I want to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving today. Though life can appear unfair, cruel and challenging beyond our strength, we followers of Christ have been empowered to be grateful and content in all things. The excerpt from The Valley Of Vision below focuses on our need to live with contented hearts all year round.
Contentment
Heavenly Father, if I should suffer need, and go unclothed, and be in poverty, make my heart prize Thy love, know it, be constrained by it, though I be denied all blessings.
It is Thy mercy to afflict and try me with wants, for by these trials I see my sins, and desire severance from them. Let me willingly accept misery, sorrows, temptations, if I can thereby feel sin as the greatest evil, and be delivered from it with gratitude to Thee, acknowledging this as the highest testimony of Thy love.
When thy Son, Jesus, came into my soul instead of sin He became more dear to me than sin had formerly been; His kindly rule replaced sin’s tyranny. Teach me to believe that if ever I would have any sin subdued I must not only labor to overcome it, but must invite Christ to abide in the place of it, and He must become to me more than vile lust had been; that His sweetness, power, life may be there. Thus I must seek a grace from Him contrary to sin, but must not claim it apart from Himself.
When I am afraid of evils to come, comfort me by showing me that in myself I am a dying, condemned wretch, but in Christ I am reconciled and live; that in myself I find insufficiency and no rest, but in Christ there is satisfaction and peace; that in myself I am feeble and unable to do good, but in Christ I have ability to do all things. Though now I have His graces in part, I shall shortly have them perfectly in that state where Thou wilt show Thyself fully reconciled, and alone sufficient, efficient, loving me completely, with sin abolished. O Lord, hasten that day.
contentment for christians and Anxiety,
are diabolical polar opposites.
but yet Paul also tells us to Be in the world but not of it.
Paul did not say If Humanly possible live your life free of anxiety.
but in Romans he said If possible live at peace with all…
this is a Human effort ..pursue peace with all and holiness.
It is the christian that is to make the effort not just believe to
PURSUE PEACE AND HOLINESS.
Pursue peace with all, and holiness, without which no one shall see the Lord: … ; Romans 14:19.
PURSUE ….WHAT, How, when.
be content.
where does one get this POWER to live this kind of life Paul is talking about?
I have no Power except in Christ as a born again christian.
Humanly I am a DEAD Man.
I am aware of my human short comings but still I seek to try to live the
life we are called to as Christians.
Conflict drives our mental thought processes,
but I try via the power Christ has given us via his Holy Spirit.
. “And this is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests which we have asked of Him” (1 John 5:14, 15).
THATS Power But why is our CHURCHES Powerless?
“To be human is to experience self-consciousness, to know separation, to be made aware of limits and to contemplate ends. One cannot be human, therefore, without being filled with chronic anxiety. It sounds depressing, but surely it is true.”
Bishop John Selby Spong