God Meets Our Needs

 

Life's challenges often isolate us and cause us to understand loneliness like we never experienced it before now. We feel abandoned, neglected and even ignored.

Our friends surround us during the funeral of our loved one; but then they forget to call, come over to visit, invite us to their home or on an outing in the ensuing weeks.

This loneliness causes us to look inward and we find a void there as well. God seems distant and we either panic or get angry with Him for forsaking us.

There is no Biblical evidence that God ever leaves His children. We leave Him, but He never leaves or forsakes us, and He always stays closer to us than a brother (Hebrews 13:5; Proverbs 18:24).

We often develop expectations and requirements, which we imagine God fulfilling. We have our own timetable and we are devastated when God does not meet our demands.

We seek blessings, which He knows are not for our good at this time in our life. He has other plans for us (Jeremiah 29:11), but we often have no patience to wait on God's timing to meet our needs.

God knows everything about our life from beginning to end (Proverbs 5:21). He promises to meet all of our needs through His glorious riches (Philippians 4:19).

Rather than stewing in the juices of our loneliness, we can take up a hobby, join a civic organization or exercise at the local health club. Getting more involved with our church family is the best use of our unscheduled time.

Prayer:

Father God, teach us that rather than focusing on our desires, we can view the needs of others around us and pray about You using us to meet their needs. Allow Your Spirit to guide us to the exact person You want us to help. Otherwise, we may not be in Your will and we may thwart the plans You have for that person.

Open our eyes and allow us to meet new people, which we can invite to join us at our church or our local Bible study. Remind us to look for people sitting alone, so we can greet them and allow them to see Your peace and joy in us to bring them a smile to encourage their day.

Thought for the Day:

Sometimes we accuse God of not caring; however, hindsight always reveals the effort of God's Spirit behind the scenes, working out all things for our eventual good.

- Romans 8:28; 1 Peter 5:7

 

Mirrored Nature

There is a difference between a trial and a temptation. God uses trials in our life to help us to walk in the Spirit and not to rely on the flesh (Galatians 5:16). In this life we will have tribulation. We do not need to fear, because with Jesus in us, we can overcome every time (John 16:33; Romans 8:37). God does promise, however, that we will never experience a temptation that is more than we can bear. His Holy Spirit is right there to give us the grace to withstand it. However, He can only provide us with a way to stand against the temptation if we avail our self of His help (1 Corinthians 10:13).

From the seed of one trial, God bears much fruit in our life. We learn life lessons that could not come to us any other way. We grow closer to Christ with each trial, because it is through His strength that we endure them. His Spirit helps us to trust in the eternal aspects of life, which we cannot see, as we surrender to Him the frightful temporal issues which plague our life (2 Corinthians 4:18). God has a plan for each of us. As we walk in His will, He works all things out for our good (Romans 8:28).

All of us face extreme hardships at least once in our life. God uses each trial to teach us to rely on Him. He did this with Jesus also, because Jesus learned obedience through the things that He suffered (Hebrews 5:8). You may notice, however, that it is easy to run to God when Satan unleashes his fury on us in a trial. It is a different story when Satan tempts us with his deception. We forget to go to God, and we are tempted. We think we can handle it by our self. This is nothing short of self-righteousness. Then complacency creeps into our heart and Satan has us right where he wants us.

Complacency is actually the sin that we find it hardest to withstand. Satan lulls us into apathy and away from our passion for Christ. Then the fervency of our dedication to Him decreases little by little. Some of us spend years pursuing the wispy pleasures of this world at Satan’s invitation. He freely provides all sorts of substitutes that we use to attempt to quench the deep longing in our heart and to assuage the void that only Jesus can fill.

It is much easier to trust in what we can see with our human eyes than to trust in the eternal aspects that can only be viewed with the eyes of the Spirit (Hebrews 11:1). We usually rely on human wisdom for most of our decisions and we collect friends around us that agree with us. We feel safe somehow in trusting only what we can prove and believing only that which makes sense to the human mind.

True contentment will continue to elude us, however, until we completely trust our life to Christ and accept God’s will for each day in it. Only then will God remove the hills and bumps from our life. When we refuse to depend upon human reasoning and instead honor God and avoid immorality, then we will enjoy health in our body, soul and spirit (Proverbs 3:5-8). God began a good work in us and He will see in through to the completion of this life and into the next (Philippians 1:6). God loves us so much that He sacrificed His only begotten Son for us, and he will freely give us an eternal inheritance with Jesus (Romans 8:32).

Prayer:

Lord Jesus, You were with God in the beginning (John 1:2) and mirrored His nature (Philippians 2:6). Yet, You humbled Yourself and took on the form of a man to die in our place. Thank you for redemption through Your blood and for the forgiveness of sin (Ephesians 1:7). Teach us to see Your purpose in trials and to look at life from an eternal perspective, so we can avoid Satan’s temptations. Help us to totally trust in You and not to rely on our human wisdom (Proverbs 3:5-8).

Thought for the Day:

God tries us to strengthen us; but Satan tempts us to weaken us.







Thank you, Michael Emig, for the use of your photo.