“Whatever you do, in word or in deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father, through him.”

Everything we think and say and do should be captured to Christ. It is a great regulator of our words and deeds to know we do them all in the name of the Lord Jesus. We can find ourselves rehearsing our griefs and failures and getting ourselves in a bad spiritual state by forgetting what God has done for us and in us. We forget that we are redeemed people, and the past is all forgiven by the Lord and we have been given a new start. Every time we fall, the Lord is there to correct us and pick us up and set us on our feet again. What a loving Saviour and Companion He is! He loves us with no regard for our past sins. They are forgotten in the sea of forgetfulness. He has paid the price already and we are free people. But our thoughts and words can bind us again in the bonds of blame and confusion. Let us put away the words and deeds that would separate us from the Lord our God and walk worthy lives for His glory and our own good.

We can be so cruel to ourselves and we can allow others to call the shots in our thought processes. We must cling to the words of the Scripture and not the lies of the enemy. We look to our Saviour and are so thankful for all that He has done for us. He has set us free, and we must never forget that.

Everything we do is for His sake, and remembering that His yoke is easy and His burden light. He is not a taskmaster nor is He harsh in His treatment of us. Unfortunately we are often harsh on ourselves and sometimes on each other too.

“The merciful man does good to his own soul, but he who is cruel troubles his own flesh.”

Proverbs 11:17

We must remember our own flesh and its limitations and weaknesses and not be unkind in our judgment of ourselves. We avoid sin and fight the unrighteousness that is in us, but we must not make our lives harsh and difficult and full of misery. The Lord gives us all things to richly enjoy, and all His things are ours in Christ. A cruel person is cruel to themselves, and this should not be the case, because the Lord is not cruel to us. Too many rules and regulations about life and a tight and unyielding legalistic spirit can make us so dull and restrictive. We stop enjoying life and start to pile on the blame and guilt. Christ our Lord has set us free from all that, so let us stand fast in His liberty and enjoy the life He has graciously given us to enjoy. We give thanks to Him for it and express our gratefulness to Him for all He does in us, by living our life for His glory and praise.

As we praise and thank our Father in heaven through the Lord Jesus Christ, so we give the glory to the right cause and set our priorities right, and our minds are focused on the right things. God will reward us and give us peace and the felt sense of His presence with us. We will find we have the strength to say and do the right thing when the time comes for us to act and speak.

“Settle it therefore in your hearts not to meditate beforehand how to answer, for I will give you a mouth and wisdom which all your adversaries will not be able to withstand or to contradict.”

Luke 21:14-15

If we give Him all, words and deeds, we will reap a rich harvest…