Most of our deeds have to be done without any foreknowledge of their outcome. Hope doesn’t mean confidence that things will work out as we wish, but confidence that God’s purposes will be accomplished, even if we have no idea what is going to happen.
We are a busy people with little time to meditate on God. But do we have so little longing for God because we’re busy, or are we so busy because we have little longing for God? Once we answer that with integrity, things will start looking up.
When we’re counting our blessings we need to count those times when we’re forced to face our need for God. Any episode of “hunger” that disrupts our sense of self-sufficiency and brings us back to the reality of our need is to be appreciated.
Thinking rightly about the God who is our Creator is vital. Remembering — rather than forgetting — what God has done in the past is the key to dealing reverently with God in the present and to thinking clearly about His promises in the future.
When we’re young, we haven’t lived long enough to look at events from anything but a very short perspective. Later, we can judge the value of things much more easily, because we can see them within a larger context. Age widens the lens of life.
We should pray that God will bring to naught any course of action on our part that is inconsistent with His purposes. And we ought never to be more grateful than when He has defeated the foolish little kingdoms that we set up in defiance of His.
Canaan was different than anything Abraham could have imagined in Ur, but the result of sojourning there was also better than anything he could have enjoyed elsewhere. He “waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”
We need to live life with death in mind. Our minds should be governed by neither a morbid fascination with death nor a gloomy fatalism, but simply a healthy understanding that we have only a few days in which to get our work done.
With our words we may say God is our most pressing priority, but if our schedule books show that on most days we spend very little time on that pursuit, who are we fooling? Where our heart is, there our “To Do” list will be also.
We need something superior to us to reach toward. Though we often suppose that independence, autonomy, and equality are the things we need, what we really need is a Being who is higher than we — One in whose supremacy and sovereignty we may rest.
