Nothing is more important for the Christian than becoming fully persuaded that God does indeed lead his children on their journey from earth to heaven. If you doubt that fact, you will struggle through life feeling as if every major decision rests solely on your shoulders. What a difference it makes to know with great conviction that behind your life stands the unseen hand of God working in, through, and sometimes in spite of your decisions to accomplish his will in your life. If reading this sermon does nothing else, I hope it builds your confidence in God.
This very week as you come to that moment when you must decide to go one way or the other, you can have confidence that God (though perhaps unseen and unheard and not traced by the five senses) is leading you in exactly the direction he wants you to go.
Perhaps you’ve read these famous lines by James Russell Lowell. They describe life in a fallen world where values have been turned upside down:
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And behind the dim unknown
Standeth God with the shadows,
Keeping watch above his own.
The last line contains the heart of the Christian philosophy of history. God stands “within the shadows, keeping watch above his own.” When the world seems most out of control, God steps in to let us know that he keeps watch over us. Often it is only as we look back that we see the hand of God working through the affairs of life.
When you trust and decide that you will let God drive, there is a natural rest that will occur. Imagine a woman who is trying to wrestle the driver’s wheel away from her husband. Now imagine a woman who is sitting in the passenger’s seat allowing her husband to drive without complaining, correcting or cursing. Which one do you think is experiencing rest? The one who trusts and is sitting in the passenger’s seat, of course. She is enjoying the scenery. She is not fretting about how her husband will get her where she needs to go. She is just relaxing and resting while she is enjoying her frozen mocha from Starbucks.
But, the other woman doesn’t have time to enjoy a thing because she is too busy trying to be in control. But if she would only choose to trust, she could rest, too.
Which woman will you be like?
Keep Believing!