For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (Ephesians 2:10, NIV)
I have had a chance to play several new courses in the past few days. Courses I have never seen before. It’s fun and challenging because I can’t rely on my previous experience to guide me to the right shot. I have to try to assess the new situation and come up with some kind of shot that fits what I see now. It’s definitely harder and my scores are usually higher, but it is exhilarating to test my game against something unfamiliar.
I suspect that this same concept is part of God’s plan for our spiritual growth. He starts us out on simple concepts and uses simple tests of our faith in the beginning.
As we grow to manage our faith in the face of these small challenges, he gradually moves us to a little harder situation which will require more faith and more obedience. We can chafe at the unsettled feelings we have in new situations, or we can embrace the challenge and allow God to use it to enlarge our faith.
The other kind of life is one where we take the risk to truly follow Jesus wherever he leads us. Our verse for today says that we are God’s workmanship. We are a work in progress every day of our life. To grow, we must allow God to test us and challenge what we have become familiar with. Most of us don’t like change all that much. But if we find ourselves in a new and challenging situation we can know, if we are trusting in our Creator, that we are not there by accident. God has laid out plans for us from the very beginning. In fact, he did this well in advance of your arrival to the place you are now.
We have two choices about how we choose to live. We can stay on our same safe course and know every shot we might have to hit, or we can take a risk and play a new course that will challenge us in untold new ways. One kind of life is safe and stable and has a limitation on how much we can grow. The other kind of life is one where we take the risk to truly follow Jesus wherever he leads us. That life is one that can unlock our true potential and maximize what we can accomplish as we work alongside our Creator to accomplish his purposes for us personally and for the world at large.
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Linda Ballard
May 2, 2019
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The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.
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