Your Daily Crossroad
Be strong in The Lord!
There are many kinds of strength. But the most important one is the strength you need in the Lord. True Christian strength is not of the body. True Christian strength is of the spirit, measured in faithfulness, trust, and perseverance. By Grace we live by Faith.
Our (true) struggle is against powers and principalities and the Lord wants you to be strong.
There are many things to fight in this world. For instance you can fight sickness, fatigue, death of loved ones, failure of your plans and hopes, questions without answers, and pain without reason. Yes we fight in this world. But we also fight in the spiritual world.
It is Satan who opposes you. It is he who seeks to sift you and destroy your bodies and souls in the eternal blackness that will be his unending grave of torment.
Yet the blood of Christ has guaranteed your deliverance from that awful end. Jesus bought you with His blood and ensured that none of those bought would be lost. Praise the name of the Lord.
Give Him Praise
Solomon began by highlighting God’s holiness and faithfulness. Then he gave God credit for the success of the project and emphasized God’s greatness, declaring, “The heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house which I have built!” (2 Chron. 6:18).
After exalting God, Solomon asked Him to pay special attention to everything that happened inside the temple. He asked God to show mercy to the Israelites and to provide for them when they confessed their sin.
Immediately after Solomon’s prayer, “fire came down from heaven, and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices; and the glory of the Lord filled the house” (7:1). This incredible response reminds us that the mighty One we praise and speak to when we pray is the same One who listens to and cares about our requests. He is the same yesterday, today and forever.
When I read this it reminded me that so often we seek God in prayer for what we need when it’s so important to take time to spend in prayer giving Him praise and thanksgiving for every thing in our lives. Let’s take time today and just give Him the praise and honor He deserves and put our requests off to the side for a day, He already knows what we have need of before we even ask so let’s prioritize God today and have a conversation with Him today about how mighty He is and how grateful we are. When we do that we will find that everything else, our needs, our wants, will all fall into place and we will find a peace so so sweet. He deserves our praise. Let’s draw closer to Him as we pray. He is worthy of our praise!! Amen!
Have a wonderful day in The Lord!
Today’s Reading is 2 Chronicles 6:12-21
By Faith
The Hebrews 11 definition of faith is pretty straight forward. The Christian faith means confidently hope in the promises of God. Not pretend to “hope” but actually pessimistically doubt, we are to confidently hope. There ought to be a certain bounce in our step because our confidence in God’s promises is so great. We know He will fulfill His commitments to us.
Our confidence in His promises come from our assurance in what we do not see. This is such a hard thing because we humans don’t see a whole lot. For starters, we don’t even get to see God Himself. We are taking it on faith that He even exists. It’s not a baseless faith, but it is faith without sight. And we also don’t get to see how God is working for us behind the scenes and out of our sight. This blindness can often be a harder leap of faith then the leap in believing in God at all. Not knowing how God is going to work all things together for our good and yet remaining confident in our hope in Him? That’s not an easy ask. But it’s not one the Lord asks of us ignorantly either. While God doesn’t know what ignorance is like, He knows us. He created us and He perfectly comprehends how we function and how challenging it is for us to walk faithfully when we cannot see what the full picture of what is happening or how it will end.
The mystery of faith and the assurance about what we don’t see has been compared to quilt-making. On the underside of the quilt, all you can see is the knots, the apparently hapless crisscrossing of different threads and colors. It looks like a disaster, a mess. But on the right side of the quilt, we see a beautifully embroidered pattern, one that could only be wrought by a master seamstress. We live on the underside of the quilt. But we like to think that we are living on the right side of the quilt, so when things go wrong, we panic and think that the design of our lives has gone terribly wrong and that everything is ruined. But there is a master Designer knitting and knotting us into a beautiful work that only He can see. We have to trust that the knots and messes of our lives are being worked out into beauty as our God has promised. We are to have assurance that He sees what we do not and confident hope in the promises He has made to us.
When I read this it blessed me and I wanted to share it with someone today. I trust there is someone who needed this today. What a mighty God we serve.
Have a wonderful day in The Lord!
Today’s Reading is Hebrews 11
Smile
When anger or tension or bitterness threatens our relationship with the Lord and with others, it helps to remember that “a merry heart doeth good like a medicine” for our own joy and well-being.
Think about a time when you were angry with someone or when you had an argument. How did you feel inside? What parts of your life did it affect?
After reading this I couldn’t help but think of a saying I’ve seen in times past, When life gives you a hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have a thousand reasons to smile. Let’s be the reason someone smiles today.
Today’s Reading is Ephesians 4:25-32