This blog post will be updated daily with a devotion from a Wooddale Pastor during the COVID-19 situation. Please check-in each day for a new video or encouraging word to help you stay focused on Christ during this season.
Pastor Lloyd John Oglive says, “The special gift of suffering is that it exposes all secondary satisfactions. We live in a world that has made a false god out of quantity rather than quality. It measures greatness by how long we live and how well we live, in the number of breaths we breathe instead of the breath-taking experiences we enjoy. The passion for trouble-free health has robbed us of a passion for God when it is interrupted. Our false idea of happiness anesthetizes us from finding joy. We cannot tolerate any infractions of our prescribed agendas where everyone lives to be a hundred, is happily married, has perfect children, makes a good living, and retires to trouble-free leisure where the only problem is how to battle boredom. We find ourselves unable to tolerate the imperfect, the incomplete, the inconsistent!”
George Everet Ross makes a similar point. He says, “I have served in the ministry thirty years…I have come to understand that there are two kinds of faith. One says if and the other says though. One says: “If everything goes well, if my life is prosperous, if I’m happy, if no one I love dies, if I’m successful, then I will believe in God and say my prayers and go to the church and give what I can afford.” The other says though: though the cause of evil prospers, though I sweat in Gethsemane, though I must drink my cup at Calvary-nevertheless, precisely then, I will trust the Lord who made me. So Job cries, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.”