Trusting God Day by Day: 365 Daily Devotions (50 page)

I challenge you to regularly stop, and take a good look at your life. Ask the Holy Spirit to show you where your priorities are out of line. Then, allow His conviction to motivate you to seek a deeper relationship with Him.

O
ne of the reasons I previously found myself stressed-out, burned-out, and sick was from not knowing how to say
“no.”
I wanted to take every ministry opportunity that came my way, but it just was not possible. We must all learn to let God’s Spirit, and not other people’s desires (or our own), lead us.

Frequently people tell me that God has shown them that I am supposed to come to their churches or conferences and be their speaker. There was a time when that would pressure me because I thought,
If I say no, then I am, in reality, saying they didn’t hear from God.

But other people cannot hear from God for us. We are individuals and have the right to hear from God ourselves. I started realizing that no matter what others thought they had heard, I could not do the engagement with peace if I had not heard from God about it myself.

Are you saying
“yes”
with your mouth while your heart is screaming
“no”
? If so, you will eventually be stressed-out, burned-out, and possibly sick. We just cannot go on like that forever without ultimately breaking down under the strain.

No matter how many people you please, there will always be someone who will not be pleased. Learn that you can enjoy your life even if everyone does not think you are wonderful. Don’t be addicted to approval from people; if God approves, that is all that really matters.

Being committed is very good, but being overcommitted is very dangerous. Know your limits and don’t hesitate to say
“no”
if you know that you need to. God has assigned a life span to each of us, and although we don’t know exactly how long we have on earth, we should certainly desire to live out the fullness of our years. We want to burn on, not
burn out. We should live with passion and zeal, not with exhaustion; we should be good examples to others.

W
e live in a noisy society. Some people have to have some noise in their atmospheres all the time. They always have music or the television on or the radio playing. They want someone with them all the time so they can talk. Each of these things done in balance is good, but we also need complete quiet and what I call “alone time.”

In order to enjoy a peaceful atmosphere, we must create one. Outer peace develops inner peace. Find a place where you can go that is quiet, a place where you will not be interrupted, and learn to enjoy simply being quiet for periods of time.

I have a certain chair in my living room where I sit and recover. The chair is a white recliner that faces a window to our yard, which is filled with trees. In the spring and summer, I can watch the birds, rabbits, and squirrels. There was a time when I would have considered that boring, but not now—now I love it. When I return from a conference, I go home, take a hot bath, and then sit in that chair.

Sometimes I sit there for several hours. I may read a little, pray, or just look out the patio door window, but the point is I am
sitting still and enjoying the quiet.
I have discovered that quiet helps me recover.

Being still has a soothing effect on us. If we find peaceful places and
remain in them for a while, we will begin to feel calmness engulf our souls. Waiting on God quietly does more to restore our bodies, minds, and emotions than anything else.

We regularly need quiet time to wait on God. Insist on having it; don’t let anyone take it from you. Jesus made sure He had seasons of peace and alone time. He ministered to the people, but He slipped away regularly from the crowds to be alone and pray (see Luke 5:15–16). Surely if Jesus needed this type of lifestyle, we do also.

I
was pondering just this morning the future of our ministry. We have been in ministry since 1976, and many things have changed during those years. I realize that things will not be the same ten years from now, but I don’t know exactly how they will be. Dave and I are getting a bit older, and we realize that we will not always be able to maintain the heavy travel schedule that we have now.

When I try to look into the future with my thoughts, I must admit I don’t really see anything definite. I intend to keep doing what I am doing and prayerfully helping more and more people. And I believe whatever God does with our ministry, it will be good.

I believe it is important for many of our readers to realize that even ministers and authors, like myself, don’t always have exact direction from the Lord; we walk by faith just like everyone else.

Having faith means that we don’t see or have any natural proof of what tomorrow may hold. We believe for good things, we expect good things, and we wait on God. We may be disappointed occasionally, but in Christ we can shake off the disappointment or discouragement and move on with what God is doing—not with what we wish He did.

I trust that God will always take care of us, that He will always do the right thing. God does not make mistakes—people do. Often we make ours from excessive personal planning that becomes so important to us we miss what God wants to do.

