Psalms 62:5 My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.
It never ceases to amaze me, the way the devil uses our offenses and our “offendedness” to divide and conquer marriages, relationships, churches — even entire nations!
Many of us are not careful enough about the things we say and more importantly, we get offended way too easily. As we were discussing this topic recently, a good friend gave this analogy and we loved it:
If you are holding a baby and his little arm swats you in the face, would you take offense to that? Of course not! We know the little guy didn’t intend to hurt us. We respond with “awwww” or laughter or something to that effect. But if it is a friend, a family member or a brother or sister in the church who offends us with a little swat of his words or actions, we are undone. We expect more from them! What hypocrisy! We become angry and we want to defend ourselves, fight back or leave forever.
Yeshua (Jesus) said NO! He said that even if someone despite-fully uses us, that means on purpose, that we are to respond in love! We as human beings are troubled and sinful. We are not perfect and we should never expect others to be, no matter what their positions are in the church. God is perfect and He is the one from whom our expectations should come — no man.
So let’s be quick to forgive, and slow to anger! Turn over all of those offenses to the Lord and allow Him to restore His perfect shalom over us!
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]“Don’t be anxious”…even though it's a perfectly natural response to mounting threats; sickness, finances, employment, uncertainty, emotional stress, family crises...Nevertheless, it says, "Don't be anxious about anything". Instead, pray!
As we ask in His name, and we see our prayers being answered, we realize how real and faithful our God is. But I want to focus on the life that is overflowing with JOY!
A major earthquake struck Taiwan over the weekend, which triggered a tsunami warning as far away as Japan.
This reminded me of when we first moved to Israel, in 2003.
When does God answer our prayers? And when do we receive what we ask of Him? And when are we confident He has heard our requests? Many of us wonder why our prayers seem to go unanswered.
A.W. Tozer had an interesting commentary on this verse. He said: "Faith is seeing the invisible, but not the nonexistent."
In the early 1800's a preacher gave a message to call men to join him on the mission field in Africa. In the audience were only a few women along with a boy. The pastor knew that few women were expected to volunteer to face harsh African jungle conditions. However, he gave the message; and no one responded. What he didn't realize was that he had touched the heart of a little boy whose name was David Livingstone. This boy would grow up to spend the rest of his life ministering to Africa's unreached tribes.
The word "verily", in this verse, is the Hebrew word “emunah” (em-oo-nah). It also means "faith" or "faithfully". When we trust in the Lord, and our trust is demonstrated by doing good, He declares that He will faithfully feed us. How will we be fed?