Alive to His Faithfulness

Day 92

Alive to His Faithfulness

For I have chosen you
    and will not throw you away.
 Don’t be afraid, for I am with you.
    Don’t be discouraged, for I am your God.
I will strengthen you and help you.
    I will hold you up with my victorious right hand.

Isaiah 41:9b-10 NLT

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O

ur path out of bondage to overeating is by way of God’s mercy. This takes the punishment away from the crime, the sting away from the dying, and self-condemnation away from our weakness; we are relying upon God’s faithfulness! And so we pray, “Have mercy on me Lord, I am a sinner, and I must participate in Your perfection because I have none of my own." 

It is only when our confidence rests fully upon the Lord that we can have peace of mind and heart. Our way to freedom is not a puzzle we can solve; there is no solution we can discover. The Lord holds the answer to every difficulty we face.  

Our deliverance from the consequences of sin has not arrived through human logic and reason; we would not have considered the possibility of God’s own Son paying the price for our sin. Likewise, our daily deliverance from temptation and sin comes, not through our own determination and will, but by the will of God.

We show our humble dependence upon the Lord and our confidence in Him when we give Him first place in our lives. Placing God first sounds appropriate in theory, but in day-to-day practice, it seems logical to address the issues that are causing us the most stress in an orderly way, from most to least pressing. Relationship with the Lord thus gets pushed to the back burner as we take care of other things, and we end up stumbling through our days without having sought God’s counsel.

We know things are not right and we intend to do better, but our lives spiral out of control and we develop resentful attitudes: “I’m doing the best I can,” and “If God wants me to put Him first then He needs to lessen my stress.” All this creates an expectation of punishment from the Lord and feeds our lack of confidence in His plans for us. 

The cure for our lack of confidence that God’s intentions toward us are good is simple. We are told of it in Scripture, and we give it lip service, but we have tremendous difficulty implementing it:

“So don’t worry about these things, saying, ‘What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?’  These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs.  Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need” (Matthew 6:31-33 NLT). 

One line in the passage above should draw our attention and convict our hearts: “These things dominate the hearts of unbelievers.” When we fail to put our Lord first in everything, we are acting like unbelievers. When we put other people and things ahead of seeking God’s guidance, we rob ourselves, not of His presence and power in our lives, which He has promised not to remove, but of our awareness of His presence. Without daily reminders of His steadfast love through Scripture and prayer, we begin to act like unbelievers; we feel as though we are on our own, and we lose confidence in the Lord.

God’s faithfulness does not waver, but our sense of confidence in Him is directly related to our choice whether or not to give Him first place in our lives.

Pray:  Lord, help me always give You first place in my life, forgive me when I fail, and thank You for remaining steadfastly present with me. Thank You for doing for me what I could not do for myself.  Thank You for using the things that Satan would use to harm me for Your purposes; even for my good. It isn’t my faithfulness, but Yours that I’m depending on, not my obedience, but Yours that has saved me.  The life I am living now is possible to me only because of Your faithfulness to death, even death on a Cross. You are my God and my King. I praise Your Holy Name, the Name that is above every other, the Name of Jesus. 

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I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.

Galatians 2:20 KJV