"Faith is reason grown courageous." - Sherwood Eddy
For the last 5 days we have been iced and snowed in here in Dallas. It was fun at first but then the bad stuff started to take place; like frozen pipes and no hot water. It even got a little scary when the rolling blackouts started to take place. Then it hit me how blessed I am to have the things I usually take for granted.
What are you taking for granted? Is it your health, warm food, clean drinking water, shelter, a steady job; we all take something for granted until we lose it. And here is the saddest part; we moan about so many little inconveniences that are really not basic to the good life we are leading. For example did you realize that if you make at least $47,500 a year, you are in the top 1% of the wealthiest people on the earth? Most of us don’t feel so privileged do we?
How much money would you need to be happy? Or put another way, “How much is enough?” For me it is really about security. How much money do I need to feel safe and secure? Then we have to ask, if we are putting our confidence in wealth, “How do we protect our wealth, so it cannot be lost once we get it?”
Jesus said that we should put our confidence in our Heavenly Father’s ability to care for us and not in material possessions. How are you doing with that concept? One test of that philosophy is alluded to in the so called “Lord’s Prayer” where Jesus says, “And give us this day our daily bread...” Do you trust God to provide as He taught the Israelites to do in the wilderness through His daily provision of manna?
How do we get our mind into the right zone to live as He proscribed? How can we learn to live day by day in dependence on Him and not our own power to provide? Is that even realistic? We have been taught from the cradle that we need to work hard to provide for our family and our self. Can a Christ-follower be expected to literally follow God in this way or are we responsible for our own needs? Can we train our self to be completely reliant on God for everything? Probably not … but it sounds like a great philosophy doesn’t it?
I wish it was true, but I doubt God wants me to be so dependent on Him or so stupid as to take that Jesus stuff literally. Jesus must have been exaggerating God’s ability to do for us what we really can’t do for our self; wasn’t He? Well most of us will never know, because we will never try it or anything close to it in our whole life until the snow and ice fall and the pipes freeze and the power fails. Then we may just have to trust Him because we have no other choice. I wonder if He will be there in that day ... at that time ... and in that circumstance?
"If you want to live a genuine life of faith, start when you don't need anything."
Contact US
