Weekly Devotion Topic

H10: What do you think about starting a post each Sunday for devotion thoughts? There are 6 of us so every sixth Sunday it would be your turn to start a post with some devotion topic. Then, through the week the rest of us would leave a comment or two. The idea is to promote our personal quiet time. I will start with with a post for this week!

BACKGROUND: There is a book series entitled "Great Conversations" by Ravi Zacharias. I'm reading "Jesus talks with Oscar Wilde on the pursuit of pleasure." Here is an excerpt.


Topic: Building our Soul (e.g. heart, spirit, individual, eternal as opposed to flesh, body, temporal)


JESUS: What seems so difficult for many to grasp is that pleasure is always monetary. You can time it on every occasion. It has no staying power. That's what happens "under the sun"--apart from God. All pleasure, however good, is locked into the sensation of the moment. Was the pleasure in keeping with the way my Father has framed you? If it's in keeping with His will the mark it leaves upon your conscience will draw you back again to the pleasure, only this time it is pursued for a greater purpose than immediate gratification.

This is something you must understand To be enduring pleasure must always come from a prior moral commitment. If not, it is fleeting and empties very quickly. And in every relationship, there must be a moral commitment. Don't ever forget that.

OSCAR WILDE: But how can one treat things that are temporary as nothing? Just because they're temporary? I know this body is temporary. But so is life. Must I treat it as nothing?

JESUS: I said that anything that endures for a shorter time than the soul does is incapable of satisfying the soul.

OSCAR WILDE: Which means that I shouldn't pursue anything that doesn't satisfy the soul? Where does the body fit into all of this..."the flesh," as you often call it?

JESUS: No it doesn't mean you shouldn't pursue anything that doesn't satisfy the soul. But is does mean that anything that violates the soul destroys it. What is permanent is destroyed by what is temporary.

OSCAR WILDE: There's a hierarchy of pleasure, then?

Jesus: Of course...but here's your answer. In seeking pleasure, you pursued the body and lost the person. You sought the sensation and sacrificed the individual. You see, in pursuing the sacred, you exalt the person and the sensation follows. Life then makes sense. In pursuing the sensuality, you exalt the body and profane the person. It's like emptying a container and throwing it away. Life, then, becomes just a container. Living becomes senseless.

You wanted sexual promiscuity. It's written into the nature of sexuality that perversion empties pleasure of the meaning for which it was created. The body was not made for that...

I was not deceived by the tempter because My singular desire was to do the will of My Father. I couldn't be enticed to do the wrong thing because My desire was to please My Father. And that was what the temptation that came to a climax in the second garden (Gethsemane) was all about.