How do you maintain your integrity and walk upright while those around you lavish in sin?
This morning while I was in my bible study, I found myself thinking about this question when I was reading about Lot and his family living near Sodom and Gomorrah.
The Bible said the sin of the people was so grievous that Sodom and Gomorrah cry out and God heard.
Try to imagine it for a second, everyone around you lavishing in sin while you try to stay true to God.
YOU WOULD NEED TO HAVE A STRONG PRAYER LIFE.
Daniel is a great example of someone who maintained his relationship with God and kept his integrity while living in a pagan country. His secret was a faithful prayer life—3 times a day he prayed. It would have been easy for him to fall into living the lifestyle of the people around him because everyone else was. Babylon was a rich place AND he was a young man living far from his homeland.
Prayer is not just for us to go before God with requests; it’s where we get to know Him more, where we talk to Him as we would our best friend about everything and anything, and where He talks back to us. It builds us up in the knowledge of who God is and teaches us how to walk in His ways.
Through prayer, we will know that when we find ourselves surrounded by many unrighteous people, God wants to bring His light into their darkened lives through us. Daniel did not preach to the people he was around; his relationship with God, his faithfulness in prayer and his refusal to bow to the wicked ways of the land, was what allowed God’s light to shine through him and God’s power to be seen and feared.
The devil will try to provoke or harm you by letting jealousy and envy, rise up people against you, to bring out negative behaviours in you to steal your light. We need to maintain our relationship with God for Him to strengthen us to resist reacting in the ways of the flesh.
Daniel already had a strong prayer life before he got to Babylon and it was what kept him faithful to God throughout his entire service to all the Kings he served. So don’t wait until you are surrounded by darkness to pray, start building your prayer life now—it is vital for every believer.
We live in a fallen world where many find it hard to resist temptation because the flesh is weak. When an unsaved person sees you overcoming something he/she struggles with, the light in you will draw them to you to seek help and that will be your opportunity to share Christ and His Love with them. It is God’s light in us that brings light to the world. We can’t allow Christ’s sacrifice to be in vain by giving in to the darkness and letting it steal our light.
How do we keep our children grounded around unbelievers?
You as the parent/s have to lay a strong foundation for them in the teachings of the Lord—by this I mean, show them through your daily lives—walking upright. It would then become second nature for them to follow in your footsteps.
Abraham is another great example of someone that walked upright in the ways of the Lord while living among strangers. Abraham, like Daniel, also had a strong prayer life and walked with integrity. Throughout the book of Genesis, you are always seeing him having conversations with God. If you don’t have a consistent prayer life, you will never get to where Abraham was with God.
Remember, the Bible also commanded us to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17). Prayer keeps the connection between us and God and gives God the authority to act on our behalf. When we pray daily we grow more in understanding God, and we then start to hear from him more.
When Abraham left his father’s homeland Ur of the Chaldees, to live in the land of Canaan, which God had promised him as an inheritance, he took his young nephew Lot who had lost his father, with him. Abraham’s lifestyle had taught Lot how to walk upright before the Lord throughout his life and when he grew up and moved away with his own family, Lot continued to live by those same principles. In Genesis 18 and 19 you see an example of this.
Both men had such an intimate relationship with God that in Genesis 18 when three men were passing through the land on their way to Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham recognized that they were not ordinary men, but God himself, and two angels and he invited them to stop and eat with him.
In Genesis 19, you see the same action taken by Lot when the same two men got to Sodom and Gomorrah to bring judgement upon the land. It was what he learned from Abraham that saved him from the judgement that came upon that land. It was what kept him from becoming corrupt like everyone else that travelled with him to that land. If Abraham did not fellowship with God with Lot around, Lot would not have learned to do the same.
So as parents, you don’t pray for your kids only—you pray with them so they learn to stand on their own. The home is where the first church started and it’s we parents who need to teach our kids how to fellowship with God first. You cannot shield them from the world or should you. But pray for them, pray with them, worship with them and let them see a consistency in your life that even when you don’t feel like doing something, you still do, so they develop that strength and commitment as well.
If you just got saved and you already have kids, let them see you grow in Christ. I mean let them be with you while you pray, worship and read the word. Don’t give in to their requests to do whatever they like. Let one of your first prayers as a new Christian be to ask God, to show you all the things you need to get rid of out of your house and your life and to give you the strength to do it.
Sometimes the flesh will hold us back from letting go of things we need to release, even though we are in Christ. That way, you won’t have such a fight as you are growing in the Lord. When you are praying do so in all the rooms, don’t just limit your praying to one place. Let your house itself become a prayer and worship altar.
When anyone comes around you or your house, they are supposed to feel Christ.
Check out this short video snippet from my Christian Fiction Book about Darkness vs. Light. Please subscribe for more videos that will help you grow on your spiritual journey.