessing.