Daily Devotion

Living In Insanity

 

"Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, "See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.""  John 5:14

 

You've been burned millions of times, because you keep putting your hands in the fire.  You keep getting into the same arguments over and over again.  Or maybe you do my number: drive the car until the gas hand gets very low, most times out of laziness, and then fill it up...wondering if you'll ever run out of gas.  Well, these behaviors and many other cyclic behaviors that produce the same result equal what we love to call "crazy" people--INSANE.  Insanity is contemporarily defined as doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result; you know, like a rat in a maze running to the same cheeseless corner.  Well maybe in the case of the rat, he does not possess a true capacity of mind to actually learn that his behavior is producing the same nonproductive result.  But we all have the ability to learn, to change, whether we believe it or not. 

 

Many times throughout the Bible, the Prophets, Jesus, and the Apostles all instruct the peoples to turn away from their sins.  But because of the inherent sinful nature of the world, we are naturally inclined to do wrong--thus sin.  You cannot get anything new if you keep doing the same old things.  In the above story, Jesus tells our "insane" man to stop sinning--which indicates that his perpetual sinning was the cause of his infirmity and that if he continued in it, he would suffer potentially greater consequences.  He obviously was still sinning, or why would Jesus say these things to him.  But the sinning isn't his only example of insanity:  he waited at the pool year after year for over 30 years in hopes that someone would help him into the pool first to be healed.  Rather than a)hmmm I don't know lay at the very edge of the pool so he could have rolled in or b)seek some other form of healing. He sat by the pool year after year in hopes that he would get healed...thank God Jesus came and healed him, else he would otherwise still be waiting and still be complaining about someone getting in before him.  Like this man, we are all guilty of insanity at some point; its at these points that we need to recognize that God is the only one that can bring sanity and peace to our lives.  For example, I go to sleep late night after night, hoping that I can get up early to get to work earlier...like tonight lol.  Yes how insane of me to think that without making an honest effort to adjust my sleeping habits that I will actually get up earlier on my own.  Here's the why not: I have four different alarms that I all snooze at some point or another...please don't laugh lol.  But like the man at the pool of Bethesda, I have to turn away from sin--my sin in this case staying up late---so that nothing worse will happen, like I oversleep for work.  We have to recognize our insane behaviors and submit them to God so that we can overcome them.  It is hard to overcome bad habits without fully making a commitment to God for Him to change them.  We cannot overcome our pasts without giving them to God because our weakness will force us to allow them to linger or to deny their existence.  We cannot tear down strongholds without first recognizing the damages they take on.

 

Stop doing what you've been doing all along--whatever it is that is keeping you in insanity, away from the fullness of God's grace.  We live in a crazy world, but if you submit your life to God, He will break those cycles and make the road straight for you.  And with this, I bid you all good night and many blessings!