"Christ Is Our Strength"
By: Zach Wood
Philippians 4:13
I can do everything through him who gives
me strength.
There have been so many times in my life when I have
tried to do things with my own strength. I am sure I have written many
devotionals talking about how I have tried and how you have tried as well.
We all do things on our own strength and we last for a few days. Maybe we
even last for a few weeks. There comes a time, however, when we realize
that we need Him and we cannot live without having His strength. If I go
through a day where I do not get up early and start my day with reading and
prayer, I feel different all day. There is just something about connecting
with God and asking for strength through Christ. That is exactly the way it
should be.
Our strength has to come from Christ. If we do
not look to him and trust in Him to give us strength, we live on our own
fuel. That is just about as good enough as filling your tank about 1/4 of
the way. It will do for a while, but it will run out before you know it!
It has happened to me on so many occasions. Why can we not just give up our
attempts to run on self-made fuel and allow Christ to fuel us with real
energy and real life?
For the past two weeks, I have had a lot of situations
thrown my way. Some of them small and others kind of large. Through these
situations, my wife and I have talked about how, without God, we cannot
survive these situations. We can choose to survive with just living, or, we
can really thrive by growing closer to Christ.
I want to encourage all of you who are in a marriage
relationship or any dating relationship. From experience, I want to share
with you from my heart that if Christ is not the absolute center of your
relationship, the relationship will fall apart in some way. I cannot tell
you how many situations I have heard about where marriages and relationships
fall apart. There are many reasons that they fall apart. It always breaks
my heart when they fall apart because of lack of keeping Christ in the
center. Now, this is not to say that if Christ is in the center of a
relationship, then everything will be easy. I am saying, however, that if
Christ is in the center of your marriage or any other relationship you have
with someone else, that relationship will thrive beyond what you can
imagine!
I fail many times to remember that Christ must be the
center of my life and sometimes in my marriage. I focus on the wrong
things, but I have a very loving wife who reminds me that we need to always
be praying and focusing on the Giver of Life to give us strength. That is
what it is all about. Growing together in Christ. So, this devotional is
to encourage each of us to keep Christ as our strength, but also to
encourage any of you in dating or marriage relationships to keep Christ as
the center. That is the only way to success.
God Bless You All!