CHOOSING TO TRUST

“How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? Look on me and answer, LORD my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, and my enemy will say, ‘I have overcome him,’ and my foes will rejoice when I fall. But I trust in Your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in Your salvation.”  (Psalm 13:2-5 NIV)

Every time a believer struggles with sorrow or loneliness or ill health or pain and chooses to trust and serve God anyhow, a bell rings out across heaven and the angels give a great shout. Why? Because one more pilgrim has shown again that he or she understands that Jesus is worth it all. God is faithful.

-- Philip Yancey in “Disappointment with God”


#4718

STEWARDSHIP OF TIME

“Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries. Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy.”  (1 Corinthians 4:1-2 NRSV)

Time. None of us has much of it… The tree that shades the sleepy cow in the pasture may have looked down on our grandfather when he was a boy, and it may remain to watch the passing of our children's children. And that we have so small a store of time constitutes a powerful reason for our making the most of what we have. Yet how many hours have we spent doing nothing or doing the wrong thing. Our cynical waste of precious time could be a reason for our not having more of it given to us, who knows? Jesus once said, "Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost."

Time wasted is lost beyond recall. While we sympathize with the emotional content of the old song, "Backward, turn backward, O time, in your flight," it is yet hard to conceive of a more futile appeal. Time does not run backward. The old man does not become young, the young man becomes old. So it has always been and so it will ever be. The bird of time flies past us and is gone; "the leaves of life keep falling one by one, the wine of life keeps oozing drop by drop." We must work while it is called today.

-- A. W. Tozer

#4704

FAITHFUL STEWARDS

“Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries. Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy.”  (1 Corinthians 4:1-2 NRSV)

[Money] is an excellent gift of God, answering the noblest ends. In the hands of His children, it is food for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, raiment for the naked: It gives to the traveler and the stranger where to lay his head. By it we may supply the place of an husband to the widow, and of a father to the fatherless. We may be a defense for the oppressed, a means of health to the sick, of ease to them that are in pain; it may be as eyes to the blind, as feet to the lame; yea, a lifter up from the gates of death!

It is therefore of the highest concern that all who [revere] God know how to employ this valuable talent; that they be instructed how it may answer these glorious ends, and in the highest degree. And, perhaps, all the instructions which are necessary for this may be reduced to three plain rules, by the exact observance whereof we may approve ourselves faithful stewards… Gain all you can... Save all you can… Give all you can.

-- John Wesley in his sermon "Serving God with Mammon"


#4703