Thursday 26 Oct 2017

October 26: Psalm 77:1-10

Key Verse: Psalm 77:7
Will the Lord reject forever? Will he never show his favour again?

Devotion:
How many times have we reached a point in our lives when we begin to ask whether God has actually forgotten us. Maybe we get to know God at an early age and then get carried away with the world, forgetting God, going with the flow... Then one day we start to think again, thinking about what God thinks of our lives, thinking about what we are doing... When I got to the stage described above, I felt I had abandoned God and He, in turn, had abandoned me. I could not help but think I was alone even though I had my most precious people with me – my children.

This psalmist must have been going through troubled times to have thought in a similar way. When we go through troubled times, we will probably start to think in a similar way – we imagine how God has abandoned us in our hour of need. Most of the time we cannot understand why He could abandon us in any way; yet that is how we feel. Whether we are the ones at fault for abandoning Him, or whether we simply feel alone, the fix is the same. We need more time in a close relationship with Him. Time in prayer to let Him know how we feel, time in His Word to allow Him to show us what we need to know, and time to reflect upon what is going on in our lives...

Our weakness is not the fact we feel this way but that we had ever thought God would abandon us at all. Our weakness is that of lack of faith in His love for us, the lack of faith in the fact He will look after us and the lack of faith He does know exactly what we need in our lives. Our guilt should not be the fact we have abandoned Him or He us, but that we have lacked faith in His awesome power in our lives. Surely we should not forget what God has done in our past, nor what He has done throughout history; He has continued to be there and to uphold His Word continually. Spending more time in His Word will allow us to see this to be true. Spending more time finding out what He has done, what He is doing and what He has promised to do will give us hope. Living out that hope will keep us close to Him where we can commune most effectively with Him!

Points to Ponder:
How often do you doubt things in your life?

How often do you doubt God?