With too much tranquility, we tend to forget God. We need to get out of our ruts and go on some fearful adventures, the kind that require real faith. If we don’t, God may have to disturb us. He may have to say, “Get out of your country . . .”
What God has done is powerful, but neither nature nor the Scriptures are powerful enough to impress us if we are unobservant. For the significance of what we see and hear to sink in and alter our character and conduct, we have to pay attention.
If God’s love for us is active, then our response to Him must also be active. He will help us do whatever needs to be done (Philippians 4:13), but He won’t force salvation upon any person who doesn’t care enough to seek Him diligently.
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.”
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