When Your Competence Tries to Replace

Dependence on God

Read Transcript Instead

Click here

This Week's Devotion Was Inspired By:

Psalm 48:14

^{^{that this is God,
our God forever and ever.
He will guide us forever.}}

FROM HEAD KNOWLEDGE TO HEART KNOWLEDGE:

1. Evaluate in prayer: Where can I invite God into my daily decision-making? Where can I start trusting Him more? Where can I ask for His guidance?

2. Apply to now & the future: Pray & ask God to lead you - and then wait for Him to do it! Pick one decision right now to ask God for specific guidance on and see how take note of how He works in your life!

KEY POINT: We can, and should, pray about our work, asking God to guide us as we plan even the mundane things like lesson plans, activities, and seating charts.

Haven't taken Hope Renewed yet?

Enroll Today

Through 5 weeks of powerful, Scripture-based lessons, you’ll learn how to lean on His strength—so you can stop feeling defeated & teach with confidence, peace, and renewed joy.

Transcript

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I fall into the trap of making decisions on my own, especially everyday decisions involving work and things that I’m pretty good at. I just think, “Oh yeah, I’m just going to make these decisions.” As a teacher, you might think:

“Oh yeah, lesson planning.”
“What kind of policies am I going to have in my classroom?”
“What am I going to teach today?”

These are everyday decisions that we make on our own, right? But I want us to stop and consider how we should be inviting God into even these everyday decisions, even these things that maybe we feel like we could do on our own.

Because inviting God in allows Him to give His wisdom to us, and it also allows us to participate with Him in the work. And that is so powerful. Here’s one verse to encourage us in this way. It’s Psalm 48:14. It says:

“He will guide us forever.”

And that’s so amazing, that He promises to guide us. I think we latch onto this for things like big life decisions or when we don’t know what to do in a major life issue. But sometimes we forget to bring God into our work.

And I absolutely do not believe that we should leave Him out. We should invite Him into the moments we feel competent and also invite Him into the moments where we feel confused.

I don’t know about you, but there are times in my work where I don’t know what to do, where I’m not sure what the right decision is. Sometimes I get really stressed about that. I find my mind working and racing and trying to figure out a problem that I can’t solve.

And I’ve been learning lately that in those moments, sometimes the best thing I can do is go to God and say: “God, I don’t know what to do about this, but I’m going to give this to You, and I’m going to trust You, and I’m going to ask You to reveal to me what I should do.” And it’s so interesting then to see what God unfolds.

And it’s not always instantaneous. Sometimes part of this is being patient and allowing God to guide us over the next hours, days, and even weeks. But the bottom line of what I’m saying is I want to encourage you to start taking more steps and think about:

Where can I invite God into my decision-making in my day-to-day school and summer and what I’m doing with work and my life every single day? Where can I start trusting Him more? Where can I ask for His guidance and then patiently wait for Him to lead me?

I want to encourage you to think about that right now. Pray about one decision you’re making regarding work or school, and ask Him to guide you. Then wait and see what He does.

FROM HEAD KNOWLEDGE TO HEART KNOWLEDGE:

1. Evaluate in prayer: Where can I invite God into my daily decision-making? Where can I start trusting Him more? Where can I ask for His guidance?