Pressing on!

It is so easy to have faith when everything is going well, isn’t it?  We never question God about the blessings He sends us.  When we are happy, financially stable and healthy we never doubt God’s faithfulness.  However, it’s a different story when things don’t seem to go the way we want them to.  When we feel pressed and oppressed we cry out to God for a moment of relief and when that moment doesn’t come instantly we start to question God’s motives.  We start saying “How long can I endure this?”

We often think; if God knows I love Him than why do I still need to face these difficult situations, why can’t every day with Him be easy? Unfortunately for our lazy spirit He never promised that every day would be easy.  So the question remains, why then do we have to go through challenges? 

God will never give us blessings that we aren’t ready to receive.  He might have given us some victories over certain things but in order for us to be fully prepared for new victories of much grander things we need to have some attitude adjustments. "And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins" (Luke 5:37-38). He cannot give us new power into our lives unless we get rid of some of our old habits and attitudes. 
Think about how wine is made.  The grapes are thrown into the winepress and the winepress crushes every single grape and squeezes the grape juice out so that it flows into a barrel where the grape juice ferments and turns into wine.  We too are like those grapes in the winepress where God is pressing out of us the old attitudes in order to squeeze out of us the greatness that His spirit is building inside of us.  Let us be real, being in the winepress isn’t fun and it certainly isn’t enjoyable.  It’s painful!  But we can overcome that pain and press on to the new power that God has in store for us.
When I look at my life for the last 20 years and I look at the difficult moments that I went thru I realize that they were all necessary to change my attitude.  Those people that know me long enough know of the lousy attitude that I used to have.  I was looking in my year book from somewhat years ago and it said that I was known for complaining.  God have mercy!  Complaining!  I might have been the worst person to be around with in my past.  There certainly wasn’t anything positive that came out of my mouth.  God knew I loved Him and I wanted to serve Him but He especially knew that He had to press my bad attitude out of me.  Let me tell you that painful is an understatement for how difficult my time in the winepress was.  But it was necessary and I praise God that I overcame it.  Now for new power into my life I need to press on some more.  Some things we will never understand why they happen to us but must trust that God will always knows best and He will always work out no matter what kind of situation into our good.
Don’t be afraid of challenges but be afraid of giving up.  Giving up isn’t an option if you want to achieve great blessings into your life.  Your success depends on your perseverance.  Never give up or give in!