Hebrews 4:12 – For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
The Daily Nugget is a weekday devotional written by Pastor Jim Sole. We hope you find encouragement, guidance, and conviction unto holiness through the scriptures and commentary.
How would you answer today’s nugget theme? You may respond along these lines; “My greatest privilege in life is being a Christian” or “My greatest privilege in life is knowing God.” And those are great Biblical answers, but I want us to go a little deeper. We may easily say, “My greatest privilege in life is being a Christian” and actually not be exercising that privilege. That isn’t a critical judgment. It is an assessment based on what Jesus said concerning end times, “And because lawlessness (sin) will be increased the love of many will grow cold” (Matthew 24:12). All genuine Christians fight the battle to maintain first love for Jesus. There is a reason why the Christian life is called a “fight, a race, the narrow way, and difficult”.
A faith untested and untried is a faith which must not be trusted. It will fail every time the storms of life come. It will not stand the crashing waves of tough circumstances. It is of sand, not the solid rock of Christ and His Word, and will be washed away at the first sign of difficulty. And to ensure we have the type of faith which holds during trying times, God tests us. He tries His children with intense and severe tests. He told us so – “Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction” (Isaiah 48:10).
All of us want at least two things in the Christian life; spiritual growth in Christ and fruitfulness for Christ. And I would say we all want it fast; like now, like instantaneous, like immediate, like no waiting time. Nothing wrong with these desires. In fact, something would be really wrong if these desires were lacking in our lives. But here is where we often struggle. When we are going through tough times in life and don’t understand what God is doing, we find great comfort in these familiar verses found in Isaiah 55:8-9. These verses also apply in the process of God refining us into the image of His Son or spiritually growing us.
In today’s scripture, Jacob says something which is soul-searching for every Christian – “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.” I wonder if some of us would have to say that about church yesterday? Did we go to church and leave unmoved, unchanged, and not hungering more for God? Did we come to church, go through church, and leave church having never encountered the Lord Jesus? What I am referring to as encounters with the Living Christ are two things which always occur when we meet God.
The Christian life from start to finish is all of grace. God saves us by His grace. He grows us by His grace. He makes us like His Son by grace. He will bring us to heaven by grace. Yes, everything we have and are is all of God’s amazing grace. Every day we should be a people humming along the grand hymn of the faith written by John Newton – “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.” There is another aspect of grace we may not think of much; “The Preventing Grace of God.”
Today’s scripture was my portion of reading in my yearly Bible reading plan. It is familiar to all of us, but today, it jumped off the page with newness and clarity in its application. And the lessons are many and apply to all of us who are seeking to live for Christ. All of these lessons are in the context of “storms”, not a literal one as the disciples were encountering, but in the ones we face every day of life – emotional storms, spiritual storms, situational storms, relational storms . . . you may add a “personal storm” to the list. So, since these are realities in all our lives, let’s consider some valuable truths behind all our storms.