Beloved, when God weighs you in His balances, you will be found wanting if your righteousness is not of God in Christ Jesus. Except your righteousness shall exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the Kingdom of heaven - Matthew 5:20. Self-righteousness is like filthy rags and falls short of God's standard of true righteousness and holiness.

Greed, covetousness, the love of money and materialism cause the heart of man to drift away from God. And the heart that is far from God will usually be plagued by sorrow and misery. There may be temporary happiness, but without contentment real joy will definitely be missing. Covetousness like idolatry takes the heart away from the Lord. Wherefore, my dearly beloved, flee from idolatry - 1 Corinthians 10:14.

The grace of God is misunderstood by many Christians and Bible teachers. Under grace believers are free from sin but not free to sin. The erroneous doctrine of eternal security stems from the teaching that once saved by grace, you are forever saved regardless of what you do afterwards. But Demas who was once saved by grace, later backslid and lost his salvation because of the love of the world. We cannot take the grace of God for granted because it is not a license to sin.

One of the reasons why we read, study and meditate on the word of God, is to arm ourselves for victory in the face of temptation. Every time Jesus was tempted either directly or indirectly by the devil, he overcame by speaking the written word. Learn to hide the Word of God in your heart, that you may have what to say in the hour of temptation. You must deliberately make out time every day, to read and meditate on the word of God.

The word of God has the power to keep us from sin. Referring to the Bible, John Bunyan wrote: "Either this book will keep you from sin or sin will keep you from this book". The word of God purifies and cleanses us from all sin when we simply obey the instrcutions of the Lord. Jesus said, "the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life" - John 6:63. His words rescues man from the power of sin and spiritual death.