‘Endure until your testing is over. Then you will be mature and complete…’ James 1:4 GWT
Tomorrow is the official start of Spring. Flowers and stuff. Great. Then, a few months from now, spring will have sprung and it’ll be sizzling into summer. Your life works the same, in cycles and seasons. That means some periods of our lives are all green grass, shiny newness and fresh loveliness. It also means some periods will be dead leaves, rain and sniffles. Whichever you have right now, God’s on it. He’s the one who decides when we get spring–like growth seasons. And when we need a stretch of… being s t r e t c h e d… He brings us into (and through) it. ‘For everything there is a season.’ (Ecclesiastes 3:1 NLT) That’s not to downplay how outright rubbish those tough seasons can feel. But they’re a necessary part of God’s long–term plan. Think about a tree. The only reason it has space to grow strong, healthy, green leaves in spring is because it lost the leaves it’d finished with last autumn. And it only grew new ones after shivering, bare–branched, through winter. If everything looks barren and cold around you right now, we 100% guarantee it’s only for a time. In that time, the best thing you can do is stick to God, and let the difficulty He has allowed you to face do its work. Seasons come and go. So it’s important to have a stable centre to your life. Are there any places in your room that you can turn into ‘prayer spaces’? It doesn’t have to be a wooden bench to kneel at, it could even just be a beanbag. Make it special place to remind you to meet with God each day.
SoulFood: Phil 2:5-11; Rev 19:11-16; Acts 3:1-16; Matt 1:18-21
word4U2day (an adaptation of The Word for Today authored by Bob & Debby Gass) is published under licence by UCB Australia. 2014 UCB International Ltd