Trading on Yesterday
Soul Snack 176/14 ... The morning arrives, you blink through bleary eyes towards the curtains and clumsily your feet hit the floor. Stumbling down a darkened hallway (for it is pre-dawn) your mind struggles to plan the next few moments, maybe even the ensuing sixty minutes, until you slide behind a steering wheel to head out for another repetitive day.
During the wearisome moments of waking a voice whispers:
you read your Bible last week, whispered prayers from the pillow as you dozed off last night; you know the Bible, in fact you have known it for a long time - no need to read it again today. You are ok - there's nothing new there or more important than your tasks today!
The temptation persists within each believer to trade on yesterday's spiritual journeys, and return to these now beaten paths. But this is not spiritual progress or the drinking of living water - rather the peering into now stale water; it is not to master the soul.
Yesterday you drank milk, today you need meat.
Yesterday you grazed upon fresh new pastures, today you need green hillsides.
Pastors trade on yesterday when they reproduce sermons, copy another's, become too busy for devotions, or are too tired to bend the knee.
We have learned to trade upon yesterday's spiritual success and so rob us of today's.
There are none exempt from these spiritual siestas; lazy dalliances upon the past. They are both unhealthy and dangerous.
Beaten paths are for beaten people. (Anonymous)
There are spiritual fields in all lives that should now remain fallow. The work of the believer is to not turn back or re-plow, but seek the new season and the fresh grain. Lift the cup filled from moving (living) streams and raise Jesus' chalice of new wine to the lips.
Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, instruction about cleansing rites, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And God permitting, we will do so (Hebrews 6:1-3)
Refuse to settle for what was when you can have what will be.
Today's Soul Snippet:
"The only power that God yields to is that of prayer." ~ Leonard Ravenhill
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