Trusting in God

Sometimes as I read Scripture, I find something that causes me to pause and reflect.

That was the case this morning. I was reading Psalm 41. In this Psalm, David’s enemies are pursuing him, saying evil things about him, and devising evil plans against him. Even his best friend has turned against him. He is all alone, and fears that death is near.

Yet he looks to God. All of his hope is found in God. He believes that God will lift him up and deliver him. And his proof? Verse 11: “By this I know that you are pleased with me, that my enemy does not triumph over me.”

How does David know that God is still with him? Because his enemies, while hotly devising evil schemes, have not yet killed him!

I find that pretty incredible. Today, so many people want God to deliver them from every bump in the road. Every hitch, every setback, is cause for wonder if God is still there.

Have the faith of David. God is with you! The fact that you are still here is all the proof you need. Live your life for God now, no matter how difficult it might be. Because you’ll probably never be as bad off as David was when he wrote Psalm 41. And David still knew of God’s love for him.

Though you may face trials of many kinds, God is with you and will deliver you. Trust in that!

Finding peace in what you can't understand...

On Thursday I performed a funeral for a young man who died suddenly. He was my age, and in getting to know him, I found that we had a lot in common.

It’s hard to explain the death of someone in their late 40’s. In fact, you can’t explain it. We come to funerals like this showing our lack of understanding. There really is so much that we don’t understand. Most of the time we can hide it well, we can appear to be in control of our own lives, our own destiny. But once in a while something happens that seems very unfair, shockingly unfair, and we realize that we really don’t understand as much as we might have thought we understood.

These things that we can’t understand can rock our world. They shake our foundations. We thought we knew a little bit about life, and then something happens to remind us we really don’t. But we want to. More than anything, the human race wants to understand. We pursue understanding. Everyone of us, to some extent, thinks we understand things. We all develop our own opinions. We believe we know the way things are. So it can be particularly devastating to find that we don’t understand the really big things. Life. Death. Disease. As hard as we try, we find that there is always more that we don’t understand, then what we do understand.

Perhaps one of God’s greatest blessings is the ability to find peace, even in those situations we may never understand. Peace is one of the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). Understanding isn’t.

When your foundations are shaken, seek God’s peace. We may never understand, but we may find peace.

A thought on worry...

I’ve been worrying lately. There is a situation in my wife’s family that has caused a rift, and I am really worrying about it. I’m not going to get into details, but I don’t know what to do, if anything, about it.

Since this has started, I’ve heard (over and over again) those passages that talk about giving our concerns over to Jesus, and for the most part, I do that. But I also remember Rick Warren’s quote in The Purpose Driven Life, “The problem with a living sacrifice is that it keeps crawling off the altar.” Perhaps I’m dropping this concern at the altar, only to pick it up again as I leave.

I’m not unusual. Many of you may do the same thing. Many are filled with worry, when we should be enjoying the fruits of the Spirit. In my quite time this morning, I came across the passage in Matthew commonly called the parable of the sower. In this parable, we see that the seed of the kingdom is scattered to all. But many don’t receive it. Some of the seed feel among thorns, where it grew, but the weeds and thorns choked it out. Later in the passage, Jesus explains this to His disciples. “The one who received the seed that fell among the thorns is the man who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke it, making it unfruitful.”

As I was thinking on this passage, I began to see how worry chokes us of the Spirit and makes us unfruitful. Am I being unfruitful because of this family concern? Is God withholding fruit because of my worry? Are you as fruitful as you could be, or is worry choking your fruit as well?

There is another verse we can cling to, from Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him…” Let’s all of us, you and me, allow God to work through these things that worry us, that good might come of them. Let’s let go and let God work.

I know it’s a lot easier to say than to do this, but we can, if we are confident in God’s word to bear fruit in our souls. One thing for sure, our worrying can’t help the situation. It only hinders God’s work.