Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: October 22nd

HOW TO OBEY AN APPARENTLY IMPOSSIBLE INJUNCTION

In nothing be anxious; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. - Philippians 4:6

Paul here directs to the mode of feeling and action which will give exemption from the else inevitable gnawing of anxious forethought. He introduces his positive counsel with an eloquent " But," which implies that what follows is the sure preservative against the temper which he deprecates. " But in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God."

There are, then, these alternatives. If you do not like to take the one, you are sure to have to take the other. There is only one way out of the wood, and it is this which Paul expands in these last words. If a man does not pray about everything, he will be worried and anxious about most things. If he does pray about everything, he will not be troubled, beyond what is good for him, about anything. So there are these alternatives; and we have to make up our minds which of the two we are going to take. The heart is never empty. If not full of God, it will be full of the world and of worldly care. Luther says somewhere that a man’s heart is like a couple of millstones; if you do not put something between them to grind, they will grind each other. It is because God is not in our hearts that the two stones rub the surface off one another So the victorious antagonist of anxiety is trust, and the only way to turn gnawing care out of my heart and life is to usher God into it. and to keep Him resolutely in it.

"In everything." If a thing is great enough to threaten to make me anxious, it is great enough for me to talk to God about. If He and I are on a friendly footing, the instinct of friendship will make me speak. If so, how irrelevant and superficial seem to be discussions whether we ought to pray about worldly things or confine our prayers entirely to spiritual and religious matters! Why! if God and I are on terms of friendship and intimacy of communication, there will be no question as to what I am to talk about to Him; I shall not be able to keep silent as to anything that interests me. And we are not right with God unless we have come to that point. That entire openness of speech marks our communications with Him; and that as naturally as men, when they come from business, like to tell their wives and children what has happened to them since they left home in the morning, so naturally we talk to our friend about everything that concerns us. " In everything let your requests be made known unto God." That is the wise course, because a multitude of little pimples may be quite as painful and dangerous as a large ulcer. A cloud of gnats may put as much poison into a man with their many stings as will a snake with its one bite. And if we are not to get help from God by telling Him about little things, there will be very little of our lives that we shall tell Him about at all. For life is a mountain made up of minute flakes. The years are only a collection of seconds. Every man’s life is an aggregate of trifles. "In everything make your requests known."