Instead of letting our thoughts take us captive…
For the weapons of our
warfare are not of the flesh
but have divine power to
destroy strongholds. We
destroy arguments and every
lofty opinion raised against
the knowledge of God, and
take every thought captive to
obey Christ.
2 Cor. 10-4-5
My dear friend posted this song the other day and it was just what I needed. Duane Clark and his brother, Terry, are pioneers of the contemporary Christian music genre. If you’d like to have some of their music for your own, you can check it out here.
I pray this song blesses you, too, and reminds you of how very much God loves you through anything and everything you go through.
I pray you’re always reminded of that when you come here, that you’re always drawn to Jesus and His love and hope, and that it causes you to want to walk with Him closer than the day before.
I love trees, and today in the U.S. it’s Arbor Day, a day marked for celebration of trees (traditionally by planting a tree) and all the good they do for the environment around them.
God uses trees throughout His Word, beginning and ending with the Tree of Life, and many other references throughout.
Today, though, I thought about how God tells us, in the Psalms and in Jeremiah, how we can be like a tree, sustained and fruitful even in hard times.
Jeremiah records God’s word to His people:
“This is what the Lord says:
‘Cursed is the one who trusts in man,
who draws strength from mere flesh
and whose heart turns away from the Lord.
That person will be like a bush in the wastelands;
they will not see prosperity when it comes.
They will dwell in the parched places of the desert,
in a salt land where no one lives.
But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,
whose confidence is in Him.
They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.’”
Jeremiah 17:5-8
At one point in history, God’s people demanded Samuel appoint them a king instead of looking to God as their King. The first king they put their trust in was Saul, and we know how that ended. And for hundreds of years God’s people put their trust in, and were ruled by kings.
Even today, a lot of people (sometimes even God’s people) are trusting in men and women in office to fix things, to make bad situations good, to make wrong situations right. And there seems to be no shortage of people willing to promise to do those things.
But that never ends as well as we’d like because people are just people, and the world’s system is not God’s. Let the world have the world.
We have God, a Savior, a Lord, who can do much more – He can make our hearts right.
Jesus tells us “’Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.’ By this He meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were later to receive.” John 7:37-39
So, we might not be able to plant a tree today, but let’s be a tree and leave the world’s ways (sorry, I couldn’t help it!).
Let’s plant ourselves by the living water by putting our faith in Christ and Him alone and receive from Him rivers of living water, the Holy Spirit, continually moving through us, nourishing us, sustaining us, and producing in us fruit and all kinds of good things to benefit us and those around us, no matter the circumstances, with no end to its abundance.
Isolation can give us a lot of time to think, and sometimes there’s nothing more dangerous than being inside our own heads.
We can start looking around, comparing our situation, our lives, to others and feel like we’re coming up short. Our piece of the pie seems like a sliver, and other’s a whopping piece with ice cream, or whipped cream, or both, slathered all over it.
And the truth is, we all have things in our lives we wish were different.
There is much that others enjoy as a given part of life that I will never know.
At the beginning of Psalm 73, Asaph ponders the prosperity of those who are wicked. Though they live foolishly, they enjoy good health, they have no troubles, they aren’t plagued by common human burdens (he thinks).
And here he was, he thought, keeping his heart pure and his hands innocent, and yet every day brings a fresh round of pain and affliction.
Until, he says, he entered the sanctuary of God.
We he got his focus off himself and onto God, then he understood the final destiny of the wicked. Ultimately, all they had gained will come to absolutely nothing when they face God at the final judgment.
And finally Asaph writes, “My flesh and my heart may fail…”
There is much discussion about what Asaph meant by this. Did he mean his flesh and heart failed him when he fell into bitterness and envy of others? Or did he mean that eventually his flesh and heart will fail when he dies and moves on from this life? Maybe both.
“… but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” Psalm 73:26
Asaph is finally able to take a wide and godly perspective and realize that because he has God in his life, he doesn’t have just a sliver of pie, or even a big piece. He actually has the whole pie.
Yes, his own heart may fail, but God is His strength, and His portion, his inheritance, in this life and in the next.
Forever.
Yes, I may have missed out on a lot in this life, and maybe that’s a good thing because it showed me how much I needed God.
But God (Elohiym – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) is my portion. And when everything in this life is gone, I will still have my Portion. I will have my relationship with God through Christ, and the faith and character and everything else He’s built on that Foundation through the many years I’ve walked with Him.
And it will last forever.
So the reality is, I haven’t missed out on one bit. I have God and all He is! And if you know Jesus, so do you. We have the Creator of the universe, our heavenly Father, the keeper of our souls and the One is able to make all grace abound toward us and bless us abundantly, our Lord and Savior and Friend and Brother and Co-Heir in the faith, Jesus, and our Comforter and Peace Giver, the One who seals us for eternal life, the Holy Spirit.
We can never come to the end of the list of His blessings. And anything we missed in this life that He deems important He will more than make up for in the next.
So instead of focusing inward or outward, let’s look up. We have more pie than we could ever eat.
