From today’s My Utmost for His Highest devotional:
Fill your mind with the thought that God is there. And
once your mind is truly filled with that thought, when you experience
difficulties it will be as easy as breathing for you to remember, “My heavenly
Father knows all about this!” This will be no effort at all, but will be a
natural thing for you when difficulties and uncertainties arise. Before you
formed this concept of divine control so powerfully in your mind, you used to
go from person to person seeking help, but now you go to God about it. Jesus is
laying down the rules of conduct for those people who have His Spirit, and it
works on the following principle: God is my Father, He loves me, and I will
never think of anything that He will forget, so why should I worry?
Jesus said there are times when God cannot lift the
darkness from you, but you should trust Him. At times God will appear like an
unkind friend, but He is not; He will appear like an unnatural father, but He
is not; He will appear like an unjust judge, but He is not. Keep the thought
that the mind of God is behind all things strong and growing. Not even the
smallest detail of life happens unless God’s will is behind it. Therefore, you
can rest in perfect confidence in Him. Prayer is not only asking, but is an
attitude of the mind which produces the atmosphere in which asking is perfectly
natural. “Ask, and it will be given to you…” (Matthew 7:7).
This reminds me of the Joan Osborne’s song – What if God was one of us and makes me
realize that even today, even among believers, we each have some idea of who
God is that is not only not complete because our finite mind cannot truly ever
get around an infinite Creator, but that may be warped and ultimately
unbiblical because we latch on to certain revealed aspects of God while we
minimize or even neglect other revealed aspects of God. Such as God is
Love, and as we focus on an entity of love we discount if not even forget His
wrath. It reminds me of the following moving scene from Talladega Nights . May we each continually
look into God’s Word and never fear challenging what we think we know, as we
trust in the Holy Spirit to teach us as we learn and grow.
From today’s J.C. Philpot’s Daily Words for Zion’s Wayfarers :
Click on the previous link in order to learn why the following quote was said:
“Thus those very things which seem against them are
for them, and they derive their sweetest consolations out of their heaviest
afflictions. They would not change their trying path, with all its bitter
things, for the smooth flowery path in which they see thousands walk, knowing
that a religion without trials and temptations will only lead the soul down
into a never-ending hell.”
“In
his book, The Vision and The Vow, Pete Greig tells of how a distinguished art
critic was studying an exquisite painting by the Italian Renaissance master
Filippino Lippi. He stood in London’s National Gallery gazing at the
fifteenth-century depiction of Mary holding the infant Jesus on her lap, with
saints Dominic and Jerome kneeling nearby. But the painting troubled him. There
could be no doubting Lippi’s skill, his use of colour or composition. But the
proportions of the picture seemed slightly wrong. The hills in the background
seemed exaggerated, as if they might topple out of the frame at any minute onto
the gallery’s polished floor. The two kneeling saints looked awkward and
uncomfortable.
Art
critic Robert Cumming was not the first to criticize Lippi’s work for its poor
perspective, but he may well be the last to do so, because at that moment he
had a revelation. It suddenly occurred to him that the problem might be his.
The painting had never been intended to come anywhere near a gallery. Lippi’s painting
had been commissioned to hang in a place of prayer.
The
dignified critic dropped to his knees in the public gallery before the
painting. He suddenly saw what generations of art critics had missed. From his
new vantage point, Robert Cumming found himself gazing up at a perfectly
proportioned piece. The foreground had moved naturally to the background, while
the saints seemed settled – their awkwardness, like the painting itself, having
turned to grace. Mary now looked intently and kindly directly at him as he
knelt at her feet between saints Dominic and Jerome.
It
was not the perspective of the painting that had been wrong all these years, it
was the perspective of the people looking at it. Robert Cumming, on bended
knee, found a beauty that Robert Cumming the proud art critic could not. The
painting only came alive to those on their knees in prayer. The right
perspective is the position of worship.” - Bible
in one year 2019
Please
Lord, keep my perspective on You alone—“For the Lord God is our sun and our
shield. He gives us grace and glory. The Lord will withhold no good thing from
those who do what is right.”
Psalms 84:11 NLT
“A single day in your courts is
better than a thousand anywhere else! I would rather be a gatekeeper in the house
of my God than live the good life in the homes of the wicked.”
Psalms 84:10 NLT
Have a great day!!
Godspeed,
Carmine DiLello
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