Does it seem odd to you that abandonment to God should be mentioned in the same breath as joy? Isn’t abandonment a miserable thing? Maybe abandonment would go with peace, but certainly not joy. How can this be?
Yet once we move below the surface, we see that peace and joy are based on confidence in God (faith). In this confidence, I can abandon myself to God, even die to myself. As I do these things, striving will cease and joy will naturally flow. I may even now and then “be anxious for nothing” and experience the peace of God as it guards my heart and mind in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:6-7).
TODAY’S EXPERIMENT - As a means of knowing the joy and peace of God, consider praying a few of these prayers of release: “O God, I long for your perfect peace that is beyond my understanding. I now release to you the habit of: dwelling on certain past sins and failures, such as . . . looking forward at what might happen to me if . . . fixing my eyes inward at struggles with work, responsibilities, temptations, and deficiencies, such as . . . putting trust in myself to work things out with . . . having to make things come out right with . . . being mad at . . . whose actions I’ve had to resist.
“Thou wilt keep me in perfect peace as my mind is stayed on thee, because I trust in thee” (Isaiah 26:3, PAR).
No comments:
Post a Comment