Spiritual Ponderings

After reading a morning devotional I felt compelled to share it along with a few of my comments. First, here is the devotional reading. Satan’s plan of temptation is always the same. While everything moves prosperously, people think that they have faith . But when suffering, disaster, or disappointment comes, they lose heart. A faith that is dependent on circumstances or surroundings, that lives only when everything goes smoothly, is not a genuine faith . In his trouble Moses cried to the Lord. This is what the children of Israel, so recently delivered, ought to have done. The Lord heard the cry of His servant, against whom the people had said so many bitter things. He showed Moses a tree, “which when he had cast into the waters, the waters were made sweet.” It was not the virtue of the tree that turned the bitter water to sweet; it was the power of Him who was enshrouded in the pillar of cloud, the One who can do all things . . . . Did the people then appreciate and acknowledge ...

Last night I was sharing with few people a little about how God gets my attention at times when I start feeling anxious because I am stressing out about losing something or things are not working out my way. As I was waking up this morning it occurred to me that anxiety, just like faith, is a spontaneous reaction that develops naturally inside the heart as a result of what I am focusing on, the nature of the object of my attention. I have been realizing for some time that faith is not something that I work up but is something that happens inside of me whenever I come to know someone who is worthy of my trust. It is true that I need to make the choice to exercise faith at times whenever circumstances cause my feelings to forget how trustworthy God really is, but that is not the way faith itself is spawned. If I have not already come to know God at a more intimate level and have spent time dwelling on His character and studied the life of Jesus and come to see and experience how trust...