Wednesday, November 9, 2016

“According To Your Faith"

"According To Your Faith"
     
   

    Our experience of life hinges on our response to God and His truth rather than happenings.

   "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life… My expectation is from Him" (Psalm 23:6; 62:5).

   Do we look behind to see "goodness and mercy" following hard on our heels?  Do we look ahead in anticipation that our Lord awaits us at every destination?   How we consistently answer these questions determines a heart kept in the peace and joy of the Lord Jesus Christ, or a heart tossed to and fro by circumstances, conditions, and situations.  The issue does not primarily concern happenings.  Pleasant and unpleasant things occur in everyone's lives.  What matters is how we respond to the events of life, or more importantly, how we respond to God in them.  Some of the most miserable people in the world live amid riches, ease, health, and the freedom to do what what they want, go where they please, and live like kings and queens.  Conversely, some of the most joyous people in the world live in difficulty, possess little, and are seemingly bound by poverty, weakness, illness, and need.  Indeed, if joy could be measured, I suspect we might find that in every moment, the most genuinely content human being on the planet may seem to possess nothing in earthly terms, but has everything in the Lord Jesus.  "As having nothing, and yet possessing all things…" (II Corinthians 6:10).

   Some people, including even believers, look behind and see trouble and danger.  Some look ahead not with expectations "from Him", but rather from the vagaries of chance, or the prospects of calamity, or even the designs of devilish influences.  Again, how we view our wake behind and our path ahead determines how we experience life.  We can choose to exclude God  from our consideration.  If so, He will allow us to wallow in our self-imposed discontent.  Conversely, we can choose through Christ to look behind and look ahead with eyes of the heart that see the living God as the very Life of our lives.  If so, we will still experience the human realities of the pleasant, the unpleasant, and the mundane.  However, we will do so with a spirit maintained in peace, joy, and the promise of "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee, because he trusteth in Thee" (Isaiah 26:3).  The choice is ours, the choice of faith or unbelief.  God paves the path of our lives, both behind and ahead.  However, we determine whether we will see Him along that path, and thus experience the journey in the light of His glory, or the darkness of disbelief...

"According to your faith, be it unto you."
(Matthew 9:29)

Weekly Memory Verse
    The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.
(Proverbs 9:10)





















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