Depending on God: "to be raised from the dead"
2 Corinthians 1:9 “Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.”
I find myself at a place today of despair and don’t really know why; I have been in the kind of ….feeling down, desperate, nothing going right, where is God, am I being obedient, what is going wrong,….kind of state for the past few days. To be quite honest I’m not exactly sure where this has come from except that about a week ago I read a devotional by St. John of the Cross where he challenged the temptation to make our devotional life an idol and urged his reader to take a week off. I did this and I sit here today feeling completely disconnected and desperate. The feeling of death, doubt, and failure are all around me. However, in my reading today I came across this verse and it has given me a ray of hope. It reminded me that whenever I depend upon myself it will always lead to the feeling of desperation and death. This means that my negative feelings today must be coming from me trying to rely upon myself. It also tells me that God specializes in raising the dead and if I will rely on God, He will bring me back to life; He will rescue me from the feeling of death and desperation. In the midst of my despair today I see a ray of hope and I am relying on that hope with all that I am because it will only be by God’s grace that my desperation can be transformed into life.
Lord, I thank you for this scripture today and in some strange way I thank you for my despair, doubt, and fear because it has helped me to see that I can only experience peace by relying on you. If I rely on myself it will only lead to this feeling of emptiness. Give me the grace today to rely on you, to allow you to direct my life. May your grace be the chief actor in my life today and may you bring me back to life through your grace. Help me let go of my fear that you are using my fear to teach me a lesson; prevent the evil that is in me from having the last say. Kill the evil inside of me and replace it with your grace; may your life in me be the most powerful force in my life. Amen!!!
Today, I chose to rely on God and in relying on God I have faith that I will experience being raised from the dead.
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