To nourish means to sustain, strengthen or build up according to dictionary.com.  Today I realized that I’ve been nourishing fear and worry in my heart.  Conviction sprung from today’s devotion from Oswald Chamber’s My Utmost for His Highest.  “All our fears are sinful, and we create our own fears by refusing to nouish ourselves in our faith.”  Last weekend, when my mind was supposed to be at rest, I decided to think on and worry about something.  What it was doesn’t matter.  What matters is that I decided to nourish this worry.  I sustained it by continuing to think about it and turn it over and over in my mind.  I strenthened it by speculation.  What if….?  How can I….?  And I built it up by choosing to put myself in somebody else’s place and imagining how I could deal with this seemingly impossible burden.  When I got home on Sunday, I was dreading the whole thing.  The worry and fear had spiraled into something much bigger and blinded me to the actual truth of the situation.  Today I was convicted of the truth.  The truth that the enemy does not want me nourish, sustain or build up.  I must choose to nourish and cherish this truth – “for God gave us a spirit not of fear, but of power, and love and self-control.”  Chambers quotes Galatians 2:20 which says that Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us.  Have these truths become mundane??!!  God forbid.  I might not want to confess it, but I am prone to forget just like the wandering Israelites and every other human who ever lived.  I am prone to forgetting who God is.  I am prone to believing the lie at the root of every other lie, “Has God really said…”   After all the Scripture I’ve memorized in the past 2+ years, I am still weak and in need.  I cannot skate through this life of faith. So I must above all things nourish and strengthen and build up my faith in the Lord.  The more I know of His majesty, glory, grace and power, the stronger my faith will be. 

 

So every day there are choices.  Will I feed faith or fear?  I am trying, by His grace, to feed faith so that, as Chambers says, my life will “be an absolute hymn of praise resulting from perfect, irrepressible, triumphant belief.”