With Man...With God...

March 19

We must become the change we wish to see in the world. - Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

Gandhi makes an important point. We don't have the power to change the world. We can't change our political system, we can't change our nation's destiny. We can't change what's happened in the past. We can't change what will transpire in the future. We hardly have control over what will happen two minutes from now. The one thing we can begin to influence toward a desired change is ourselves, although often, we don't seem able to affect even our own heart-set or our own mind-set.

The above-stated observation is particularly true if we have allowed ourselves to become prisoners of our own thinking (Proverbs 23:7). If we have allowed ourselves to become negative in our perceptions of who we are and what our future is, we can be incarcerated within our own tormented outlook as to what our future holds. The world around us impacts us negatively—from the devastation caused from renegade storms or the threatenings of renegade nations or the aspirations of violent men who yearn for total conquest of the world, to our own personal storms—so we have every reason to be depressed.

We have every reason to allow ourselves to plummet further and further into a sense of inadequacy and hopelessness; to allow ourselves to spiral further and further into a sense of our own worthlessness—UNTIL we remind ourselves that the Author of the universe, the One who created all that exists by the word of His mouth, the One who laid His deity aside to become a man has paid an enormous price in order to save us from our foibles, failures and sins! Jesus did it all to deliver us from people and circumstances that can precipitate our downfall; He came to deliver us from even our ‘self,’ I Timothy 1:15.

Jesus paid it all for me; He paid it all for you. The realization of that one amazing truth should negate the effect of any negative world event, any personal conflict, or any negative inner perception we have of ourselves! I am not an orphan child whose mother died too soon, whose father rejected him, whose so-called friend claimed, "I can destroy you." NO! I am the child of the KING of kings and LORD of lords! I have value in HIS eyes! I am treasured so much that HE DIED FOR ME!

YOU ARE "PRECIOUS IN THE BELOVED." You, if you will change your perception of yourself, will discover that in appropriating what JESUS thinks of you unto your self-hood, in allowing the love of the Almighty to over-ride the disdain of mere men who would make themselves to be lord over you, you will become who the LORD ordained you to be from the foundation of the earth! You will be pure and free and alive and filled with hope in your own perception of yourself!

Let today be the first day of the change YOU make in WHO YOU ARE IN YOUR OWN EYES—and in so doing, you will set the course of your future on a bright and hopeful path of light and truth and joy and love. The Lord who loves you will affirm your hopeful expectations, for He has ways beyond yours to establish the good things you claim for yourself when you allow your mind to latch onto the HOPE YOU HAVE IN CHRIST! Remember, “With man it is impossible, but with God, all things are possible,” Matthew 19:26.