obedience

The Jigsaw Puzzle of Faith

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For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare[a] and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Jeremiah 29:11 NKJV

Faith can be like a jigsaw puzzle. If you are like me, there are some days when it feels like we are trying to put together a puzzle, which not only has no picture on the box, it also seems to be missing several pieces. We get depressed or angry, and wonder why everyone around us appears to be doing fine with their puzzles, while we are only able to piece together a few of the edge pieces. But our stressed-out attitude has the situation entirely backwards. God isn’t asking us to put together a 5,000-piece puzzle, because that isn’t our job. The reality is that we are God’s puzzle, and He sees the complete picture and is putting everything together perfectly according to His plan. We don’t need to see the picture on the box: He does! We aren’t missing any pieces, we are the missing piece, and our only job is to take the next step He is calling us to take. His call challenges us to either believe and trust Him, or to rely on and trust in what everybody else says. No one can take that step for us. We have to do it with our own faith. Obedience can be scary, dangerous and difficult, but it will be worth it all! Jesus is everything and the only thing we will ever need in every situation, in every place, and every single day! Faith asks the ultimate question: “Will I trust Him today with what He asks me to do!”

Spiritual Bug Squashing

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For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. James 1:23-24 ESV

A few weeks ago I shared how on the farm I needed a flashlight to find my way out to the barn and how that is like God’s word being a lamp for our path. But sometimes God’s word also shows us some things on the inside of us that really aren’t so great. That reminds me of a recent incident coming into the bathroom in the morning and switching on the light. Suddenly I saw perched on the lip of our brand new sink, the biggest ugliest palmetto bug ever! It didn’t take more than a few seconds for me to usher our uninvited guest into eternity and thankfully though I looked high and low he hadn’t brought along any friends or relatives! Now you would think it pretty strange if I had simply switched off the light and gone back to bed. You would probably say, “That’s disgusting! You’ve got to kill that critter!” But I could reply. “Yeah but it’s so much easier to just go back to sleep.”

Now that’s a funny story and even if I thought going back to bed was an option, my wife would never let me get away with it. So let’s ask ourselves today, how often do we wake up in the morning, read our Bible and decide that flicking off the light seems easier than dealing with the issues it reveals? Now I admit that, the spiritual solutions to straightening out relationships, telling someone we’re sorry or paying back an overdue loan from a friend are all much more painful than getting rid of a palmetto bug. But James encourages us in the following verse that if we take action, God has a special blessing in store. Jesus doesn’t just leave us on our own to do all the spiritual bug squashing . Instead He comes along side with his Holy Spirit to show us what to do next. We must never forget to be thankful for the blood of Jesus that forgives our past sins. But we must also remember that God wants to shine His word in our hearts, so that as we walk up His pathway we can live a life for Him with the light on, both on the inside and out!

But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing. James 1:25

True Love

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They say you get to choose your friends but not your family. The other people we don’t get choose is our enemies. What we do get to choose is to love them. We’ll never experience the miracle Jesus has in store till we dare to obey Him!