"Now it came to pass after these things that God tested Abraham, and
said to him, 'Abraham!' And he said, 'Here I am.' Then He said,
'Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to
the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one
of the mountains of which I shall tell you'" (Genesis 22:1,2).

There is no such thing as living a human life without being tested.
Every decision that any of us makes is a test, from the little
choices all the way up to the major decisions. When the road forks
and one path or the other must be chosen, we are in each instance
being asked what kind of character we have. If we make our choice on
the basis of which path is easiest or most personally satisfactory,
we will indicate that our character is of one sort. If, on the other
hand, we choose the path that we judge to be the most honorable and
the most pleasing to God, we will indicate that we have another kind
of character. As life moves along and our decisions begin to
multiply, it becomes more and more obvious what kind of "stuff"
we're made of. When the end comes and we stand before our Maker for
His judgment, the evidence will be irrefutable. We will have chosen
our own destiny.

Do we understand what a "crisis" is? Our English word comes from the
Greek verb krinein, which meant to separate, to decide between, or
to judge. A crisis, then, a situation in which a crucial decision
must be made. It is a turning point, a pivotal circumstance in which
we have to make a choice. Abraham faced such a crisis when God
called on him to choose whether he would or would not comply with
His instruction to give up Isaac, his only son. In making the choice
that he did, Abraham showed himself to be a man of faith and godly
integrity (Hebrews 11:17-19).

In every human life there eventually comes an ultimate crisis, some
single test larger than all the others combined. This fact should
not frighten us. It should move us to work on our character a little
bit each day, building strength by "practicing" the discipline of
good decision-making. The most foolish fellow in the world is the
one who supposes that he can waste the little decisions and still
pass the big test when it comes.

"So we will be brought one by one to the testing place, and we may
never know when we are there. At that testing place there will be no
dozen possible choices for us -- just one and an alternative -- but
our whole future will be conditioned by the choice we make.
May God bless you all

September 17: When We Lose What We Were Made For

"Do not hide Your face from me;
do not turn Your servant away in anger;
You have been my help; do not leave me nor forsake me, O God of my
salvation" (Psalm 27:9).

As personal beings, we were created for fellowship both with our
Creator and with other persons, and the loss of that fellowship as a
result of sin is a most grievous loss indeed. When we lose the very
thing that we were made for, we suffer a void that can't be filled
with any lesser fulfillment. There is no honest way to deny that we
hurt. We've been cut off from a contact and a communion that are
essential to our nature.

Our need for deep, significant relationship to God and to other
personal beings is so profound that we ourselves do not fully
understand it. We sense that we need to be connected in some way to
other personal beings, including God, and we suffer pain when our
connections fall short of happiness. But we find it hard to
articulate the loneliness that we feel. As finite creatures broken
by sin, we hurt and we don't even have the ability to understand how
deeply we hurt. Our need for personal relationship is deeper than we
ourselves can fathom.

But our pain does not come from simply being alone. It comes from
being left alone. Following the murder of his brother, Cain was to
be sent into lonely lands to live by himself. As God pronounced his
sentence, Cain cried: "Surely You have driven me out this day from
the face of the ground; I shall be hidden from Your face; I shall be
a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth, and it will happen that
anyone who finds me will kill me" (Genesis 4:14). Can any of us say
that we've never feared what Cain feared?

Having been created for personal relationship, there can be no
greater agony than to know that we, like Cain, have lost this thing
that is so essential to us. Because of our own choices, those whom
we need to be connected to, especially God, have turned their backs
to us -- and not without justification. We are not only alone, we
are alone because we've been abandoned. And we've not only been
abandoned, we've been abandoned because of our own misdeeds. Thus,
it is the triple combination of loneliness, regret, and rejection
that twists our hearts into such sorrowful shapes.

"Over the years I've come to realize that my greatest fear in life
is a dread of a certain kind of solitude, of abandonment"
May God Bless you,allllll