Trusting God Day by Day: 365 Daily Devotions (43 page)

W
e often have very strong feelings and emotions that we don’t seem to be able to control! The truth is, you don’t have to make decisions based on your feelings! You have a free will, and you can choose to believe God’s Word more than you believe how you feel at the time. When you begin to live by the Word of God and what you know through Him instead of how you feel, your feelings will eventually change and line up with the Word.

Satan used guilt to steal from me for years, which was often false guilt because much of the time I had nothing to be guilty for. I had repented, asked God to forgive me, and even believed that He had forgiven me. And yet I would still live my life feeling guilty and badly. I carried the burden of guilt everywhere that I went. I often said,
“I did not feel right if I did not feel wrong
.” At times I even felt very spiritual because I always felt bad about my behavior; now I understand God doesn’t want me to feel that way.

Every morning when I went to have my prayer and time with God I would go over one of two things: all of my problems or all of my mistakes. The Bible says ask and
receive
that your joy may be full. I was asking for forgiveness, but I never took the time to receive. I’d like to encourage you from now on when you ask God to forgive your sins for anything you’ve done wrong, take a moment and say,
“I receive your forgiveness right now.”
Don’t just ask, ask and
receive
so that you can take the next step and be filled with joy.

One morning as I was attempting to spend time with God, He spoke to my heart and said,
“Are you going to fellowship with Me this morning or with your problems and your sins?”
Do you spend more time with your sins than you do with God? Do you spend more time thinking about what you’ve done wrong than about what He’s done right? Remember, where sin does abound, grace and forgiveness and mercy does much more abound.

D
o you have something in your life that you could be very worried about and very anxious about if you didn’t decide not to be? Most people do, and if you don’t have something today you might have something tomorrow or the next day. That’s not being negative, it’s just saying that life is real and you never know exactly what is going to come your way. But we do know God and we don’t have to live in fear. He is with us and He’s on our side.

I had a lot of bad things happen to me in the early years of my life, and I got to the point where I was afraid that bad things would happen. Proverb 15:15 calls that “evil forebodings,” which means you have this sense that you are waiting for the next disaster. I’ve learned instead of doing that to expect something good to happen in my life and to expect it on purpose.

You can choose your own thoughts. You don’t have to just think whatever falls in your head. You can cast out wrong things and choose right thoughts. Faith starts in our hearts, a gift from God, but it is released through our thinking and speaking right things. When we have a problem, we can either do what the devil wants us to do and worry about it and get anxious and try to figure things out on our own, or we can do what God wants us to do and think about the promises in His Word.

The Bible teaches us to cast all of our care on God because He cares for us (1 Pet. 5:7).

Throughout our married life, every time we’ve had a problem in our house Dave has had one answer:
“Cast your care.”
It’s not wrong to see our problems, but we need to tell them where they stand in relation to God. Worry sees the problem, but faith sees the God Who can handle the problem.

G
od will do one of two things if you have a problem: He will either remove the problem (which is always our first choice!) or He will give you the strength, the grace, the ability to go through the problem. I know we don’t like the going through part, but if that is what God chooses, we need to trust Him.

If God lets us go through something, then He’s got a purpose in mind; there’s something we are going to get out of it that we need. If we don’t trust God, we’re going to be miserable. The only choices we have are—trust and be happy, or don’t trust and be miserable!

Trusting God is very peaceful. It is so wonderful to be able to say,
“I don’t understand this, but I believe God’s going to work it out.”
When you are in a difficult situation, believe God is with you and that He will give you direction at the right time. Believe you are growing spiritually even though you might be hurting right now.

I went through many years when I tried to have enough faith to prevent myself from having problems, or when I did have problems,
I wanted enough faith to resist the devil and believe God would make my problem go away. To be honest, I was under so much pressure and stress that it began to adversely affect my health. Finally I decided,
“Oh! I’m supposed to trust God. And if God doesn’t get rid of my problem, then I trust God to take me through it
.” By believing in God, I entered His rest!

We trust God’s timing, we trust His wisdom, we trust His ways, and by doing that, we can enjoy every single day of the journey. We don’t have to just be happy when we have no problems; we can also enjoy life while we are “going through.”

Y
ou can’t add anything to your life by worrying. I enjoy people who don’t worry but are confident and really know who they are in Christ. That is why Zacchaeus is one of my favorite people in the Bible (see Luke 19).

