Zebra Ministries

Good morning Zebras,

I love you!

Daniel 1:5b They were to be trained for three years, and after that they were to enter the king’s service.

Daniel and his friends were taken into captivity with the purpose of being trained to go into full time service for the King.  We all know the story, Daniel refused to eat the King’s rich food, not for health reasons, but because God had given the Israelites dietary laws. 

We however we do not have dietary laws because Jesus declared all foods “clean."

Mark 7:18–23  “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him ‘unclean’?  For it doesn’t go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods “clean.”)  He went on: “What comes out of a man is what makes him ‘unclean.’  For from within, out of men’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.  All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean.’”

What we have is the directive found in James.

James 1:27 Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

Putting aside the widows and orphans for a moment let’s focus on “keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”  That is what Daniel was doing when he refused the king’s food.  He was preventing himself from being polluted by food he knew he wasn’t supposed to eat.

Our job then is to do the same thing, not just in regard to food, but in regard to everything.  The world is an onslaught of things that want to pollute our faith. Things that want to pull us off track, water down the truth and make us lose the joy of living for Jesus.  It is like living in a big puddle of mud that wants to stain our garments of white.

Revelation 3:1–4 …I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your deeds complete in the sight of my God. Remember, therefore, what you have received and heard; obey it, and repent… Yet you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their clothes. They will walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy.

It is not the “things we do for God” that prove we are a follower of Christ, it is how well we keep ourselves from being influenced by the world.  Since we can’t remove ourselves from the world we need to remember to wash frequently in the cleansing power of the Word of God so that none of the “mud of the world” sticks.   

Love,

Jill