Drag in our spiritual lives.

This weekend was a crazy weekend for me, so I did not get a chance to post a daily devotional. First let me say congrats to Jamie McMurray for winning the Daytona 500 yesterday, even though I was wanting Dale Jr. to win. I am happy for whoever wins a race, and even happier when no one gets hurt.

Now on to the devotional for today. In NASCAR the teams have a engineers that their only job is to find the fine balance between to much aerodynamic drag and enough down force to keep the car on the track. Which is a good thing at almost 200 mph, speeds that only a select few get to see. For the rest of us, we will not have to worry about aerodynamic drag in our daily drives to and from work. We DO have to worry about spiritual drag in our lives from day to day, and this drag can be very tiring. It says in Hebrews 12:1;

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.

I talk a little about this passage in my very first post, but with it being the day after Daytona, this verse still inspires me to dive deeper into this verse. In our daily lives there is always something that is out there to create drag in our spiritual lives. I know for me there are times that I feel like that I have been "disqualified" from the gift that God has given us with the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus. The devil is always around to reminds us how we have sinned and try to keep secrets from God, which we all know that we have no secrets that God does not know about. The secret to getting rid of the drag we all experience is to give it all to God. Throw off everything that is keeping you down and give it to God, He will pick you up and help you get back on track. Can imagine how much God must love us to be willing to pick us up when we fall. I know it is hard to give up everything to God, we all want control over our lives, but we do not have control, God does.

Just the drivers like in the Daytona 500, we have to pace ourselves to run the race that has been laid out in front of us. If we go all out we will make more mistakes and we will not learn from the mistakes that we have made. Plus you can not hear anything at a dead run. So how can we expect to hear God when he is talking to us? If we take our time we can learn to tell the difference between God talking and the devil talking, and that is very important. If we listen to what the devil says, then we will always have spiritual drag in our lives. So we must throw everything off that drags us down, I know I am repeating myself but I think it is very important we always realize this.

I think one of the best ways to get rid of the secrets in our lives that cause the spiritual drag in our lives, is to find someone or a group of people that we trust to share the drag with. We do not have to run the race alone, we are all in it together. Iron sharpens iron, and we can help each other.

Today the questions I want to ask everyone to ask themselves. What secret sin do you work hard to keep hidden? What spiritual drag do you have in your life? I challenge everyone to ask God to show them someone that they can share with.