Tuesday, January 18
3 do not waste your strength on women,
on those who ruin kings.
The Message translates the first sentence of the previous verse like this, “Oh, son of mine, what can you be thinking of! Child whom I bore! The son I dedicated to God!” It seems obvious what this promise of hers was thinking! This mother was not naïve. She was the original advocate for talking to your kids about sex and other pitfalls of life! The word ‘strength’, according to Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance means wealth, valor, and virtue and is confirmed by The Message translation, “Don't dissipate your virility on fortune-seeking women, promiscuous women who shipwreck leaders.” Recently, I was cable channel surfing. I came across The Joy Behr Show. A guest host was interviewing two beautiful young women who were discussing their life as part of a harem. Their manager, who was there along with them, vehemently asserted that the young women were free to leave any time and that he, in no way, was a pimp! The interviewer stated that she had heard that virgins are becoming more and more desirable and asked him the going rate for a virgin. He stated a virgin can bring as high as one million dollars.
Have you have lost your virginity, physically or metaphorically? You can still become virtuous. Remember Bathsheba. The word, virgin, implies an absence of an action. Virtuousness implies a lifestyle.
In what ways are you living a virtuous life?
Can you articulate, on a separate piece of paper, a time when you wasted your “strength, wealth, valor, or virginity?”
Now, take that piece of paper out side, and give it to God in exchange for His forgiveness, make an altar and burn it! It is gone! It is impossible to reassemble!
Journal your confessions of renewed virginity.
This morning when I burned my paper, I thought about the ashes. My mind immediately went to Isaiah 61:3. "...to give them beauty for ashes." I looked up the word ashes in the Strong's Concordance. It means worthlessness. The first mention of the word ashes in the Bible is found in Genesis 18:27. Abraham says of himself "(I am but) dust and ashes."
ReplyDeleteThank you, Lord, for giving me beauty for worthlessness, beauty for decisions that proved to be worthless. If you can bless Abraham like you did, not because of any works he did or did not do, but simply because he believed in your goodness, then it will be for me also. Because of Christ, I am Abraham's seed and I claim his inheritance.