Day 92 - Issue 42
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Psalm 108:1-2 92
'My heart is confident in you, O God; no wonder I can sing your praises with all my heart! Wake up, lyre and harp! I will wake the dawn with my song.'
Isn’t it wonderful when you can say that you have total confidence in someone? Perhaps it’s your doctor or dentist, a plumber or a friend that, without hesitation, you could recommend to anyone. You know that they would never let you down. But the reality, of course, is that they are human. However wonderful they might be, they could become sick and, just occasionally, they may forget. You cannot be 100 per cent certain that they will always be reliable. However, our confidence in God is wonderfully different. The psalmist was so confident of God that he burst into song! He knew that God would never let anyone down and so he grabbed every instrument in sight and decided to wake up the day with his song.
Martin Luther was a man who showed his confidence in God by courageously standing up against the Church authorities of his time. It would have been so much easier to have kept quiet, but he could not. At the time, it was said that if someone bought an indulgence to support the rebuilding of St Paul’s Basilica in Rome, their sins would be forgiven. Luther would have none of it. The idea was abhorrent to him. He knew that God graciously forgave all those who came to him by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ alone.
He wrote: “Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that the believer would stake his life on it a thousand times.”
The apostle Paul often spoke of his total confidence in God. That was why he was willing to take such extreme risks
in his ministry. He wrote to the church in Rome: “I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow – not even the power of hell can separate us from God’s love” (Romans 8:38).
If we are to stand strongly for God in a society which largely rejects him, we too need to have total confidence in him. The psalmist and Paul would encourage us to have just that.
Question: Do you have total confidence in God? If not, how could you grow in confidence?
Prayer: Lord God our Father, I thank you that I can be certain of your love and goodness for time and eternity. Amen
Released on 8 Oct 2022
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