“With deep love I will take you back” (Isaiah 54:7 GNT).
Do you need a little refreshment in your life? Are you feeling a little dried up? Do you need some revival? Come back to God. You may say, “But you don’t know what I’ve done.” It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done. God still wants you to come back to him. You may say, “Isn’t God going to scold me? I’ve been away from him for months, years, decades.” Here’s what the Bible says God will do if you come back to him: “With deep love I will take you back” (Isaiah 54:7 GNT). God isn’t mad at you. God is mad about you! No one will ever love you more than the Creator who made you. God the Father created you, Jesus the Son died for you, and God’s Spirit wants to live in you. Christmas is proof of God’s love for you. Many people can’t feel God’s love because they’re listening to the wrong voices. If you listen to what other people say about you, you’re going to get down. If you listen to what you tell yourself, you’re going to get down. Stop believing everything you tell yourself, because it’s not all true. You lie to yourself more than you lie to anybody else. You’re not the best judge of you, because your feelings lie all the time. (This is true for all of us!) You have to decide whom you’re going to believe. Are you going to build your life on what everybody else thinks about you? Are you going to listen to what the critics say about you on social media? Are you going to listen to your own feelings? Or are you going to listen to what God says about you, which is the truth? Acts 3:19 says, “Repent therefore, and turn back,that your sins may be blotted out” (ESV). You’re deeply flawed, but you are deeply loved, and you are infinitely valuable. You may have come to the end of yourself and feel like you don’t have anywhere to turn. But there is always Someone to turn to. With deep love, God will take you back.
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“When God our Savior revealed his kindness and love, he saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He washed away our sins, giving us a new birth and new life through the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:4-5 NLT).
No matter what you’re going through, you can live with hope. That’s the consistent, overriding message of the Bible. God will always treat you with grace and mercy. Peter writes to those who are already believers, “All honor to God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; for it is his boundless mercy that has given us the privilege of being born again” (1 Peter 1:3 TLB). The more we understand grace, the more we’ll be amazed by it. It’s completely undeserved. It’s totally unmerited. It is not something that you could earn or work for. It’s just a free gift of God’s mercy. You can’t make God love you any more than he loves you right now. You can’t make him love you any less. His love is based on his mercy for you. God’s Word tells us, “When God our Savior revealed his kindness and love, he saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He washed away our sins, giving us a new birth and new life through the Holy Spirit” (Titus 3:4-5 NLT). This is extremely important to understand. When you make mistakes as a believer, God doesn’t get mad at you. God doesn’t want to get even with you. God doesn’t start planning to mess up your life. God always acts in mercy toward you. Why? Because you’re covered in the blood of Jesus Christ when you’ve been baptized into his death. That’s why God responds in mercy every time you mess up. And that can give you hope. Life is full of contrasts. We go through mountains, and we go through valleys. We go through successes, and we go through failures. We have wins, and we have losses.
In weather, there are four seasons. But in your life, there are dozens of different seasons. And every season of life includes both good and bad times. Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 gives us a representation of different life experiences: “For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to harvest. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to tear down and a time to build up. A time to cry and a time to laugh. A time to grieve and a time to dance. A time to scatter stones and a time to gather stones. A time to embrace and a time to turn away. A time to search and a time to quit searching. A time to keep and a time to throw away. A time to tear and a time to mend. A time to be quiet and a time to speak. A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace” (NLT). Life is a combination of contrasting seasons. All sunshine and no rain make a desert. If you’re following God’s will, seeking to live your life according to the way God wants you to live, then you’ll eventually see that these experiences can have purpose and value in your life. You may think that the only time you’re in God’s will is when you’re at church or having a quiet time. You can be in God’s will as you’re cleaning out a closet. You can be in God’s will as you’re mowing your lawn. You can be in God’s will when you move to a new location or stay right where you are. There’s a time and season for everything. Ray Stevens sang a song called “Everything Is Beautiful” that included the lyric “Everything is beautiful in its own way.” That’s not exactly true. Everything is not beautiful. Cancer is not beautiful. Child abuse is not beautiful. War is not beautiful. The Bible says it differently in Ecclesiastes 3:11: “God has made everything beautiful for its own time” (NIV). That’s very different from “Everything is beautiful in its own way.” Because the Bible is saying that God can take even the bad things and, in the proper season, turn them around and use them for good in the way he intends. You may be going through a season right now that is not beautiful. Your finances look ugly. Your health looks ugly. Your marriage or a friendship looks ugly. Your future looks ugly. But God can make something good out of it as you trust him with the pieces. "Put your trust in the LORD your God, and you will stand your ground. Believe what his prophets tell you, and you will succeed” (2 Chronicles 20:20 GNT).
