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Jan 13 Daily Devotional

TRUSTING GOD’s PLAN
Daily Devotional

Cultivate trust for God’s plans each day this week.

January 13: Trust God’s Plan

  • Scripture  Proverbs 3:5-6 — Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge God, and God will make straight your paths.
  • Meditation: Okay, maybe we argue with this text a little. God gave us intellect and discernment. Are we not supposed to use it?
    The answer lies in balance. This scripture is a prompt to focus on trust. God’s ways lead to integrity of being. God’s Way keeps us on a sustainable path.
    Yet we admit that it’s hard to trust others, even higher powers. We want to be independent, strong, and in control.
    Sometimes trying to go it alone, to be totally in charge and follow a plan without any support or larger perspective, or even a way to adapt if things go wrong, is what gets us in trouble. And maybe we’re not all bottoming out, but we all have challenges with trust. What would cause us to admit that maybe we don’t have everything figured out? That we need help and support? And that maybe ‘going it alone’ isn’t the best or only way to live?
    Twelve Step programs help people struggling with addictions, who want to be sober and stay in recovery, to rebuild and reclaim wholeness of identity, purpose, and wellbeing in life. Along the way, they begin with these three steps: 1) Admit some aspect of life has become unmanageable. 2) Turn to a higher power as a source of strength, resilience and restoration. 3) Surrender by turning over our wills and lives to the care of Godself in whatever way participants understand Godself. Participants go on for the next 9 steps, remaining accountable partners in the process of recovery. And veterans of this program know that it’s a life-long journey. We always need help. And trust.
  • Spiritual Discipline: What if we try the first few steps? 1) Admit some aspect of life has become unmanageable, or needs extra attention. 2) Turn to God as a source of strength, resilience and restoration. 3) Surrender in prayer, turning over lives to the care of Godself.

SONGS:

I don’t always trust that I am loved by God and worthy of that love. I need someone to tell me. We all do – we are a forgetful people.
    So if my work as a pastor and a theologian does nothing else in the world I wish it to do this one thing – that those in my care may know this: If you have been told that God is some kind of punishing, angry bastard with a killer surveillance system who is basically always disappointed with you for being a human being then you have been lied to. The church has failed you and I am so sorry.
      So if you hear nothing else hear this: that angry punishing God is not the God revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. This Jesus who ate with sinners and tax collectors and pissed of the religious authorities (because he was so clearly free from their control) and who loved and healed and forgave people indiscriminately – well this Jesus was God’s way of telling us who God is.
     So when you wander far from the fold of God, or when you live in such a small way because you don’t trust that you are loved and worthy to be loved, know this: that all the forgiveness and mercy and reconciliation of God is already yours. It will not be taken away as a punishment and it will not be granted as a reward, it is yours no matter what.
When God sees you, God is filled with compassion. Even if you are still trying to get over, even if you’re not ready, even if you truly have turned a corner and started to become the [man or] woman God intended you to be, even if you have never felt well-loved, even if you can’t forgive yourself. Even if you have never really told the whole truth. Even if you aren’t interested in it. All the love and mercy of God is running toward you. The DJ has been hired and the dancing begun and the feast prepared before you even walked in this door. — Nadia Bolz-Weber
Jan 13 Daily Devotional
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