Finding Favor with God

Noah found favor with the Lord. (Genesis 6:8) 

The hope of every believer's heart is that they 'find favor with the Lord' in all they say, think, and do. At times, we aren't very wise in our choice of words, so we waver a bit there. We waver a bit in the area of our thinking as we don't always 'put our thinking caps on' before we speak or act. We definitely waver in the 'doing' part of life as our mind may desire to do one thing, but we end up doing what our emotions 'feel' rather than what we know to be right. Noah was righteous and blameless before God. Out of all the people on earth, he alone found favor before God. Compared to the rest of the world around him and you will see they were so evil that God got to the point he could not bear it anymore. His justice demanded that he punish them. 

I can only imagine how difficult it would be to live a righteous life in this kind of evil and vile environment. There was absolutely no restraint against sin. Everybody else was engaging in the worst of sins shamelessly and actually encouraging others to follow in their choices. Violence, immorality of all kinds, cheating in the marketplace, lying to get ahead, murdering one another, and a number of other sins that would curl your hair if I wrote them here. But Noah, just like Enoch and Seth before him stood out to God as 'different'. He didn’t make the same choices as those around him. From God's account of the conditions that existed around him, there was no one else outside of his own family who truly trusted God. 

And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect. (Romans 12:1-2) 

We also live in a dark world, but it is not nearly as dark as at that time. We have the blessing of fellowship with other believers who can help us where Noah and his family were truly alone. If God were looking at us as he did that day, do you think we would find favor in God’s sight? If God were to build another "ark", who would he choose to build it today? Would any of us stand out as being righteous, in love with Jesus, and following in his footsteps, or are we basically the same as everybody else? Just askin...