At the Feet of Jesus by Joanna Weaver – Day 4
May your unfailing love rest upon us, O Lord, even as we put our hope in you. Psalm 33:22
Nothing is more detrimental than allowing the stone of unbelief to wedge itself between us and the heart of God. I appreciate the honesty with which Ann Spangler writes of her struggle to truly believe in the love of God.
I have never found it easy to believe in God’s love for me, except perhaps in the first days and weeks of my conversion…Nearly every prayer in those days was answered, sometimes wondrously. I remember thinking that the problem with many people was that they expected so little from a God who was prepared to give so much.
But years passed and something happened. It wasn’t one thing but many….It was tests of faith [and…] sins accruing. It was disappointments and difficulties beyond comprehending. All these heaped together like a great black mound, casting a shadow over my sense that God still loved me, still cared for me as tenderly as when he had first…won my heart.
In an attempt to recapture that sense of God’s love, Ann went back to the promises of the Bible. Unfortunately, “like many people who tend to be selfcritical,” she writes, “I find it easier to absorb the harsher sounding passages in the Bible…Somehow, the tender words seem to roll right off me, much like water that beads up and rolls off a well-waxed automobile.”
But Ann persisted. Over the next year, she immersed herself in the Word of God, allowing truth to wash over her until God’s love stopped being a concept and started to feel like a reality.
“Act as though God loves you,” a friend advised her. And that’s what Ann did. She put the full force of her mind behind believing the truth, exercising her faith rather than depending on her feelings. And the stone of unbelief began to roll away.
—Lazarus Awakening
Read & Reflect: Using a concordance or Bible website, look up several verses on the love of God. Write them out, then choose one to memorize.
Excerpted from At the Feet of Jesus by Joanna Weaver. Copyright © 2012 by Joanna Weaver. Excerpted by permission of WaterBrook Press, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
