Written by Chuck Swindoll, these encouraging devotional thoughts are published seven days per week.
Intimate friends are rare in life. Often we have only one, occasionally two, usually not more than three in our entire lives. There's something about an intimate friend that causes your souls to be knit together. It's what we call a kindred spirit.
Intimidation. That's our MAJOR battle when we face giants. When they intimidate us, we get tongue-tied. Our thoughts get confused. We forget how to pray. We focus on the odds against us. We forget whom we represent, and we stand there with our knees knocking. I wonder what God must think, when all the while He has promised us, "My power is available. There's no one on this earth greater. You trust Me."
So often, when facing our own giants, we forget what we ought to remember, and we remember what we ought to forget. We remember our defeats, and we forget the victories.
That's the way with the giants of fear and worry, for example. They don't come just once; they come morning and evening, day after day, relentlessly trying to intimidate. They come in the form of a person, a pressure, or a worry.
The Spirit-filled saint is a song-filled saint. And your melody is broadcast right into heaven—live—where God's antenna is always receptive, where the soothing strains of your song are always appreciated.
One important thing this says to me is that you should never discount anything in your past. God can pick it up and use it in the most incredible ways.
How easy to second-guess God's selections! How necessary, when tempted to do that, to remind ourselves that His selections are sovereign and sure.
However, at Pentecost and from that time on, all the way through our present era, when the Spirit of God comes into the believing sinner at salvation, He never leaves. He comes and baptizes us into the body of Christ. That happens at salvation.
God's ways are so marvellous, aren't they? At the most surprising moment, the most magnificent things happen.
It is in the schoolroom of solitude and obscurity that we learn to become men and women of God. It is from the schoolmasters of monotony and reality that we learn to "king it." That's how we become—like David—men and women after God's own heart.
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