Written by Chuck Swindoll, these encouraging devotional thoughts are published seven days per week.
Thank You, dear Lord, for the beautiful way You teach us. Thank You for Your patience when we fail. Thank You for Your understanding in the midst of all our own confusion. Thank You for reaching down to us when we would never have reached up to You.
May Your grace keep us from a judgmental spirit toward others, Lord. Give us the encouragement we need to be all You have called us to be as Your obedient children, so that we, like David with the sheep, might guide others skilfully and well. In the strong name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Lord, because You don't save us and then suddenly take us home to heaven but leave us here on earth, hear us as we ask You to bring to our attention those things that will assist us in staying clean in a corrupt world.
We are grateful, Father, that Your Son did not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. By Your grace, You have invited people who are imperfect, who are sinful, who have every reason to be ashamed of themselves, who are failures, who are guilty of wrong, to come to You and to find in You relief from their burdens, hope beyond the present, and relief from shame.
Refresh us with frequent flashbacks from Your inerrant and reliable Word. "If God is for us, who is against us?... Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?... But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us."
Teach us in these tender days the value of genuine humility—of a self-forgetful life. We ask this so that we might become for You messengers whose message makes sense because our lives are like Your Son's life—the One who is gentle and humble of heart.
Lord, words of hope from others can fall flat if things aren't right in our own lives. When we're consumed by rage and resentment, somehow words about joy and purpose sound hollow...they seem meaningless. But when our hearts are right with You, we have ears to hear the message of hope.
Sovereign God, all of us would be quick to say that we do need to be relieved of our anxieties—they are too many and too frequent. And because we want to call our own shots, we need to be levelled and removed from the realm of pride.
In light of Your sovereign grace, we thank You for blindness, for paralysis, for loss, for death, for broken dreams, for dissolved partnerships, and for disillusionment. In faith, we praise You for times of insecurity, failure, divorce, and even those when others have treated us unjustly. We see the storm, but You enable us to also see beyond the storm, so we trust You to make all things just in Your time.
Our only source of relief comes through Your grace. Bring it to our attention again and again in those critical moments when discouragement does a number on us...and make us grateful.
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