"Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour."--1 Peter 5:8. Here Peter tells us to be of sober spirit and to be alert because the devil is hunting us like a lion. What Peter is emphasizing is the importance of sobriety.
**Before I begin, I need to give some credit to my friend and brother Jack Dodgen for handling this same passage in recent months. I am taking a different approach then he did but he wrote some excellent thoughts on this passage. The link for his devo will be at the end of these thoughts.**
Sobriety. Peter emphasizes the importance of being sober. Of course when we hear the word sober or sobriety, our minds tend to go to someone who is not under the influence of alcohol. While the Bible speaks to the importance of not getting drunk, the sobriety mentioned in this context is of a very different type, we are speaking here of sobriety of spirit.
Sobriety. To go with the alcohol illustration, if you have ever seen anybody that is drunk, they typically do not know what they are doing or saying and end up making some very poor choices and sometimes end up in situations they end up regretting "the morning after" as the adage goes. This is all due to a lack of judgment and not to mention self-control. See Galatians 5:16-25 for reference.
Sobriety. If we are spiritually "drunk", this also creates a big problem. If we are just going through the motions in our walk with God and not checking ourselves, we set ourselves up for attack from the lion, the devil.
Sobriety. I have chosen this topic for tonight because I have realized I have not been as spiritually sober as we all need to be. I recently noticed a couple of things about myself that I don't think God approves of and based on recent studies, I am pretty sure, He does not approve of some of the attitudes I have had recently. So I have chosen to take a step back things and re-evaluate my motives. I hope over the next couple of days to keep a log of what I do and what my attitude was towards that. Call it my recovery from spiritual drunkenness. Thanks for the prayers.
Sobriety. My encouragement to you tonight is this. Do what I am doing, take a step back from things and check your motives. Do this by keeping a brief log of what you do and what your attitude was toward what you did when you did it. Do this through the weekend, you might learn a few things about yourself and what you need to improve on. I am betting that I will.
Finally, check out my buddy Jack D.'s thoughts on this passage at http://babytaco.blogspot.com/2011/04/our-adversary-lion.html.
DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! PRAY ABOUT IT! LOVE Y'ALL! GOD BLESS!
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