What If The Great Crisis Has Passed?

As we begin the new school year, we cling to a lot of fears for the remainder of our mortal lives. But, what if the great crisis of this life has already passed? Suppose just for a moment that the crisis that may have led to your first profession of faith in the saving grace of Christ was the one great crisis of your life. From that point on, God had only small trials of the sort that are completely under His sovereign control. You have no more worries for this life. You have only one real problem: no one bothered to tell you that the great crisis would be the last one. So, in the fear of the flesh you continue to fret and worry over that next great crisis that is surely on the horizon. When the flesh is quiet, the forces of the Adversary rise up to fling their darts of anxiety and stress toward you. When God is silent for a moment, you reach out to grab these darts as though a dreadful message was somehow better than none at all. Do you yearn for the next great crisis to prove that God can save you one more time?

All of us may recognize a bit of that in ourselves. All of the trials we will face in this life are under God's sovereign control, just as the first great crisis in life was so long ago. We are to live without fear and worry as we walk daily with our Savior, but we reach out for worries and grasp them to our breast as though manufacturing a new crisis will bring God closer to us. The methods for drawing closer to God are prayer, praise, love and many others as we grow in the Spirit. If a child went out and broke an arm just to gain your attention, you would seek the help of doctors and child psychologists to cure the problem. But in a spiritual sense, we sometimes do much the same with our Father in Heaven. We perversely want another great crisis to shore up our faith when God responds as we know He will. How about we let God manage the size of the crisis from here on out, and trust in Him for the small problems.

Take time today for a prayer of thanksgiving on this Labor Day!
Bucky