When you focus on your problems instead of trusting God, you’re going to end up exhausted. And you’re going to be defeated because God didn’t design you to fight your battles alone. You don’t have the power you need to face every problem in your own strength. You need God’s power. You can’t focus on your problems and focus on God at the same time. You’ve got to shift your focus to who God is and what he’s promised to do for you. Life is full of experiences that test you, drain you, and wipe you out. When you are worn out, that’s when you’re ready to say to God, “I’m sorry. I can’t handle this situation, and I’ve tried everything. I need to give it to you because it’s bigger than me.” So, what should you do when you are overwhelmed? You stand strong. Standing strong is an attitude of quiet confidence in the character of God. You will be successful when you put your trust in what he says to you through his Word and the Holy Spirit. When you get with God, you’ll never have to give up ground because you are standing strong. When the burden is overwhelming, you may be tempted to cave in under the pressure. God doesn’t want you to back down from difficult situations. He doesn’t want you to sacrifice your integrity. God wants you to trust him through the challenges and learn from them. If you run, you’ll miss out on learning from God. And chances are, you’ll need to repeat that lesson. God is committed to your success. But you need to focus on him and trust him and his Word if you want to stand your ground. “Trust in the Lord with all of your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all of your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.” (Proverbs 3:5-6 ESV). “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28 ESV).
Life often brings moments that are difficult to swallow, like a sickness, a job loss, or the death of a friend or family member. Those pills are bitter going down, and we often choke on them. Rest assured, God is up to something good in your life, even if you can’t see it. To hold on to hope in the midst of tough times, you’ll need to grab a hold of this truth. The Bible says it this way: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28 ESV). The Bible isn’t saying that every event in your life will be good. We know that’s just not true. But it does mean that when you put your whole life together, every piece of it works together for good. It’s like making a cake. You may not like the taste of each ingredient, but when it’s all put together, it comes out tasting good. God wants to bake an amazingly tasty cake with your life, and he wants to use even the distasteful and bitter elements to do it. God also doesn’t say that everything works together like we want it to or that every story will have a happy ending. Not every business decision will make a million dollars. Not every couple that gets married lives happily ever after. Not every child will become captain of the football team. Instead, this verse reminds us that we can have absolute confidence that the Master Designer of the universe causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God. Hope isn’t the same as optimism. It isn’t the belief that something bad will turn out well. It’s the absolute confidence that every part of your life ultimately makes sense, regardless of how it turns out this side of eternity. From our vantage point, life looks like a mess at times. But God’s view from heaven isn’t the same as ours. You can’t even imagine the good that God has in store for your future. You can trust him with your present circumstances and your future, because he is always working for your good. “May God, the source of hope, fill you with joy and peace through your faith in him. Then you will overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13 GW).
In 1927 an American submarine collided with a Coast Guard vessel off the coast of Provincetown, Mass., and began to sink. The Coast Guard and Navy sent divers to assess the damage and begin a rescue operation. As the divers got close to the submarine, they heard a sailor tapping on the hull in Morse code. He asked, “Is there hope?” That’s a fundamental question of life. It’s asked every day by countless people in countless ways: when sitting in the doctor’s office awaiting test results, when a couple puts months and months into counseling and gets nowhere, when dealing with a tax accountant in bankruptcy court, or when a family hears their child is missing. You can survive 40 days without food, three days without water, and eight minutes without air. But you can’t last a single second without hope. It’s an essential part of life. When hope is gone, life is over. People everywhere are looking for hope in all the wrong places. They look for it in their relationships, in self-help books, in religion, and in self-righteousness. But there is only one place to find real hope. The Bible says real hope is found by turning to God: “May God, the source of hope, fill you with joy and peace through your faith in him. Then you will overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13 GW). You need that kind of hope. And it’s only available through a relationship with Jesus Christ. When you trust in him, the Holy Spirit works in you to fill you with hope that God is in control, he loves you, and he is working for your good. That kind of hope will lift you from despair and give you room to breathe. “I would have despaired unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait for the LORD; Be strong and let your heart take courage; Yes, wait for the LORD” (Psalm 27:13-14 NASB).
God has only good plans for your life. He does not have bad plans for you—he never has and he never will. Yet a lot of people miss God’s plan for their lives because they don’t trust God. Instead, they decide to follow their own plan, and in the end, that leads to hopelessness and pessimism. The more you understand God’s goodness, the more hopeful you’re going to be because hope is anticipating God’s goodness. The only reason you have hope is because God is good. If God is not a good God, there is no rational reason for hope. “I would have despaired unless I had believed that I’d see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; Be strong and let your heart take courage; Yes, wait for the Lord” (Psalm 27:13-14 NASB). Everything God does for you, through you, to you, and in you, he does because he is a good God. God’s goodness in your life isn’t based on how good you are. It’s based on God’s character, not yours. Everybody needs God’s goodness. Everybody wants God’s goodness. But we have to understand and believe it to experience it. In his goodness, he blesses us with sustenance and balance, resilience and guidance, confidence and assurance, influence and abundance, benevolence and inheritance. He makes it all available to his children because of his grace and his good character. |
AuthorTaken from Daily Hope by Rick Warren. Categories
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