Today's Devotional

December 10, 2004

Subject:  Is That A Mirage?

Jeremiah 17:5-6 - "This is what the LORD says: Cursed is the person who trusts humans, who makes flesh and blood his strength and whose heart turns away from the LORD.  He will be like a bush in the wilderness. He will not see when something good comes. He will live in the dry places in the desert, in a salty land where no one can live."

A few years back, the Marines had a unit training at 29 Palms, California.  29 Palms is located in the Mojave Desert in California where we do most of our desert warfare training.  During this particular training evolution, a Marine had been posted as a sentry.  When the unit decided to return back to base, they did not remember that he was out there and left without him.  After the unit returned to base and realized that he was missing, they began to search for him, but it was too late.  He had died out in the desert not having enough food and water to sustain him through the days that it took them to find him. 

A desert is a tough place to survive.  Very few things flourish in the desert; more things die there than grow there.  While the literal desert is hard to survive in physically, so too is the spiritual desert that we often find ourselves in.  Like the Marine who died in the physical desert, in our spiritual desert, we stop getting fed and there is no water.   We could be in a spiritual desert when we stop going to church or when we stop fellowshipping with our Christian brothers and sisters.  It could be when we stop reading our word on a regular basis or it could be when we determine in our minds to willfully disobey God. 

However we wind up in the desert, we need to know that unless we get out of the desert, we will die because if you spend enough time in the desert, you eventually see mirages and find it hard to determine what is real and what is not.  As the verse above says, "when something good comes, you will not see it."  For believers this is critical because we want to make Godly decisions every day and this becomes impossible when we can't see.  Therefore, we become prone to let valuable relationships pass because we didn't see them or we let job opportunities pass because we couldn't see what God was doing.  There are a million more "good" things that God has for us, but in the desert we find it hard to tell the good from the bad.  We see only mirages.    

Today, if you're having a hard time seeing what is real and what is not, maybe you're in a desert.  If so, you're in the dry places and no one can live there.  Send out an SOS and let God rescue you before it's too late. 

Carlen