Trusting God

Prayer of the day for September 21:  "Heavenly Father, grant me strength for the task of this day. I thank you that I do not need to ask in vain. Equip me for my duty with strength and grace. Let me believe in you with all my heart. Let me walk in holy trust and bear fruit."

I appreciate so much the discipline of intercessory prayer and the knowledge that the prayers of God's people are powerful and effective. Now while I claim the truth i admit that I do not see the results that I would like to see. But I persevere trusting the outcome to the God who is all-knowing, all-wise and all-powerful (omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent). So the prophet Isaiah says that God keeps in perfect peace one whose mind is focused on God because they trust in God.

Dallas Willard (Christian philosopher) writes "our identification with the natural (fleshly) life or with the spiritual Christ-life in us is a set of the will. It is not to be discovered by examining theological treatises or even a state of mind. Is it my will to be in the old, dead life of sin?  Or is it my will to be in the resurrection life of Christ, which has entered into me through the impact of God's word? If you choose the latter, you still "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for His good pleasure"(Philippians 2:12-13). It is I. Yet it is not I but Christ. We move beyond communication and communion toward union with Christ, and we have the opportunity of progressively unifying all aspects of our personalities with Him so that, literally, "to me, living is Christ and dying is gain" (Philippians 1:21).

When serving First Reformed Church in Willmar MN we ran a series of ads in the weekly Willmar Reminder. We used material from a group called Heavy Thinking. It used a picture with a one line statement. Here are some of the statements without the pictures:

"BEWARE of the emptiness of a busy life... find fulfillment with us."

"SLOW DOWN...take time for God with us."

"FAITH at the beginning is a fearful thing...trust with us"

"Egg shells are so thin you may see out of one for a lifetime and never know you were inside...break out with us."

"ME is my only problem...find the answer with us."

My lectionary words for this week for your reflection as you choose:

Jeremiah 8:18-9:1   grief

Psalm 79:1-9          forgive

Amos 8:4-7             poor/needy

Psalm 113              praise

I Timothy 2:1-7      truth

Luke 16:1-13         faithful

Revelation 12        war

"The living God, the God who is God and not a philosopher's abstraction, lies infinitely beyond the reach of anything our eyes can see or our minds can understand...If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent God to us as God is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find God we must enter into silence." (Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation)

Consider the following from CS Lewis in Surprised By Joy: "You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious things: the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape? The words "compelle intrare" compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion our liberation."

May each of us know the compelling love of our creator God however that God may choose to work in our life.