Trust God from the bottom of your heart; don't try to figure out everything on your own. Listen for God’s voice in everything you do, everywhere you go; He’s the one who will keep you on track. Don’t assume that you know it all. Run to God. Run from evil. Proverbs 3:5-7
I recently read Romans 4 (see below) from the Message Bible (2011 NavPress) and was deeply encouraged by it. The writers of the translation really knew how to put things in todays terms to help simple-minded folks like me 'get it'.
Though your situation may be seemingly hopeless, believe anyway. Decide to not live on the basis of what you see you can't do, but on what God said He would do. God will make good on what He says. With a word, God can make something out of nothing.
Pray and expect God to answer. Prayer is simply talking to God. Everything will come in the time that God has prepared it to come, so keep praying until something happens. If you ask, God'll give you strength that you never thought you'd ever have.
The Lord asked me yesterday, 'Why do you continue to worry and stress over things that I've already told you I've taken care of?' Good question, why do I? Lack of trust obviously. The more we get to know about God and His character, the more we trust. Getting in the Word and staying in it helps us to get to know our Father better.
God is working in you, giving you the desire to obey Him & the power to do what pleases Him. Phil 2:13
How long are we going to do things our way, before we realize we have to relinquish control to make it .. give it up. Sometimes, it's a good thing that we feel like we're loosing control. Don't trust your own instincts more than God and His Word, He's faithful and won't let us down ... BELIEVE.
Focus on the Lord and not the problem. Let's keep our eyes on Jesus instead of our circumstances. Don't panic, we're not alone. Even when we can't see which way we're going, God will show us the way to go. We've come too far to loose hope. Our better days are still ahead of us.
Having done all ... stand. God's gonna take care of EVERYTHING. Simply trust. With God all things are possible, so I'm gonna keep believing.
We don't have to have everything all figured out. Let's let Daddy figure things out and handle them.
Father, I pray that You speak to us and our situations. Help us to hang on to every word that You give us. Create a spirit of hope and expectation that will never die, but instead grow each day, knowing that You will always come through for us, at just the right time. Give us peace while we wait on You, trusting that You have everything under control. In Jesus' name, amen.
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Romans 4/MSG
1 So how do we fit what we know of Abraham, our first father in the faith, into this new way of looking at things? 2 If Abraham, by what he did for God, got God to approve him, he could certainly have taken credit for it. But the story we’re given is a God-story, not an Abraham-story. 3 What we read in Scripture is, "Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own."
4 If you’re a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don’t call your wages a gift. 5 But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it’s something only God can do, and you trust him to do it-you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked-well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift.
6 David confirms this way of looking at it, saying that the one who trusts God to do the putting-everything-right without insisting on having a say in it is one fortunate man: 7 Fortunate those whose crimes are carted off, whose sins are wiped clean from the slate. 8 Fortunate the person against whom the Lord does not keep score. 9 Do you think for a minute that this blessing is only pronounced over those of us who keep our religious ways and are circumcised? Or do you think it possible that the blessing could be given to those who never even heard of our ways, who were never brought up in the disciplines of God? We all agree, don’t we, that it was by embracing what God did for him that Abraham was declared fit before God?
10 Now think: Was that declaration made before or after he was marked by the covenant rite of circumcision? That’s right, before he was marked. 11 That means that he underwent circumcision as evidence and confirmation of what God had done long before to bring him into this acceptable standing with himself, an act of God he had embraced with his whole life.
12 And it means further that Abraham is father of all people who embrace what God does for them while they are still on the "outs" with God, as yet unidentified as God’s, in an "uncircumcised" condition. It is precisely these people in this condition who are called "set right by God and with God"! Abraham is also, of course, father of those who have undergone the religious rite of circumcision not just because of the ritual but because they were willing to live in the risky faith-embrace of God’s action for them, the way Abraham lived long before he was marked by circumcision.
13 That famous promise God gave Abraham-that he and his children would possess the earth-was not given because of something Abraham did or would do. It was based on God’s decision to put everything together for him, which Abraham then entered when he believed. 14 If those who get what God gives them only get it by doing everything they are told to do and filling out all the right forms properly signed, that eliminates personal trust completely and turns the promise into an ironclad contract! That’s not a holy promise; that’s a business deal. 15 A contract drawn up by a hard-nosed lawyer and with plenty of fine print only makes sure that you will never be able to collect. But if there is no contract in the first place, simply a promise-and God’s promise at that-you can’t break it.
16 This is why the fulfillment of God’s promise depends entirely on trusting God and his way, and then simply embracing him and what he does. God’s promise arrives as pure gift. That’s the only way everyone can be sure to get in on it, those who keep the religious traditions and those who have never heard of them. For Abraham is father of us all. He is not our racial father-that’s reading the story backwards. He is our faith father.
17 We call Abraham "father" not because he got God’s attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn’t that what we’ve always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, "I set you up as father of many peoples"? Abraham was first named "father" and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing. 18 When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, "You’re going to have a big family, Abraham!"
19 Abraham didn’t focus on his own impotence and say, "It’s hopeless. This hundred-year-old body could never father a child." Nor did he survey Sarah’s decades of infertility and give up. 20 He didn’t tiptoe around God’s promise asking cautiously skeptical questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God, 21 sure that God would make good on what he had said. 22 That’s why it is said, "Abraham was declared fit before God by trusting God to set him right." 23 But it’s not just Abraham; 24 it’s also us! The same thing gets said about us when we embrace and believe the One who brought Jesus to life when the conditions were equally hopeless. 25 The sacrificed Jesus made us fit for God, set us right with God.
