Today’s Devotional: Shaped By God
Few of us enter into our relationship with God understanding of the spectrum of emotion and experiences awaiting us. We trust that in the end the journey Christ is about to take us on will be worth it. And while it definitely is, that doesn’t mean it isn’t at times painful.
The end result, however, is that we steadily become the sort of man or woman God truly wants us to be. The devotional below from Lifetime Guarantee calls this process, “grinding.” It’s the idea that God is shaping us like a puzzlemaker might shape a puzzle piece. He steadily cuts away and smooths our rough edges so that we fit perfectly into his beautiful plan:
He has determined where we will fit into His “puzzle,” what is going to be necessary to bring that about, and He will persevere until He gets it done! Romans 8: 29 gives us the plan He is determined to complete: …we are ‘predestined’ to become conformed to the image of His Son.
There it is! His mind is made up and He will not stop “grinding” until the job is finished just the way He has planned. Philippians 1:6 says it this way: I am very confident of this one thing. Jesus began this work and He will complete it perfectly (my paraphrase). So God has to sand off—or perhaps grind off if the edges are really rough—so we will eventually “fit” into the design He has planned for us. That’s a wonderful thing not a scary thing.
So we pray, “Lord, I want to be like Jesus. I know there’s going to be a lot of heavy sanding to do. That’s okay. The finished product will fit beautifully into Your plan and that’s worth the ‘grinding.’ So I place myself in Your hands and I see that determination in Your eyes. Thank You, precious Lord Jesus.”
Read the entire devotional at lifetime.org.
How is God “grinding” and shaping you today? How has He shaped you in the past?
