I received this from one of the members of the Global Prayer Family. Am forwarding it in hope that it blesses you as much as it did me.

Much love

Chrissy

Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.  Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money."  Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that."  As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil.  Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.   Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you.   Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten.   Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days.   James 4:13-5:3

Who do we really count on day by day, at work, at play, at home, at school, or in relationships?  If the truth be told more often then not we usually count on our ability to make happen what we wish to happen.  All too often we disregard the power of an infinitely strong, infinitely good and loving heavenly Father to play a part in our mundane daily lives.  Our society teaches us that we should be self sufficient thereby regulating God to the extraordinary tasks that we ourselves can't handle.  The problem with this mindset beloved is that when we take the reigns of life into our own hands, we forget that we are not omniscient, we forget that we are indeed just a breathe away from death and we deny that we are dependent upon the work that our Lord Jesus performed upon the Cross at Calvary.  Infected with the lie of self-sufficiency and continually bruised by the boredom of our daily routines we plan our day or week or next year as if we were the lords of earth and time thereby succumbing to the practice of practical atheism.  I am sure that at some point in time we have all been guilty of this practice.  It doesn't matter what we claim or profess, it doesn't matter how much we say we believe in God, the truth of the matter is that we confess with our lives what we really believe.  So when we live our lives as if God were not there, we forget him and our place in time.

Beloved, these lives we live are sandwiched between eternity past and eternity future.  We must remember and take to heart that the linear line upon which we live between these two eternities called time is not granted to us  by necessity, mechanics of the law, by right nor by the courtesy of nature.  No beloved, our time is granted to us solely by the covenant mercies of God.  We live under the permission-giving of God, day by day.  I know as we read our Bibles we don't have any trouble saying that "IN THE BEGINNING" of time God was in control.  Similarly, as we read our Bibles we don't have any trouble saying that ultimately "IN THE END" of time God will be in control.  But everything in between is all together another issue.  It is in this time what we call the present that we tend to live as if God suspends his sovereign control and it is all left up to us and in our ignorance we blindly grab the reins of our calendars, our lives and our tomorrows.  Again beloved, I remind you that we are in the Lenten season.  This is a time in which we should endeavor to examine ourselves with regard to our relationship to the Cross of Christ Jesus.  A better understanding of and a closer identity with this sacrificial altar will bring much needed humility into our lives displacing the blinders of presumption thereby allowing us to see that on the Cross God purposed to do all he could do for our providential care.    If God bent all of history to accomplish his son’s death for you and me, then can't we trust our todays and tomorrows to him?

Gripped in grace

Dale

dhayne03@harris.com