God wants to take our challenges and turn them into victories so that we remember the victories and learn to trust Him in every area of our lives. He shows us His love and His power by answering our prayers so that we will both trust Him- and lovingly follow Him.
Today during my time with the Lord I was reading Psalm 78 and it went on and on about how God had shown the people of Israel amazing miracles. He delivered them out of slavery in Egypt with amazing miracles, he fed them miraculously in the desert, he caused water to come out of a rock, and many other awesome displays of his power and loving care for his people.
But Israel did not learn from the powerful things God had done in their past. They did not look at impending threats and make the choice to trust God based on His goodness they had seen in the past.
Psalm 78 shows 2 major mistakes Israel made:
1.) They did not take God's past help and use their experiences with Him to face new problems and threats by thinking, "Well, God has been so good up to this point and he rescued us from this problem, and that threat, and this need - I don't know how He's going to do it but I know He'll come through again".
2.) They also turned aside to other gods and did not stay faithful to God. So again, they did not take God's past help and use their experiences with him to stay faithful by thinking, "Well, God has been so good up to this point and rescued us from so many situations- I will stay firmly loyal to this God. I will stay pure in my heart for Him. I will purify my lifestyle out of reverence for this God. This God is so awesome that if He has rescued me in this way- He must love me and have wonderful things for me that are better than the sin and impurity of this world.
My prayer time this morning was neat because I got to really exercise the lesson of Psalm 78 in my own life. My prayer is always before my Bible reading so I didn't know this lesson would be coming. By the way that is the miracle of seeking God daily and making a place for Him in your time and in your heart- you'll start seeing Him orchestrate lessons for you too. (He is the sweetest person you can possibly imagine) So anyway, I was walking around my house in my prayer time and I always start off with thanking the Lord. I do this because I like it. It is a sweet and incredible time to walk through situations in your life and thank the Lord for His help with them one-by-one. Today as I was listing out neat answers to prayer (some of them I prayed as a little boy that I now see active in my life- its staggering how God eventually answers all of our prayers) and I saw such a pattern of faithfulness and such a pattern of plans the Lord had put in place for me and my family that I, unknowingly, did what Psalm 78 tries to teach - and I said to God, "Ok, God I am going to trust you with xyz real-life situation - I believe you have a plan that I cannot see right now so I am going to trust you and walk in what I know right now".
It was neat to apply my knowledge of how good the Lord is in my life- to present and future problems and challenges. So neat.
So my encouragement to you is: do a time of prayer where you thank God for everything you can possibly think of. Then, after you do that, take the lesson of His faithfulness and commit to Him that you will firmly trust Him with other situations.
By the way - this works for anyone. If you read my testimony on this page you'll see that I'm a nobody and I thought I was stupid for most of my life. Its God who does the work in us if we will just draw near to Him. So try what I said- you'll be blessed!
Let's GO God!
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