Good morning,
God’s powerful peace
Has anything ever happened that God has not planned? While the Bible tells us that God decided to make us in his own image, as sinful human beings we are constantly tempted to think of God as made in our image, only on a much bigger scale. All of us feel most secure when things around us are going on in some sort of predictable way. We pick up patterns of living from our earliest years and then expand them more and more as we grow older and our lives become more complicated. Our test for what is right is the feeling of being in some sort of control of what is going on around us. Our test for what is wrong is that what is going on around us is uncomfortable, painful or out of our control. Of course life is much more complex than that since, as sinful human beings, we forget that Satan as well as our environment keep giving us information about what is happening on a daily basis. It’s also important that most people don’t know or don’t believe that God has planned each day of our lives from the time we are conceived until eternity.(Psalms 139:16) The Enemy of genuine believers is delighted to flood our minds with patterns and problems from the past or the danger of what might happen in the future to keep us from listening and obeying what God is telling his sons and daughters about what he has planned for each of our lives.
Of course God doesn’t lay out all the details of his master plan for us to follow. He has given us his Word and the Holy Spirit to guide us day by day so that we live by faith in Him and not our own feeling about what is right and what is wrong. When Paul wrote to the Philippians he gave them the pattern to follow that God had built into his own walk with God. He wrote, Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. God’s plan is always at work in our lives based on his perfect plan. God wants us to talk to him about his plan rather than spending our conversations together on convincing him of the goodness of our own plan. It is important that we share our needs with him, but also we must do so while remembering how well he has taken care of us in the past. When we approach God in this way, God promises us a wonderful miracle. What Paul learned was that Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. We may be tempted to worry, but we won’t. Our Enemy will tempt us, or our friends will often worry about us because we should certainly be more concerned than we are. Paul shared a wonderful truth with all of us when he wrote, His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus. Has God ever developed a plan for us that won’t work? Never! Dear Lord, please help us to remember who you are and who we are so that we may live life guarded by your peace.
Philippians 4:6 Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. 7 Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus
Roy Wisner
