Wake Up! - The One Year At His Feet Devotional
Wake Up!
Read: Revelation 3:1-6
“Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your deeds complete in the sight of my God.”
Revelation 3:2
“The experience of revival is nothing more than a new beginning of obedience to God.”
—Charles Finney
IN WORD God seems to work with us in seasons. We may go through periods of feeling particularly close to Him, followed by periods of apparent distance. We may have times of plenty followed by times of scarcity. We can see God using our labor and blessing it, and then we see His pruning process and wonder where His blessing has gone. Or we even may willfully distance ourselves from God’s work through apathy, sin, or a plan to “retire.” Our temptation in any of these times is to think that God is done with us. But we must resist that temptation. If we’re alive, He isn’t.
For those who have long been Christians, we can easily become discouraged when we try to measure our present with our past. Just as a marriage may not always have the intensity of the honeymoon, so will our discipleship rarely contain the newfound excitement that we felt when we first came to know Jesus. While there is certainly deep joy in discipleship, there is also cross-bearing, hard work, commitment, and perseverance through trials. We also find that we commit sins that we once, early in our discipleship, thought we were done with. Our discouragement about the present, especially when it doesn’t measure up to our fond memories, may lead us to wonder: “What have I lost that I once had? Have I become unfruitful for God? Has His blessing left me?”
IN DEED The answer, of course, is that God is still at work in us. Our job is to be alert, to cultivate the gifts He has given us, and to persevere in the good works He has prepared for us in advance (Ephesians 2:10). Unless He has already taken us to heaven, He has not found our deeds complete. There is no “falling away” too substantial for Him to restore. There is no weakness greater than His strength. There is no retirement in His service. Wherever we are in our walk, there is revival to be sought and work to be done.
