Go To Hope!

Bloganuary writing promptWhat do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?View all responses

Leisure time is a great opportunity to divert your focus away from stress, anxiety, hopelessness, and despair. There are so many enjoyable activities that can be diversions from the inner pain we carry day by day. However, I’ve discovered that it’s important that I avoid diversions that cause me to feel guilty, because even though they give some short-term relief, they add to my long-term stress and despair and can easily become addictions that control my life. However:

When I fix my sight
On God’s insight
My heart overflows
With great delight
And fear takes flight.

Drinking old wine spoils the taste of new wine and causes people to say, “The old is better.” But is it? Taste can be deceptive. Here’s some insight into how a strange activity, fasting, can actually lead to joy.

Perhaps fasting helps us go beyond routine religion and to acquire a taste for the Spirit’s new wine. When we deny ourselves food so we can focus intently on praying and seeking God, we realize that the old wine of religion and tradition offers little comfort during our body’s desperate cry for food. Routine religion’s lack of supernatural power and life-changing comfort may be why present-day believers in affluent countries struggle so much with moderate, healthy eating.

When it comes to our appetite for food, it’s just us and Jesus. The act of fasting makes us desperate for His presence and supernatural comfort, so if we stick with it, we begin to cry out in prayer like never before. We realize, “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick,” (verse 31) and that because we are not yet fully aligned with God, we are still battling spiritual sickness. We become aware that Jesus in His love for us is calling us to ongoing repentance (verse 32) and to always seek first His kingdom and His righteousness.

When that realization and desperation burns in our heart it causes us to more deeply surrender to the risen Jesus. Then we more fully receive and embrace God’s Spirit living and working inside of us — changing us from glory to glory and giving us an overwhelming hunger and thirst for the righteousness of Christ’s new wine.

Step out in faith.
Go to hope.
Show love.
“Christ in you,
The hope of glory.”

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