Jesus was coming to town, and Zacchaeus wanted to see Jesus, but he was so short he couldn’t see over all the people in the huge crowd. I love what he did. He didn’t go sit down and have a pity party. Instead, he ran up ahead and climbed up in a sycamore tree. When Jesus came by He said,
“Zacchaeus, come on down here. I’m going to your house for dinner!”

Instead of whining about what he thought was a problem in his life,
Zacchaeus had a positive attitude about it. Instead of worrying about what he couldn’t do, he found something he could do. And God so loved that spirit of determination that He said, “Of all these people, I am going to go home with you!”

Stop worrying about what you can’t do. Stop comparing yourself to everybody else and wishing you were them and being jealous and envious of them. Whatever your inabilities are, say to them,
“It is what it is. And I’m going to deal with it. Whatever I don’t have, God is going to make it up to me in another way.”

I like to talk; I am a good communicator and it is working out really well. I’ve got a lot of good common sense and some business sense and I’m good at managing people, but mainly I talk. I encourage you to start using the abilities that you do have, and don’t be concerned about the ones you don’t have.

I
believe God chose to liken us to eagles in order to motivate us so we can rise to our potential in life and so He can encourage us to wait on Him. When success does not come easily, when we find ourselves frustrated and weary in our efforts, we can be refreshed by waiting on the Lord.

What does it really mean to wait for the Lord? It simply means spending time with Him, being in His presence, talking to Him, listening, meditating on His Word, worshipping Him, keeping Him at the center of our lives, all the while expecting Him to do something amazing. One meaning of the word
wait
is “to be twisted or braided together.” If we think about a braid in someone’s hair, we realize that the hair is woven together so that we cannot tell where one strand ends and another begins. That is the way God wants us to be in our union with Him—so intimately intertwined and tightly woven together with Him that we are truly one with Him. As we wait on Him, we become more and more like Him.

An intimate relationship with God will strengthen you in the innermost part of your being. It will strengthen your heart; it will carry you through the hard times in your life with a sense of peace and confidence that all is well, no matter what is happening. It will give you the strength to endure tough situations in such a way that many of the people around you may not be able to detect even the slightest stress in your life.

When you wait on the Lord by faith, you draw everything you need from Him. He is your refuge, your enabler, your joy, your peace, your righteousness, your hope. He gives you everything you need to live in victory over any circumstance.

T
he temptation to quit is part of being human, but we must resist that temptation and never give up. It is important that we recognize the lies of Satan, and that we resist him at the onset of his attack. Temptation is one of the realities of the Christian life and a hindrance to success we must work to overcome. Jesus said, “Temptation must come,” so be on your guard against it.

There are many types of temptation, so we don’t always recognize discouragement and thoughts of giving up as being a temptation from the devil. Some thoughts the enemy may plant in your mind to tempt you to give up might sound like this:

• This is too difficult.
  
• I really am not qualified to do this.
  
• I am facing too many problems and can’t possibly solve them all.
  
• I have no one to help me.
  
• My friends and family think I’m crazy for pursuing this.
  
• I don’t have the money to do this.
  
• This is taking too long.
  

I encourage you to begin to recognize temptations as works of the enemy; and I want you to start resisting each temptation with everything in you. Don’t consider any temptation insignificant. Don’t let the devil lure you into passivity or wait until you’ve been in a depressed, hopeless slump for three days, listening to the enemy list reasons to abandon your cause. Resist the devil at his onset! Declare war against all forms of temptation. Show the enemy no mercy.

T
his Scripture in 1 Thessalonians tells us to
always
show kindness. Living in this generous kind of way is pleasing to God. There are many other Scriptures that also tell us to be good to everybody, not just those we consider to be like-minded with or who are in our church, but to
everybody
.

Even if someone is your employee and they serve you, you should think of ways that you can serve them also. When you get your morning coffee, bring one for them. Pick up after yourself and don’t make extra work for them. The people who help us in our lives should always be shown appreciation.

My daughter once wrote a note of appreciation to her garbage collectors and gave them a gift card to get lunch. I think these things not only bless people, but can often be shocking because they almost never happen. The world is filled with people who work hard doing jobs that are not very pleasant, and yet nobody notices.

I once saw a woman cleaning the bathroom at a department store where I shop, and I gave her some money and said,
“You look like you work hard and I thought you could use a blessing.”
I smiled and quickly left. A few minutes later, she found me in the shoe department and expressed her gratitude and told me how this act of kindness lifted her up. She told me that she did indeed work hard and felt nobody paid much attention to that fact.