Oswald Chambers: Hope - A Holy Promise Sýnishorn

All certainty brings death to something. When we have a certain belief, we kill God in our lives, because we do not believe Him, we believe our beliefs about Him and do what Job’s friends did—bring God and human life to the standard of our beliefs and not to the standard of God. The helplessness of professional religion is that there is no room for surprise, we tie God up in His laws and in denominational doctrines and orders of services, consequently we do not see God at all.

Wherever we trust in goodness or nobility instead of in God, we suddenly find ourselves in a howling waste wilderness. The attitude of a godly life is to put no confidence in anything or anyone but God.

Reflection Questions: What false sense of confidence am I willing to put to death so that my confidence in God can be fully alive? In what ways do I place my hope in religious practices rather than in the power of the resurrected Christ?

Quotations taken from The Love of God and Notes on Jeremiah, © Discovery House Publishers