Sometimes it’s hard to pray. Sometimes it feels like you’re repeating words, not talking to a person. From this we may even wonder if our faith is weak.
When that happens, what are we forgetting? What is missing?
Jesus once said, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”
Do you know that feeling? When the work energizes rather than depletes you? There are days like this. But there are other kinds of days too, when the words of the old carol feel so true:
And ye, beneath life’s crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow…
It was just a trailer for a video game. But to me it was something more. The music came from one of my favorite pieces ever. The visuals and narration portrayed the striving of humanity to better itself.
The striking last lines of the video:
“There’s no end to our imagination and no limit to civilization.”
It’s a compelling vision for humanity. It’s also incomplete. The story of mankind needs a hero, and that hero can only be God himself.
A. W. Tozer said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
Our worship of God comes from our understanding of who He is. And where does our understanding come from? From spending time absorbing what He has told us about Himself: absorbing Scripture. Absorbing—not merely reading. We need God’s Word inside us!
For the good, the bad, and the uncomfortable, go to the Old Testament. Because it’s largely a narrative, the Old Testament shows cause and effect—of every kind. You can trust it to tell the juicy parts.
I want to show you some match-ups I discovered. It’s a set of revealing comparisons of those who got it right and those who didn’t.
1. Why holiness matters.
2. How people become holy.
I’ll share these principles at the end. But see if you can find them yourself in the following comparisons:
