Inner conflict: You know what you should do, but you don’t feel like doing it.

Perhaps you know what it’s like to have thoughts, feelings, social relations, bodily behaviors, and choices that conflict with each other. You know what you should do, but you don’t feel like doing it. 

You want to say gracious, kind things, but your tongue takes over with sarcasm. Before you leave home, you decide to treat a certain relative with grace, but once you get to the family gathering and that person makes a catty remark about you, you stay exiled in another room for the rest of the day. 

What would it take to be like a fruit-bearing, unwitherable tree planted by streams of water? What is needed for you to prosper naturally? 

TODAY’S EXPERIMENT - Ponder the scriptural images in these two passages: “Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who draws strength from mere flesh [natural capabilities] and whose heart turns away from the LORD. That person will be like a bush in the wastelands; they will not see prosperity when it comes.They will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives.” (Jeremiah 17:5-6, NIV) 

Why does depending on natural capabilities turn one’s heart from God? Why would such a person not see prosperity when it’s standing right in front of him? What are the parched places in your life? How are you like this bush? “But blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in him.      They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.” (verses 7-8, NIV) 

What does this person not fear? How would you have to arrange your life differently in order to be a person whose roots thrust out toward the stream that is God? What do these verses lead you to pray?