Cheer Up
Psalms 100:2: Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.
There seem to be four commands here. Serving the Lord, being glad, coming before His presence and singing. If we are serving Him without gladness, without coming before His presence or without singing we are doing it wrong.
Nehemiah 8:10: Then he said unto them, Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared: for this day is holy unto our Lord: neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the LORD is your strength.
If we serve the Lord without joy we are weak Christians.
This devotional was written by George Whitten of Worthy Notes. on Romans 8:28: And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
In her book, Let Me Be a Woman, Elizabeth Elliot records the story of a friend who had great difficulty accepting the looks God had given her. While everyone this girl knew had grown beautiful golden hair, hers was black. And while they were all still growing, she had stopped. She grew to be only about four feet ten inches tall.
Eventually, she reached the country to which God had called her to be a missionary. One day, she stood on the wharf in Shanghai and looked around at the people to whom He had called her. *Every single one of them,* she said, *had black hair. And every one of them had stopped growing when I did.* She was able to look to God and exclaim, *Lord God, You know what You*re doing!*
Are you struggling with something specific today? Have you been asking, *Why Lord?!* Whether we realize it or not, God knows what He*s doing! We may not understand it today -- but He has known these things from the very beginning. And He really is carrying out His great plan in us! Cheer up! God is preparing His vessels for GREAT things!
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