WEDNESDAY January 8th
. . . continued from previous devotion
You will remember for 2024 the motto had been from Zechariah 4:6
‘Then he said to me, “This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel: Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord of hosts.’
And we still hold onto this verse, but specifically for 2025 it is to be Isaiah 26:3-4
‘You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock.’
We are most definitely living in troublesome times. Almost every day we hear of things that alarm us and would cause us perhaps to become even fearful as to what is going to happen next, and the remedy for the believer is to allow the peace of God to fill us and to grip our hearts instead of allowing fear to grip us.
Beside the troublesome circumstances that we see in the world, we all if not all the time are often faced with our own troubling circumstances—sickness, employment worries, family circumstances, stressful moments, what will trouble me may be different to what troubles you, we could add so much to the list, but we need to allow the peace of God to come and to fill our hearts in such a way that the fear that we can allow these things to grip us with is squeezed out.
When it comes to the peace that I am talking about, these verses tell us this important point ‘YOU’ keep him in perfect peace’, GOD himself will keep us in perfect peace, we thank God for all those who can help us in so many ways, but the highest and best source of lasting peace is to be found in heaven itself, from the One who created us and knows every intricate detail about us. He knows exactly how each one of us is wired up and he can put his finger onto any and every troubling situation and give us peace.
The source of the peace couldn’t be any better! You know what it is like when you are looking for a product, you do a few checks, maybe look at some of the reviews to see that the product is fit for purpose, well, search out the word of God concerning the peace of God and see the reviews, and I can assure you it rates as the highest, and as the best! It is described as ‘perfect peace’.
But then we need to look a little further into these verses, for there are two conditions attached to this promise of being kept in perfect peace and it is found in these words ‘whose mind is stayed on you’ and ‘because he trusts in you’.
We need to remain in the place where having come by faith to trust in the Lord Jesus Christ that we continue to exercise that trust, and we do it by ensuring that our MINDS have become so altered by the message of the Cross that we set our minds upon those things that pertain to what it truly means to be a child of God.
to be continued . . .