Skip to main content

Closing the Gap 1.10.18

By January 10, 2018Daily Devotional

Week 1 Day 3 Devotional

Pray:

Ask God to reorient you to Himself. Confess any known sin. Thank Him for His forgiveness. Be still and reflect on Jesus and His sacrifice for you. Ask the Holy Spirit to open your heart and mind to God’s Word. Pray for others in your life that they, too, would know and love God today.

Read:

2 Thessalonians 1:3   We ought always to thank God for you, brothers, and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more, and the love every one of you has for each other is increasing.

Reflect:

Faith is confidence.  Who do I trust?  Do I have faith in my government, my friends, my job, my intellect, my talents?  Relatively speaking it’s good to be able to have some confidence, some faith in these things.  But in an absolute sense, only God is worthy of our final and complete confidence.  He alone is incapable of failure.  He alone is able to “hold” our complete faith because no one and nothing can stop him from being faithful.  Faith is like a plant: it is a growing thing, or it is a dying thing.  It cannot be a static thing.  How do I learn to put my ultimate confidence in God? The key words are “growing” and “more and more.” Movement, decisions, choices, time, repentance, time…these are the descriptions of “growing.”  “More and more” is a description of closing the gap day-by-day.  If I have arrived, then there is no “more.”  But in this life we will always be arriving, so our focus must be “more and more.”  When you feel anxious, look for misplaced confidence.  Putting your faith in God will not always remove anxious feelings, but it will help you get at what is often the root cause.  Don’t worry that progress seems slow; plants grow slowly, but they do grow.  If you want to grow in faith, you will.  You and God are the only ones who can stop it.  He is all for it, so he won’t stop it.  That leaves only you…what will you choose?  Close the gap today by continually transferring trust from self (or anyone or anything else) to God.

Pray:

(Personalize this prayer today; make it specific to the circumstances that face you.)

Ask God to lead you through His Spirit as you go through your day. Ask Him to bring to mind the truth of the gospel and its implications for what you will encounter today. Tell Him “Yes” to His will and ask Him for His power and protection to live this “yes.” Ask God to create and reveal opportunities to proclaim the good news today.

Leave a Reply