Relying on God




The longing and craving of our lives seeking to find peace and happiness on our own is a basic response that’s common to all mankind. Over time even we as believers in the Lord Jesus can experience this same built-in sense of self-centeredness. Instead of relying on God, we then predictably begin (again) to depend on our own strength and resources.
Then He said to them all, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me. Luke 9:23
When faced with the decision to (boldly) commit to the lordship of Christ Jesus, we tend to measure what is required against those life-long inclinations that have been sown into our lives up to that point and time. Today’s culture and even friends and well-meaning relatives may “get in the way” of any one of us making that right decision. Throw the devil in the mix and you have a formidable foe! However we possess a powerful resource the world cannot understand. 1 John 4:4-6 says:
You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are of the world. Therefore they speak as of the world, and the world hears them. We are of God. He who knows God hears us; he who is not of God does not hear us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

HIS PROMISE
Delight yourself also in the LORD, And He shall give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to the LORD, Trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass. He shall bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday. Psalm 37:4-6

HIS PROVISION
Jesus fills-up my life with His very essence--He quickens my steps to the heartbeat of His Love for others--He extends my borders to the stretching point of all I am in Him.

MY RESPONSE
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. Romans 12:1
In order to be what all Jesus desires me to be I must present all that I am before Him, not just as one who has “died” to self, but as His prize possession for whom He gave His life. By doing this I make myself a living sacrifice ready to experience what the book of Hebrews in chapter 10 calls that “…new and living way…”
Therefore by Him let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to His name. But do not forget to do good and to share, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased. Hebrews 13:15, 16

MY COMMITMENT
Father God, now having committed to the lordship of Christ Jesus, I desire to feed daily on your Living Word. I cast down the strongholds of guilt and condemnation. I turn away from a life