What Keeps You Awake At Night?

I spoke at a church in North Dakota on Sunday. After I got done, the pastor preached about wrestling with the Bible. He said that anyone who isn't struggling with at least one thing from the Bible probably isn't reading it the way they should. I think He's right. The Bible is meant to be a mirror, showing us who we are as compared to who God wants us to be. If it isn't challenging us, then we aren't holding the mirror correctly. Most likely we are holding it up so we can look over our shoulder at the person behind us. Maybe we are holding it flat so we can stare at the clouds and get fuzzy feelings. May we have the courage to hold it straight and stare into our own eyes through the filter of God's eyes.

Fear and Doubt

Fear and doubt are caused by an understanding of personal weakness and the magnitude of a particular difficulty, coupled with a miscalculation of the greatness of God. To stave off fear, we need to nurture a proper view of God. This takes two parts. First, we must employ that active memory that is part of "heading yourself." Go back to the basis of your faith often. Second, we need to build an intimate, loving relationship with God.
If we have both in our heart, they fight off fear. If we have one or the other only in our head... a kid knows that the Boogieman isn't real. Does that help him conquer his fears on a dark night? Fear doesn't require logic, so logic fails to starve it. However, when the child's father enters the room the Boogieman is left powerless by comparison. We must have the same trust in our Heavenly Father.

God's Provision and Obedience

God hit me upside the head with something obvious the other night. I was hanging out with a friend who is a youth pastor and his sermon was on worry. They were going through Matthew 6, the well-known passage about how God cares for birds and flowers. Then verse 33 caught my eye. "Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." In the past when I have heard that, I just understood it to mean that we should be more worried about pursuing God than we are about meeting our own needs. This time a new nuance struck me. This time I read it roughly as follows:

IF you seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, THEN all these things will be given to you as well.

This is not a reward thing. This is a logical thing. Why would God provide the resources, circumstances, health, etc. for me to accomplish things contrary to His will? He has given me free will, so I can shun His path, but if I do so I would be foolish indeed to expect His resources to redirect themselves to match my blind and swerving course. That is just one more reason to constantly be checking my course with God to make sure that I am not wandering astray. And if I am not receiving provision, my first reaction should be to try to discover God's will. Sometimes I will find that I have strayed. Perhaps sometimes, like Job, I will discover that God has a greater purpose I can not understand, and His will is for me to rely solely on His grace in a time of severe hardship so that He may be glorified. Whatever the case, God cares more for me than for the birds, and He will provide daily sustenance for his child. As Solomon prayed, may God never give me too much, lest I turn away from Him, or too little, lest I be tempted to steal and ruin His name. Give me only as much as I need.