Pilch's Holiday Diary - Day 4

I have been working on my book today - here is a little bit of what I wrote today. It is in a chapter about becoming a follower and how this requires a certain kind of obedience...

Ask Him when you don’t feel worthy enough to ask.

It’s difficult to ask God for the things we need sometimes. Our thinking tells us that there is some kind of balance system in place so that if we are good and do the right things God will give us everything we need and if we make mistakes and do the wrong thing then God will leave us on our own to suffer. It’s true that we can end up suffering from the consequences of our sinful actions, but it’s not true that God abandons us because we have taken some wrong turns. He still loves us.

Part of our obedience to Him involves relying on Him to supply our needs and being obedient to Him when He says that when we need something we are to go to Him and ask. The alternative is to rely on ourselves and our own strength and that usually ends in disaster and sends us further from God.

Asking for our needs to be met, for God to be involved in our lives is a great privilege, but it is also His will for us so it’s something we need to do despite those feelings and emotions that tempt us not to.

Trust Him when your experience says to only trust in yourself and the mistakes of the past.

The past can be a great barrier to obedience. If something was tried in the past and didn’t work then there is a very strong urge to believe that it won’t in the future. To make sense of the world around us we have to generalise in some way and we can decide that a present situation is exactly the same as a previous one and that as a result it will turn out exactly the same.

Being obedient to God, however, means going against this. Firstly things aren’t exactly the same but secondly God is able to make things turn out in different ways. Sometimes it’s just a matter of timing. Experiences from the past are there to be learnt from, but it’s only God that is shaping our future.

(Postal Cricket Update... got 5 items of mail today so that makes the score 16-0)