Trust

Some of you are reading this at a difficult economic time. Your business has shrunk. Your sales are down. Your customers are cutting back. Your salary has been reduced. Your job has gone away.

Prayer is a personal conversation with our Father. It should not be filled with clever Christian clichés or worn-out prayer phrases. It is fresh, real, and raw—like any meaningful conversation in our lives.

If you are searching and hungry, if you have unsuccessfully tried to fill your life with all the things of the world, today I ask you to trust in Jesus, the Bread of Life.

But Jesus came as the Lamb of God to take away the sin of the world. On the cross, he paid sin’s penalty. He bought us back from sin’s slavery. He freed us from sin’s prison. 

Hope doesn’t just happen. It is brought about by spiritual discipline and growth. When your children speak at your funeral, I bet they won’t mention the expensive Christmas gifts. Let’s aspire for their focus to be on the gift of Jesus that you allowed them to see in you up close and personal. 

In dark valleys, he is our Shepherd who leads us to safety. God can always be trusted in the uncertainties of living. And we can be sure that when we leave this life, he will deliver us safely home. 

We live in a world that doesn’t make sense because this is not the way it’s supposed to be. Life “under the sun” is confusing. Throughout our study of Ecclesiastes, we have learned that there are things we will never understand.

If you must know the answer to every question about life and God before trusting in him, guess what? You will never trust in him. One thing we do know about the future is that death is certain. Here’s the main question. When your body has breathed its final breath, where will your soul go?

Life doesn’t always make sense. Some things we experience just don’t fit nicely into our box of expectations. We like to be in control, and we can control things we understand that fall into our line of thinking…but…when we can’t understand how and why things happen…the control eludes us.