The Right Path – Shared Reading from Rick Warren

Devotional image from Rick Warren
God’s Guidance Won’t Leave You Confused
By Rick Warren — April 13, 2019

“Your road led through the sea, your pathway through the mighty waters—a pathway no one knew was there!” (Psalm 77:19 NLT).

God can use impressions to speak to you. He can use circumstances. He can even use pain. He can use whatever he wants to use. Oswald Chambers said, “God is the Great Engineer, creating circumstances to bring about moments in our lives of divine importance, leading us to divine appointments.”

The Bible says God actively works through our circumstances. And so we cannot judge our situation apart from God’s wisdom. In other words, we must leave it up to God to interpret our circumstances. Only he is capable of understanding all the facts, and only he sees the significance of every detail. That’s why it is so important that we test it all by his Word.

If you feel overwhelmed or confused about a decision, you might be caught up in yourself and not God’s voice. The Bible says, “God is not a God of disorder but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33 NIV). He is not the author of confusion. So if you’re feeling confused, guess what? It’s not God’s voice speaking in your life.

So many times we come up against enormous financial, spiritual, or physical barriers. That’s when we need to confess, “God, there are mountains on either side and an impassable barrier in front of me.” And then we wait for God to respond: “I’ve got you exactly where I want you to be. Watch this.” God will make a pathway where there seems to be no way.

Psalm 77:19 says, “Your road led through the sea, your pathway through the mighty waters—a pathway no one knew was there!” (NLT).

When you don’t know what to do, God will guide you. He didn’t design you to go through life on your own ingenuity and power. You don’t have to just hope you can figure things out. God wants to lead you on the right path, and he will when you surrender to him and his guidance.PLAY today’s audio teaching from Pastor Rick >>
Talk About It

  • When you’re frustrated because God doesn’t seem to be answering your prayer for guidance, what do you think he wants you to do? What have you learned through those kinds of experiences in the past?
  • How has God used your pain to show you his purpose for your life?
  • Why do you think God lets us get to the point where there seems to be no way out of a difficult circumstance?

Daily Readings for Saturday, April 13th

24 Hours a Day

Meditation for the Day

I will try to make the world better and happier by my presence in it. I will try to help other people find the way God wants them to live. I will try to be on the side of good, in the stream of righteousness, where all things work for good. I will do my duty persistently and faithfully, not sparing myself. I will be gentle with all people. I will try to see other people’s difficulty and help them to correct it. I will always pray to God to act as interpreter between me and the other person.

Prayer for the Day

I pray that I may live in the spirit of prayer. I pray that I may depend on God for the strength I need to help me to do my part in making the world a better place.

Language of Letting Go

Enjoyment

One of the prohibitions many of us learned in childhood is the unspoken rule — don’t have fun and enjoy life. This rule creates martyrs — people who will not let themselves embrace the pleasures of day-to-day living.

Many of us associated suffering with some sort of sainthood. . Now, we associate it with codependency. We can go through the day making ourselves feel anxious, guilty, miserable, and deprived. Or we can allow ourselves to go through that same day feeling good. In recovery, we eventually learn the choice is ours.

There is much to be enjoyed each day, and it is okay to feel good. We can let ourselves enjoy our tasks. We can learn to relax without guilt. We can even learn to have fun.

Work at learning to have fun. Apply yourself with dedication to learning enjoyment. Work as hard at learning to have fun as you did at feeling miserable.

Our work will pay off. Fun will become fun. Life will become worth living. And each day, well find many pleasures to be enjoyed.

Today, I will let myself enjoy life as I go through my day.

Living Life on Life’s Terms…

Life can certainly be full of ups and downs. There are no guarantees, no certainties that things will go the way we want. The real question is, how do we deal with it all? Are we overcome with fear when things don’t go our way? Do we become overzealous when the events in our lives seem to go in our favor? Living life on life’s terms isn’t always easy.

We can, in our minds, think we know how things should best work out. This may or may not be what actually pans out. It’s easy to accept when things go our way. But when they turn out differently than we might have wanted, it can cause our level of acceptance to be disturbed.

I have found that it’s best that I don’t always know what’s best for myself or for others. Not that there’s anything wrong with having the forethought to move in a certain direction, but there’s also the realization that life might have other plans.

It’s not so much what needs to be changed in the world as in me and my perspective and attitude. I must accept those things in life I cannot change, change what I can.

To everything there is a season.

David Lee

Acceptance is the Answer…

“And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation — some fact of my life– unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake. Unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate no so much what needs to be changed in the world as in me and my attitudes.”

Big Book, page 417