Daily Devotional for Saturday February 9, 2019

Never lose sight of the fact that God is in control!!!

(Psalms 83:18)

***DAILY PERSONAL PRAYER FOR YOU: Dear Lord, please help me today to be an active member of Your body. I pray each day that I will be yielded to You and Your will for my life. Let me remove all that is in my life keeping me from being the best servant I can possibly for You and Your Kingdom. I love You Lord, and let my love be expressed in my daily life as I serve You. In the name of Jesus I pray…AMEN!!!

As much as we know this to be true, we live so much of our lives forgetting this basic fact, God is in control. We plan our days, we take care of our business at work or school, we shop, we do all those things a person does in the course of a normal day. Because we decide to do this or that, we sometimes get a false sense of security that we are in total control of our lives.

Successful people are most susceptible to this erroneous thought process. They spend their days" producing" results, seeing things happen, and shaping events to the extent they get a real sense that they have total control. But then, normally in a very subtle way, God nudges us and gently reminds us that it is not us but only Him that is in complete control.

Yesterday morning, I arrived at my office at a little after 5 a.m. as I do every day. In prayer as I drove in, the Lord and I had a planning meeting on what that day's Devotional would be about. As I opened the door to my office, I smelled a strange odor like something was burning. This concerned me, of course, so I started to look around the office to see what the problem was. After a little investigative work, I soon realized that the power supply in my CPU had burned up sometime during the night. It was dead.

Of course, the natural reaction was one of panic. I quickly became very concerned that the hard drive may have been affected. All kinds of thoughts were running through my head. I had a very full day scheduled and part of the reason I get in so early is to write the Devotional, answer 90-100 emails that I feel require my personal response, and several other things before the real day begins at 9 a.m.

This was not good . . . potential loss of all of the important information on my hard drive (the last back-up I did was over a week ago) . . . this was a day that was now going to be totally upside down. I was not very happy.

Then it hit me. As much as I know it to be true, I often forget who is really in charge, who is really in control. Rather than worry about the problem that was before me, I took the next 30 minutes and spent that time in prayer. Recommitting myself that day to the Lord and what HE wanted to accomplish. I recommitted the work of Liveprayer to the Lord and asked Him to have HIS perfect way over our efforts every day.

Now I realize that a burned-out power source on a CPU is not a major catastrophe. But the point is it greatly altered my daily routine. It was a totally unexpected event that changed all my plans for that day. Most of all though, it was a gentle nudge from the God who created the Universe to never forget He is in charge.

I love you and care about you so much. My prayer today is that you never lose sight of the fact that God is in control . . . total 100% complete control. We must never get so comfortable in our daily lives or routines to forget that fact. From time to time, events will occur in our life, some minor, some major to remind us of that fact.

The prayer we need to never have far from our lips is the same prayer Jesus prayed in the Garden just hours before He faced death on the cross, "NOT MY WILL BUT THY WILL BE DONE." Make that your prayer each morning as you awake. Remember, it is not our life any longer, it belongs to Him.

In His love and service,

Your friend, brother, and co-laborer in Christ,

Bill Keller