November 24, 2022 – Do You Have Difficulties?
Sermon: 2321 Give Thanks in Tough Times
Pray Over This
“If I say, ‘My foot slips,’ Your mercy, O Lord, will hold me up. In the multitude of my anxieties within me, Your comforts delight my soul.”
Ponder This
What is your greatest strength? Your intellect, your money, your personality? No, your greatest strength is God. When we sail through life without any difficulties, though, we tend not to depend on God. Joyce and I read from the Oswald Chambers devotional, My Utmost for His Highest, almost every morning. In one devotion he said, “Unguarded strength is actually a double weakness, because that is where the least likely temptations will be effective in sapping strength. The Bible characters stumbled over their strong points, never their weak ones.” Difficulty and heartache cause us to depend on the Lord Jesus Christ.
Many times, by His grace, God allows us to have trouble that brings us to depend on Him. “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). If your trouble, your heartache, your tears, and your difficulty cause you to depend more on God, can’t you thank Him for it? In those moments, we can say, “Lord, I have to thank You because this has caused me to depend on You.”
- Where are you most likely to depend on yourself?
- When have you depended on God’s presence in a time of struggle?
Practice This
Write out some of the events that have brought you to depend on God. Thank God for those things and ask Him to continually draw you closer to Him.
1Oswald Chambers, “Beware of the Least Likely Temptation,” My Utmost For His Highest, accessed September 20, 2022, https://utmost.org/beware-of-the-least-likely-temptation/.
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