More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 4 - October 28, 2025
In my own life, I have come to the settled conviction that the pursuit of God leads to intimacy with Him, intimacy leads to trust, trust produces peace, and peace leads to unassailable joy.
The strongest remedy, the surest balm, and the most comforting pillow God provides for the despairing and anxious is the revelation of His own nature.
Have you ever realized that your every worry is an invitation to draw closer to God? That every anxiety in your life compels you to direct your gaze to someplace or someone? One of the primary purposes of trials in our lives is to wean us from this world and strip us of earthly hope so that we would cling to the hope and strength that can only come from God (James 1:2-4). Remarkably, for those who set their minds and fix their gaze on God, He provides His children with what our hearts are searching for—peace.
When I doubt His love, I foolishly live as if I could do anything to deserve His love (which leads to anxiety because of my constant failures and sin).
In both the Old and New Testaments, God responded to those who were anxious by mounting the divine pulpit and preaching a sermon on His own character. Who He is, is the antidote to our worries and fears.
my consistent and persistent exposure to God’s Word is the catalyst to the cemented conviction of His care.
But it must be understood that trusting God is possible only if we know what He is like and saturate our minds with the truth of why we should trust Him. Faith is not a blind jump, it’s a reasoned response to the truth of who God is.
When we pool our anxieties rather than channel them toward God, we live as functional atheists. We may claim to believe in God, but when our hearts are weighed down by cares and concerns to the degree that we become anxious about them, Jesus said we are living exactly as the Gentiles, who didn’t know God at all (Matthew 6:32).
Your stability amid the storms of life is in direct proportion to the degree that your mind is fixed on God (Colossians 3:1).
All our needs are known and numbered by our good Father who cares more about our needs than we do. Augustine said, “God is more anxious to bestow his blessings on us than we are to receive them.”6 We do not have a Father who is indifferent to our needs; we have a Father who knows them and promises to meet our every need in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:19).
The truth of God’s omniscience details that there is no area of your life where God cannot say, “My child, though no one else in the world knows, I know. I know exactly what you are passing through.”
When we walk in the dark and when tears fall down our faces, the testimony of Scripture is that God catches every falling tear in His bottle and He writes them down in his book (Psalm 56:8).
Lord, help me to believe You are sovereign and loving and have the power to redeem all my pain and brokenness and that You have a perfect plan for Your glory and my good.
In her book Grace Grows Best in Winter, Margaret Clarkson wrote these words: The sovereignty of God is the one impregnable rock to which the suffering human heart must cling. The circumstances surrounding our lives are no accident; they may be the work of evil, but that evil is held firmly within the mighty hand of our sovereign God. . . . All evil is subject to Him, and evil cannot touch His children unless He permits it. God is the Lord of human history and of the personal history of every member of His redeemed family.6
“We set ourselves to believe in the overruling goodness, providence, and sovereignty of God and refuse to turn aside no matter what may come, no matter how we feel.”
Suffering is not the checkmate to God’s sovereignty but rather a piece in the grandmaster’s hands. The pawn can have hope and live by faith, knowing that, in the end, there is a plan behind the problems we face.
Maybe this is discomforting to you to hear that God is sovereign even over suffering, but let me tell you this: there is no comfort in suffering unless God is sovereign over it.
God never allows any evil to take place that does not facilitate a greater good that could not have happened unless that evil had taken place.”
bare and glib expressions do not help us unless we know that the One who is sovereign over our suffering also holds our tears in a bottle (Psalm 56:8), knows our names (Isaiah 43:1), loves us immensely (Romans 5:8), and has a plan that is for His glory and our eternal good (Romans 8:28).12
Therefore, in examining God’s sovereignty, we cannot divorce this attribute of God from His wisdom—or His goodness.
Moreover, in tethering God’s sovereignty to His love, we find comfort and peace in the fact that God will never exercise His sovereignty outside of His personal care for us.
Our Father knows the worst about us, and He loves us the most.
His infinite love is extended toward His children individually so that they might be satisfied by His love “all our days” (Psalm 90:14).
Isaiah 49:15–16 says, “Can a woman forget her nursing child and have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you. Behold, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands.”
Therefore, worry is an insult both to God’s sovereignty and to His love. When we worry, we say, Father, You do not really love me, and You are not really in control. Set your mind and fix your gaze on this reality: I am loved by my heavenly Father.
Right now, God views you as righteous, not because of the righteousness you produce, but because of the righteousness you possess in Christ Jesus.
At this point you may be wondering: If God loves me so much, why do I experience so much pain, affliction, and despair? The answer is simple, yet not always easy to swallow—God loves to transform those whom He loves. God bids us to come to Him as we are, but He loves us too much to let us remain the same. Every ounce of affliction and pain in our lives is superintended and sovereignly orchestrated by a God who has a plan for His glory and for our transformation into the image of His Son.
In the sixteenth century, Mary, Queen of Scots, said this of one Scottish minister: “I fear John Knox’s prayer more than an army of ten thousand men.”
And, scripturally speaking, your mind is the sum of your prayer life.
Adoration tunes our hearts to God’s glory, power, and authority, and if we miss this crucial element of prayer, our petitions will lack perspective of who we are praying to, and, consequently, our worries will not be wiped away no matter how hard we plead.
One of the reasons we are prone to worry is that we are often so ungrateful. And because our lives are short on praise, they are short on peace.
thankless hearts produce anxious minds.
When we worry, we are saying, Father, You are not sovereign. Father, You are not wise. Father, You are not loving. Father, You do not care for me.
He could have ordered my life otherwise, but he has not chosen to do so. As his child, I must trust his love and wisdom.”
I’m also thankful and I rest in the reality that although I love my daughter immensely, my heavenly Father loves her more than I ever could. She belongs to Him far more than she belongs to me. There is indeed a unique peace that “surpasses all understanding” that gilds my own heart when I cast all my anxieties onto the Lord
God’s commandments are His enablings.1 Therefore, joy in pain and affliction is not only possible, but it is a promised fruit for all who walk in the Spirit (Galatians 5:22).
Christian joy is not something we can manufacture; it is produced in us by the Spirit of God even amid great suffering and pain. Unlike happiness, joy is grounded in our faith and the changeless character of our heavenly Father.
To rejoice in great sorrow is easier said than done; however, because it is a command in Scripture, we can know with certainty that it is possible for us to obey. Why? Because, once again, God’s commands are His enablings.
Joy is the proper response to the character of our heavenly Father. Because I know that my God is sovereign, wise, loving, and all powerful, and He is determined to bless me as His child, I possess a deep-seated confidence, not only in His control, but in His plan. Knowing
Know this: whenever you lose sight of heaven in your thinking, you can be sure you will lose joy in your heart.
