Consider circumstances. Meditate on God.

Consider circumstances. Meditate on God.

This really helped me recently.

I post it here so that you might be helped by it too.

Since you don’t author your own story, and since you haven’t penned the script of your own ministry, life and ministry is constantly unpredictable. In this world of the unexpected, you are always living in the tension between who God is and what he’s promised and the unexpected things on your plate. In the intersection between promise and reality, you must guard your mediation. You have to be very disciplined when it comes to what you do with your mind. Permit me to explain.

Abraham had been told by God that his descendants would be like the sand on the sea shore, and he had staked his life on this promise. Normally his wife, Sarah, would give birth early and often. But that did not happen. All throughout Sarah’s child-bearing years she could not conceive. Now both she and Abraham were old—way too old to seriously think they would be blessed with the promised son. Old Abraham was now living in the tension between God’s promise and his circumstances. When you’re in the intersection between the promises of God and the details of your situation, what you do with your mind is very important. In this intersection, God will never ask you to deny reality. Abraham did not deny reality. Romans 4 says that he “considered the deadness of Sarah’s womb.” Faith doesn’t deny reality. It is a God-focused way of considering reality.

But the passage tells you more. It tells you what Abraham did with his meditation. He didn’t invest himself in turning his circumstances inside out and over and over. He considered his circumstances, but he meditated on God. And as he meditated on God, he actually grew stronger in faith, even though nothing in his circumstances had yet changed. For many people in ministry, waiting becomes a chronicle of ever-weakening faith. Meditating on the circumstances will leave you in awe of the circumstances. They will appear to grow larger, you will feel smaller, and your vision of God will be clouded. But if you meditate on the Lord, you will be in greater awe of his presence, power, faithfulness, and grace. The situation will seem smaller, and you will live with greater confidence even though nothing has changed.

Have the circumstances captured your meditation? Are there ways in which you have grown weaker in faith? Or do the eyes of your heart focus on a God who is infinitely greater than anything you will ever face?

Paul Tripp –

http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/tgc/2012/07/22/4-debilitating-fears/