Water Your Faith Wednesday (Aug 13)

Hello everyone! Welcome to "Water Your Faith" Wednesday! How do you feel after spending your Sunday at church praising and worshiping our Lord? I know I feel great! I start my week fired up and ready to face what's in store. Oftentimes, however, by Wednesday, life begins to drag me down. My goal is provide a way to overcome the spiritual doldrums with encouraging words, scriptures, devotions, songs, etc. Let me know what you think!

 

My sweet fiance finally hung up some "floating" shelves for me. Since moving from my apartment to my house, I've had a lot of my little knick-knack decorations still in boxes as we painted and arranged furniture just the way we wanted it. Now that we've got all of that stuff done, I've started to go through and empty those boxes. Have any of you ever heard of Willow Tree figurines? I absolutely love them, and as a result, I have a LOT of them. As I was placing some of my figurines and knick-knacks on my floating shelves, I realized that I had placed the Willow Tree figurine called  Hope next to a wooden cross I purchased while on my mission trip in Belize. It created a lovely picture and a beautiful reminder that in Jesus, we have our hope. 

 

Today's devotion, found on Short Daily Devotions, comes from Psalm 130:7, "O Israel, hope in the Lord; For with the Lord there is mercy, And with Him is abundant redemption." (NKJV)

What do you place your hope in? It may be as simple as an upcoming vacation or a date next weekend, but chances are, you’re looking forward to something. But often, the things we place our hope in keep us in an endless cycle of disappointment. What we do is create little saviors to rescue us from whatever we think is wrong in our lives when our hope isn’t first and foremost in the Lord.

If we hate being overweight, the next diet is crafted into our mini-hero. It becomes the mechanism through which we hope to be rescued from our current state. Take it a step further, and consider the dollar. How many of us place our hope in little green pieces of paper and silver coins? Or worse yet, numbers on a screen?

When we place our hope in these little saviors, we doom ourselves to a life of disappointment and idolatry. We submit ourselves to an endless cycle of regret, an existence that constantly cries, “If only!” When our hope is placed in anything less than the perfect God of the universe, we will live in the darkness of dissatisfaction. Follow Jesus into the light of eternal hope.