Christian Devotional – March 9, 2019

Living out your faith is hard. We just finished James talling about having faith and acting on it and now we’re going to journey back to the Old Testament and see how two women lived out their faith. Read Ruth 1:1-2.

Now it came about in the days when the judges governed, that there was a famine in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the land of Moab with his wife and his two sons.
Ruth 1:1 NASB
https://bible.com/bible/100/rut.1.1.NASB

The story doesn’t start out with much faith. This family, living in the promise land, experiences a famine. It doesn’t say anything about them asking God what they should do. It doesn’t mention how they prayed for guidance. It just mentioned that they packed up their stuff and left the promised land for another land.

When things get difficult and times are hard, where do we turn? Do we make up a plan for ourselves and how we can get through? Or, do we seek out God’s guidance? Part of the struggle about faith is that it’s easy to have it when things are going well, but you don’t really get to know how strong your faith is until it is put to the test in difficulty and trial.

How strong is your faith? It’s easy to read about this family and think, “I would have done it differently,” but we really never know. We are confronted with tests of our faith every day. How are we doing? If others were to read our story centuries later, what would they be thinking about how we acted and demonstrated our faith?