Today's Devotional

February 17, 2006

Subject: The Fear To Faith (F2F) Cycle: Faith's End

Job 42:10 - "And the LORD turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends: also the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before."

Job 42:12 - "So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses."

In the first stage, the storms hit and you wondered how you would make it out of the valley of despair. In the second stage, you realized this wasn't going to be a short valley, so in the third stage, you made a decision to trust God to bring you through. In the fourth stage, you began to walk by faith and you now had "unseen" strength to make it through. You are now at the end of faith and simply put, that end is blessing.

There is no other way to put it. When you believe and trust God through the circumstances, situations, and trials of life, the product is always blessing. Well why is that? It's because God's purpose is to build our Christian character. Remember, He is trying to make us like His Son Jesus. So after we've been through the F2F cycle and have begun to walk by faith, He can now do what He wants to do with us and use us for what He wants to use us for and when we're made ready for His use then He is always waiting at the end with blessing.

It's evident in Job's life that as he entered the final stage, those friends who had given him bad information didn't become his enemies because of that. When you're trusting God, then you don't spend all of your time against things or people, you're simply "for" God and His way is the path for you.

Today, you can create your own faith story, much like Job. You simply have to trust and rely on God and like Job, your latter end will be more than your beginning because the more like Christ you become, the more God can use you and that is the biggest blessing of life, to be used by God; from Fear To Faith!

Carlen