The Dallas Cowboys and Jimmy Johnson.  Cookies and cream. Peanut butter and jelly.  Donnie and Marie. Chicken and waffles. Some things just go together.  In fact, they don’t even work right unless they are together. You can’t just have cookie ice cream. No, it is cookies and cream.  No one likes peanut butter sandwiches-it makes your mouth too sticky. But put some grape jelly on there and suddenly it is a feast fit for a king.  Some things just go together and that brings us to our Verse of the Day:

Proverbs 21:21

Whoever pursues righteousness and love

finds life, prosperity and honor.

The Lord is giving us a type of formula here.  If we pursue both righteousness and love, we will find life.  This is an abundant, fun, awesome life. We will find prosperity.  This is not limited to money. But this means prosperity in our health, our relationships, our money, our careers.  We will also find honor. Honor is what we receive from peers and supervisors and those in authority above us. Pursuing righteousness and love will cause our life to be such that people will recognize the value we bring.  Promotions, recognition, and awards will follow. But the key is that dynamic duo of love and righteousness.  

Like Donnie and Marie balance one another out with a little bit of rock n roll and a little bit of country, righteousness and love balance one another out.  Unless they come as a mixture, the result will be the opposite of what we might think.

If someone has love, but no righteousness, then everything is by emotion.  There will be no standard of behavior only feelings of what one should do. And the problem with this is that the heart, the seat of our emotions, has been perverted (Jeremiah 17:9).  I don’t mean perverted sexually, but I mean the enemy takes the good God has put in us and tempts us to use it in a sinful way. And when I say sinful, I mean selfish. Those are two words that go together as well.  People with love and without righteousness will fall victim to their own emotions which will eventually lead them to a place of selfishness where they are always trying to get love from other people. It creates a selfish perspective on life.  The end result is that people will be repelled from selfishness and they will never gain what they desire the most which are people around them that truly love them.

On the other hand, if a person only has righteousness, a standard of behavior, but no love, it will result in arrogance.  They will consider themselves to be better than those who are not living up to that standard. They will judge, condemn, and look down on others. This also takes them further into a sinful perspective on life where they feel it is their duty to judge everyone and condemn everyone from their seemingly superior posture.  

But when you put the two together, righteousness and love, it is the love we have that motivates us to uphold the standard, but it is the standard that protects us from living by our emotions.  This balance is the key to finding abundant life, prosperity, and honor.  

How balanced are you between love and righteousness?  Do you live by your emotions? Do you solely focus on following all of God’s rules and making everyone else do the same? 

Begin to work on these, getting them together, like Elvis and Vegas, bananas and splite, Starsky and Hutch, Laurel and Hardy, Lightning McQueen and speed.

Be sure to leave me a comment, share on social media, and forward to those who you think might be helped by this devotion.

Live Blessed and Be a Blessing!