Good morning!
Welcome to your morning coffee! May our Heavenly Father continue to call out to us his peace, his rescue, his closeness. Father, you love us perfectly and with surprising nearness. May we embrace you as you embrace us, love you as you love us, crying out to you and running to you as your children, Father. And as we run, as we cry out to you, may we encourage our brothers and sisters in Christ to do the same. Let us call out to you, Father, with full, desperately dependent trust. Heavenly Father, in the name of your son Jesus, and by the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, help us to trust you by believing your word, and doing it today.
Your Morning Song: "Tethered" by Phil Wickham
Your Morning Scripture: Proverbs 34:17-18
When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears
and delivers them out of all their troubles.
The Lord is near to the brokenhearted
and saves the crushed in spirit.
I wonder sometimes, why we so quickly forget just who God is and how he loves us. We suffer, we struggle, we hurt, and if we were truly children, trusting him, we would run to him and weep and grieve in his arms.
And yet, for some odd reason, we often don't. He is near to our broken hearts. He saves those of us whose spirits are crushed. He is near and hears and delivers. If we would just cry out!
Why do we push him away? Why do refuse to desperately, dependently pray and then question his silence? Why do we accuse him and doubt him and harbor bitterness against him, while he is near to us, hearing us, delivering us, saving us?
God is near and calls out to us through his word, his creation, and his people. And in the depths of our grief and our suffering and our struggles, we so often and so easily push him and our spiritual family away.
It is a matter of trust. Do we trust God to do what he says he will? Are we holding on to our meager, limited control of our situations because we feel foolishly safer that way? Does it scare us to trust that God is who he says he is and will do what he says he will do? Or perhaps the intimacy he offers seems too good to be true, too much to bear. Or maybe we've never fully trusted God to hear us and deliver us and love us in this way. Maybe the idea of opening the gates of our hearts and minds to him sounds terrifying, completely out of our control.
Whatever our reason, if we do not cry out to God, he may still save, still be near, still love, still deliver, but our hearts will remain bitter, barren, and broken, despite what God is doing for us, in us, and through us.
Many of us live this way, embraced by God as his saved children, his Christ-claimed family, but still holding back, still refusing to fully cry out and to return his embrace with desperate dependence.
And so he waits for us and with us, gently repeating his call, ever faithful, ever loving, ever near. May we rest our broken hearts and crushed spirits in his presence, guarded by his peace. And to those of us who have embraced this daily, desperate dependence on our Heavenly Father's mercy, we have brothers and sisters who have not. Let us echo God's call to them, and ourselves draw near to them, and join in God's answering them, delivering them, saving them.
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