When we stay so long in one place that it feels like “home,” we may forget that our lease on this life is temporary. We quit dreaming about heaven, and we get to the point where we don’t want to let go of the things we’ve grown so accustomed to.
“Father, hear the prayer we offer: not for ease that prayer shall be, but for strength, that we may ever live our lives courageously.” While others pray to be excused from hardship, the wise pray for whatever strength faith’s journey may require.
Our hearts need an inside-out transformation. This is the goal God has in mind for us, and there is no shortcut to it. We should make sure that any impatience we have with our present imperfection does not turn into impatience with God Himself.
As we acknowledge our failures and our sorrows, various forms of self-righteousness can creep into our thinking. Secretly, we may come to look upon those whose lives appear more trouble-free as being somehow less spiritually mature than we are.
Let us not praise our present “clothing” more than the facts warrant. If we’re among His faithful people, Christ will one day clothe us in perfect glory. Our rags will be turned into riches. Until then, we need to be honest about our raggedness.
Events can seem so overwhelming it’s hard to not to feel like “dust in the wind.” And yet there remains within us a will that is free. When we make even a single choice to do what is right before God, we alter the course of history for the better.
The drastic rehabilitation Christ envisions is certainly not the work of one day. But just because we require more than a quick fix, that doesn’t mean we’re locked into our mistakes. “Beware of succumbing to failure as inevitable” (Oswald Chambers).
Jesus not only felt the full range of emotions that are the lot of humanity, but He felt them intensely and vividly. Genuine discipleship to the Son of Man will not turn us into unfeeling, insensitive robots. It will teach us to feel what God feels.
If we live in a “spiritual” climate where pretense is rewarded and honesty is frowned upon, we may conceal the heartache of deep needs that God allows to remain unfulfilled right now and cover up the reality of our continuing struggle with sin.
As we learn to pray, we must learn to want the higher things that relate to God’s rule and His righteousness — and want them for higher reasons than those that usually motivate us. We must seek, above all, the things that redound to His glory.
Jesus calls us to make a radical choice. The choice Israel needed to make was a prefiguring of the greater choice that confronts us today. The very worst decision we can make is to try to have every possibility at once. We cannot serve two masters.