God’s plan is always better than ours, so we should be careful about making too many of our own. I always say,
“Make a plan and follow your plan, but be ready to let it go quickly if God shows you something else.”
God should always have the right-of-way and the right to interfere with our plans at any time.

S
ometimes we think we would like to know the future; yet in many cases if we did know all the future holds, we would be miserable and even afraid to go forward. Trusting God enables us to handle life one day at a time. God gives us what we need. We do not have everything
we need right now for our future, because that time is not here yet, so if we did know the future—without having the tools we need to succeed—we would all feel overwhelmed.

I have discovered that I can lose a lot of peace by too much knowledge. Knowing is not all it is cracked up to be. Some things are better left alone. For example, I don’t want to know if someone doesn’t like me and has been talking unkindly about me; all that knowledge does is make me unhappy. Sometimes we are quite peaceful and then we receive some information, and suddenly we lose our peace over what we just learned.

I would love to know all the wonderful, exciting things that are going to happen in my future, but I don’t want to know the difficult or disappointing ones. However, I realize both will be in my future. Just like everyone else, I will have good and bad times. I really believe I can handle whatever comes if I take it one day at a time, but knowing it all now would be too much. This is why God withholds information from us and tells us simply to trust Him.

Trust really is better than knowledge. Trust ministers peace, and that is very important. I suppose we can ask ourselves this question:
“Do I want peace or knowledge?”
I choose peace. How about you?

W
e all have personal standards that we expect other people to meet, and we are disappointed when people fail to act the way we hoped. But
is it really what they do that hurts us, or is it our own unrealistic expectations that set us up for the pain we feel when they don’t perform to our standards?

For example, my joy is not my husband’s responsibility—although I thought it was for many years. If he was not doing what made me happy, I became angry. I thought he should be more concerned about my happiness and do things differently. But it was
what I thought
that caused the problem, not what he did.

Dave and I have very few arguments now that I know my personal joy is my own responsibility, and not his. Dave should do some things for me that make me happy, just as I should try to please him, but there were many years in my life when it would have been practically impossible for anyone to keep me happy. My problems were in me; they were the result of abusive treatment in my childhood. Yet I was placing responsibility on Dave to make up for pain he had not caused.

Over time, I noticed that no matter had badly I acted, Dave remained happy. It irritated me, but also served as an example. I eventually became very hungry for the peace and joy I saw in his life, which were not dependent on any of his circumstances. In other words, he never made me responsible for his joy. If he had been dependent on me to make him happy, he would have never enjoyed life, because much of the time I gave him no reason to rejoice.

Are you possibly trying to make someone else responsible for things that only you can do something about? Let us take responsibility and stop expecting people to do for us what we should, in reality, be doing for ourselves or trusting God to do.

S
elf-deception is one of the biggest problems we have as human beings. We easily and quickly see what is wrong with others but rarely, if ever, see what is wrong with us. We judge others, and the Lord tells us there is no justification for this.

Why would we judge someone else for the same thing we are doing? Because we look at others through a magnifying glass but see ourselves through rose-colored glasses, a tinted glass that makes everything look lovely whether it is or not. In our thinking, there is absolutely no justification for the wrong behavior of others, but for us there always is. We always seem to have some valid reason why we have behaved badly that excuses us from being responsible.

For example, someone might be short-tempered with us, and we feel it was inexcusable for him or her to treat us that way. We might have treated someone the same way on another day, but we justified it because we felt ill or had a bad day at work. In reality, we should honestly judge our own behavior rather than others because the Word tells us we will not be asked to give an account of their lives, but of our own (see Rom. 14:10).

When God admonishes me for my behavior in a relationship, it is particularly difficult for me if I feel the other person does the same thing that God is asking me to change. I have told God more than once,
“This is not fair. What about the other person?”
He always reminds me
that
how
and
when
He corrects another is His business. Our responsibility is to follow God and obey Him, not to find fault with other people or how they are living their lives.

I
try to eat reasonably healthy meals, and I have studied nutrition and its effects on the body. Consequently, I have strong opinions about how we should take care of ourselves. I do eat sweets, but only small amounts, and I am usually concerned when I see anyone regularly consuming large amounts of sweets and other foods that I know to be unhealthy.