Knowing Him Daily

21.April.2026

LIVE LONG AND PROSPER

What God has cleansed you must not call common. Acts 10:15

Do you not perceive that whatever enters a man from outside cannot defile him, because it does not enter his heart but his stomach, and is eliminated, thus purifying all foods? Mark 7:18-19

If you love Me, keep My commandments. John 14:15

We love Him because He first loved us. 1 John 4:19

I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life. Deuteronomy 30:19

I will be honest with you. I was not deeply anchored in this story before I started writing this post, but that is one of the things I love most about digging into the Word. You never walk away empty.

Peter is on a rooftop in Joppa praying when he falls into a trance and sees a sheet descending from heaven filled with all kinds of animals, clean and unclean by every standard he had kept his entire life. A voice tells him to rise, kill, and eat. Peter refuses, and the voice responds with something that changes everything: what God has cleansed you must not call common. It happens three times. The primary point of that vision was about people, about Gentiles being welcomed into the kingdom, but the declaration carries weight that extends far beyond one rooftop conversation. Jesus had already said it plainly in Mark 7, that what goes into a person does not defile them, and in saying so He declared all foods clean. We are not going back to Levitical Law, and we are not meant to.

So if we are free, why are we even having this conversation?

Because freedom and love are not opposites of wisdom and stewardship, they are the foundation of it. John 14:15 does not say if you love Me you will feel obligated to keep My commandments. It says if you love Me you will keep them, and there is a world of difference between those two things.

Obligation operates in the mind. It is a want to that rises and falls with how we feel on any given day. When love has been genuinely encountered at the level of Romans 5, the love that met us while we were still a mess, that kind of love does not stay contained to Sunday morning. It overflows into every part of life, including how we treat the body He redeemed.

But it starts with a choice. Deuteronomy 30:19 tells us He sets life and death before us and then says choose life, and He means it. He will not make that decision for us, but the moment we turn to Him, the Spirit steps in and what our own resolve could never sustain becomes something else entirely.

We love Him because He first loved us. That is where it begins, always with Him, never with our own resolve. And when that love takes root in our spirit, not just our soul, not just the emotions, but in the deep place where He dwells in us, honoring Him with how we eat stops feeling like a rule and starts feeling like the most natural response in the world.

Not obligation. Not guilt. Just love, expressed in every fiber of who we are.

Make today count and see you tomorrow.