Monday 21 Oct 2013

Monday Reading: 1 Peter 4:13

Key Verse: 1 Peter 4:13
13  but rejoice to the extent that you partake of Christ’s sufferings, that when His glory is revealed, you may also be glad with exceeding joy.

Devotion:
I found out that one of the hardest things to start doing was to rejoice in The Lord when things around me were collapsing or not going the way that I wanted them to go. Each one of us is going to come up against temptations, against sin, deceit, and all manner of things which will make us question God at some point.

God does not just want us to take Him for granted or just to believe without question! Now while that may sound a bit strange to some, others who have been through the trial will see where I am coming from. If we just accept things and do not question God we will grow up to be really great Christians for as long as we are not faced by trials. As soon as the trial hit then we will collapse in a heap! Think of someone building a house out of straw or some other material that will not stand firm… As soon as the trial hit, the building collapses.

When we face trials we question why and we build up a dependence on Christ as well as resilience against those trials. God is allowing us to be trained by what He allows into our lives. He is the one that knows what we can bear and He is the one who will make sure that we are trained in the field that we need to face. When we get to the end of the trial we can look back and rejoice in what we have been through, seeing how wonderful God is to have kept us going so that we are prepared to face things in the future.

God continues to work in our lives every step of the way. There are times when we fail and He has to pick up the pieces, but there are also times when we realise that we have had good training and rely on it to prepare us for the next step. There are also the times when we have to stop and listen as He tries to teach us what we need to do. Those are the times when we may well question everything because we do not understand yet.

Points to Ponder:
Do you question God?

Do you listen for the answer?