Isaiah 58:11
So much of our power and peace consists in knowing where God would have us be - and in just being there. If we are precisely where our heavenly Father wants us, we are perfectly sure that He will provide food and clothes and everything besides. When He sends His servants to Cherith, He will make even the ravens bring them food (1 Kings 17:1-6).
How much of our Christian work has been ineffective because we have persisted in initiating it for ourselves instead of ascertaining what God was doing and where He required our presence! We dream bright dreams of success. We try to command it. We call to our aid all kinds of resources, questionable or otherwise. At last we turn back, disheartened and ashamed, like children who are torn and scratched by the brambles and soiled by the quagmire. None of this would have happened if only we had been, from the first, under God's unerring guidance. He might test us, but He could not allow us to err.
Children of God who long to know their Father's will turn to the Bible and gain confidence by noticing how in all ages God has guided those who dared to trust Him completely, even as those people must have at th time been as perplexed as we often are now. We see how Abraham left all that was familiar and started, with no other guide than God, across the trackless desert to a land he didn't know. We see how for forty years the Israelites were led through the peninsula of Sinai, with its labyrinths of red sandstone and wastes of sand. It is impossible to think that God could guide us at all if He did not guide us always. So we are bidden to look for guidance that will embrace the whole of life in all its myriad necessities.
In which areas have you sought your own guidance rather than God's? What happened??
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