Thursday 1 January 2015

Thought for New Year's Day 2015

Are you trusting 'only the Lord', in 2015?   I once had a very long, complex and despised illness, during which I was socially marginalised for years, in London -  the heart of the Western world. I had to trust for food and shelter on faith in the invisible God - like someone dirt poor, in Africa. I seriously feared homelessness. I was stuck off doctor's patient lists for asking for free vitamins. I could not get sufficient benefits to eat the diet I needed to work full-time. 

Eventually, I learnt that trusting in God never failed and I started to view lack of a reliable income stream, or lack of apparent work, or the nail-biting 11th hour test of faith (God providing at the very last minute) as a kind of waiting game. I trusted Him emotionally. Knowing that faith works is such as mind-blowing feeling - it is pure joy. I had learnt a kind of shorthand for this state of mind, three simple words that I still daily repeat:

"Only The Lord"...

God wants all His Son's followers to rely entirely on Him. These words say "I am not hoping for other means of help" and "I attribute all to God". Read the Ten Commandments and the rest of Scripture, particularly the commands not to 'trust in men' (which includes women). Not trusting in men includes oneself. These three words outlaw the thought "I Did It My Way" and the glory (arrogantly and falsely) going to oneself.

God wants complete control over our lives which requires total obedience. The wisdom of trusting alone in God can mean material and eternal life - or death. God may even use a long illness or test to teach us this one simple insight: to love God with all our heart, before all people, animals, ideas and all inanimate things including beauty in people, animals and all things, all of which He created; to love Him not money and status;  to reject all kinds of idolatry (which are traps). For God creates our endurance, intelligence, strength, patience, careers, purpose, 'chance' meetings, relationships, families, interests and destiny, whether we recognise Him, or not. 

Isaiah 43.19 says: 
Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold I am doing a new thing. Now it springs forth; do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. 



This Waldensian cottage is centuries old but someone's vision and love has made it new, using new windows. It has a new purpose. God can give lives of faith a new and more creative perspective: it may not be one we, in our limited understanding, would design, but it is safer, more solid and more fruitful. Above all, faithful reliant lives glorify Him - not ourselves.

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