| I get up at 4:00 AM every day to spend a couple of hours in quiet time with the Lord. It is ALWAYS the best part of my day. I will be talking about the nuances of that this Sunday at church and how to put guardrails on your life to stay on the path God has for YOU! Part of my morning is a daily devotional from Oswald Chambers called, “My Utmost For His Highest”. It is excellent and I truly recommend it. While reading today’s devotional for Feb 18, God spoke to my heart and said make this your weekly tip. So, below is the Feb 18th message from Utmost by Oswald Chambers. Someone reading this, this message is for you. God loves you, and He wants you to know what follows… Feb 18 Taking the initiative against despair. “Rise, let us be going.” Matthew 26:46 In the Garden of Gethsemane, the disciples went to sleep when they should have stayed awake, and once they realized what they had done, it produced despair. The sense of doing something irreversible tends to make us despair. We say, “Well, it’s all over and ruined now, what’s the point in trying anymore.” If we think this kind of despair is an exception, we are mistaken. It is a very ordinary human experience. Whenever we realize we have not taken advantage of a magnificent opportunity, we are apt to sink into despair. But Jesus comes and lovingly says to us, in essence, “Sleep on now. That opportunity is lost forever and you can’t change that. But get up, and let’s go on to the next thing.” In other words, let the past sleep, but let it sleep in the sweet embrace of Christ, and let us go on into the invincible future with Him. There will be experiences like this in each of our lives. We will have times of despair caused by real events in our lives, and we will be unable to lift ourselves out of them. The disciples, in this instance, had done a downright unthinkable thing-they had gone to sleep instead of watching with Jesus. But our Lord came to them taking the spiritual initiative against their despair and said, in effect, “Get up, and do the next thing.” If we are inspired by God, what is the next thing? It is to trust Him absolutely and to pray on the basis of His redemption. Never let the sense of past failure defeat your next step. Brian |
| “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”2 Corinthians 13:14 (NKJV) |
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