Wednesday, March 20, 2013
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Honestly, snowball fights have always been a mismatch in our family. When our boys were little, they didn't stand a chance. Then they got bigger than I am; now I don't stand a chance. Actually, snowballs are fun unless you get too many of them. If you put thousands of snowballs together and roll them down a mountain, you've got an avalanche. That's not fun.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Snowballs...or Avalanches."
Our word for today from the Word of God is in Matthew chapter 6, and I'm going to begin reading at verse 33. It's familiar territory. "But seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."
Jesus is giving some very practical advice here about how to handle life's burdens. He says, "Take your troubles in 24-hour chunks." Just the other day, I was trying to do it the way most of us do it a lot of the time. I found myself adding up all my responsibilities, all the deadlines, all the pressures of the next 30 days, looking at this monster To Do List, and I said, "There is no way I can get all this done! I can't meet all these expectations. I can't begin to address all these problems." I started to panic, and that usually leads to paralysis. It was going to be the Mission Impossible month. Well, you know, I'm running in panic because I see an avalanche. But the fact was I didn't have to do those 30 days on that day that I was doing all the worrying about all those days. I could only do one day that day.
That's what Jesus is saying, "Don't try to do tomorrow today; carry tomorrow's load today. Don't do that! You carry each day's load on a daily basis," because the Bible says that that's how you "take up your cross" daily. All I had to do was to have one good day. Make as much progress as possible, and then trust God for the undone to crown Him Lord of the undone. You trust God that He will take 30 days like that, bless it, multiply it, and make up the difference for your inadequacies, and some of those problems solve before you get to them. Miraculously make the time you have enough. That's happened to me more times than I can count, and I have to keep learning this lesson over and over again. Even telling you about it helps me to hear it again.
Today is a snowball. You can handle a snowball coming at you. It's just that when you put many of those snowballs together and try to deal with them all at once, you're going to be trying to deal with an avalanche. That's not how God made you. He gives us strength for one day at a time. I know that from Deuteronomy 33:25. It says, "He will give you strength equal to your day." And there's a wonderful promise in the book of Zephaniah that says, "Every new day He does not fail." Maybe you're being paralyzed right now by all the "might's" and the "could's" and the "what if's". You're trying to handle a week, or a month, or a year today and you're melting down.
Relax! In God's word He promised that He will make sure that all these things will be given to you as well. He's in that process. He's already out there in the future getting it ready. Don't you try to deal with it. You work on today's snowball, and then you won't have to be buried in an avalanche.