PEACE FOR THE RAGGED TIMES IN YOUR LIFE

My old dad used to say that if you were to gather twenty people together in a room and ask them to put their problems in the middle of a big table, there’d be an awful mad scramble for each of them to get their own problems back again. I’ve often wondered if he was right; I suspect he was.

Few there are who have no problems, and these are particularly trying times, but the odd thing about problems is that they can almost always be defined as a fear of something that might or might not happen. And the odder thing is that even if the thing you fear actually does happen, it’s rarely as bad as you expected. That’s because we have a greater capacity to deal with calamity than we have to deal with uncertainty. Therefore, the trick is to live one day at a time. Easier said than done I know, but when I think of some of the ragged times in my life, I don’t think I’d have survived had I looked beyond today.

There’s a couple of sentences in the Sermon on the Mount that hold a useful key. Jesus said, ‘…don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries’.

Now he wasn’t saying that trouble will be delivered to your doorstep every day, but he went on to say that when such a parcel arrives, there’s always a second parcel that comes with it; the strength and grace to deal with the first one. However, when we run down the road looking for trouble, when we worry about the future, about things that might never happen; as we are prone to do, that’s when we become fearful, stressed and anxious, for there is no provision today for tomorrow’s troubles.

One of the most influential Christian leaders I ever had the privilege of knowing was the late Derek Prince. He authored over fifty books, recorded at least 400 audio teaching sermons and it was said that at one point his voice could be heard by half the world’s population as each week he broadcast his Bible teaching programmes. And yet I remember the Sunday morning when someone asked him to compress his life’s work and beliefs into a single sentence. He said he could reduce it all down to three words; ‘God is faithful’.

Most of us know deep down that God is faithful, and yet we struggle to trust him, we become anxious, up-tight and irritable, sometimes we feel we’re at the end of our tether and the last thing in the world we want is more words. Well maybe, but I can tell you that when my life was disappearing down the plughole a decade ago, it was these words from Philippians 4 that rescued me; ‘Let petitions and praises shape your worries into prayers, let God know your concerns, and before you know it, a sense of God's wholeness, everything coming together for good, will come and settle you down. It's wonderful what happens when Christ displaces worry at the centre of your life’.