739 Everything You Own - Psalm 24:1

Have you ever considered the importance of ownership? Hi, I'm Mike Henry Sr. with Follower of One. Thanks for joining me again today on the Follower of One podcast. We appreciate you joining us for these brief messages every day as a way to challenge yourself as you go into your day to live a life that's integrated with your faith in Christ. Today, I want to talk about Psalm 24:1, which I'm reading from the Christian Standard Version. "The earth and everything in it, the world and its inhabitants belong to the Lord." That's Psalm 24:1 from the Christian Standard Bible. 

If you own or create something, you have control over how that thing is used and what it does. God created the universe and each of us, therefore He's in charge. We don't like to admit that, but it's the truth. He has given us some ability to create and some ability to choose what we do, however, exists inside of His control, and I don't fully understand that. I don't claim to. But what difference does it make in our life? Well, if I choose to believe Psalm 24:1, then when I don't have something, I can turn to God. But the question of what I want probably isn't the first question. The first question might need to be, "what does God want?" It's His stuff, and I'm His stuff. He must have had a reason for creating me, and therefore I want to find out part of that reason.

I want to understand as much of that reason as I can because I also believe that God is good and maybe we can do another post on that here soon. God's goodness leads me to believe that what He created me to do is something that I will enjoy. I can walk in His purpose for me and expect joy from that because He promises joy for us. And so I want to also ask you, what does it mean for you if God owns you? If God created you? We don't like those terms in our Western world. But today, I want to consider how God wants me to behave in the world. What difference does He want me to make? He's given us this opportunity to speak about our own lives and serve other people around us and take part in His global strategy for saving every person who will believe in Jesus.

We get to be part of that and we get to experience the joy of being part of that. I so often considered what God wanted me to do as being work. Something that would be negative and something I didn't want to do, and I was trying to do as little of what God wanted me to do as I possibly could because I believed I enjoyed these other things.

I enjoyed what I wanted to do more than what I thought God wanted me to do. But the more I follow and trust God and lean on Him, the more I understand that God's calling for me gives me joy and it gives me peace.  Therefore I need to remember that God owns me. I believe Psalm 24:1, I believe the earth and everything in it belong to God. Therefore, I want to try and use it the way He would have it used. I wanna try and take part in the lives of other people and accomplish what God would have me accomplish. I wanna be His person in my world today. 

What about you? Would you like to intentionally be more purposeful about this? One way you can do that is with our First Daily Activity. You can pray and simply tell God, "here I am God, what would you have me do today?" You punch in and you get on the clock with that prayer, and we start working for God today it's up to Him and the Holy Spirit living in us to help us understand what He would have us do. We get that opportunity. And I believe if you'll do that, you'll experience joy today.

Look back at the end of your day today, and then let us know what happened. You can drop me a line at [email protected]. You can communicate with me through our Facebook page or our LinkedIn company page or in any way that you would like. I want to know, and I want to help marketplace Christians integrate their faith into their daily life because I believe that will make our world better.

Anything that I can do to help you, please let me know at [email protected] and also consider joining us in our online community, which is https://community.followerofone.org. Thanks very much for being a Marketplace Minister and for choosing to make a difference with your faith today.