July 24, 2026
Devotional:
Do you know God and claim to have a relationship with Him? Do you ever feel disconnected from Him? Have you skipped out on praying to Him or reading His Word? Have you been irritable or grumpy but you don’t really know why?
I know Him, but there have been times when He has not been my first priority. The other day life was getting in the way of me taking time to connect with Jesus. I didn’t pray. I didn’t read the Scripture. I just went on about the business of dealing with my life and its circumstances. But I felt this nagging emptiness and I saw myself becoming irritable and easily frustrated. I didn’t have peace. I carried guilt around on a silver platter all day long, refusing to deal with it, while knowing in my heart, that I needed to.
How easy it is for us to ignore the root of our problems. We’d rather carry our guilt around than figure out what to do about it. We’d rather handle life on our own terms than take it to Jesus, the One who can actually give us the help we need to work through our troubles.
Do circumstances in your life keep you from making a priority of connecting to the one’s that you love? Have you ever felt like you were being loved from a distance, but not from having a deep connection to that person?
This made me think about how God might feel concerning us. How many of us say we love God, yet we fail every day to engage with Him, to talk to Him? He’s provided for us to know Him through the Scriptures, through Jesus, and through His creation. Sometimes I think it is easier for people to connect with God through creation than to try and connect with His personhood—who He is and who He wants to be to us. More often than not, we put every other person or thing before Him. And He waits…
God understands the distance we feel from family and friends from time to time because He has experienced the times that we have been distant from Him. He wants to have a relationship with us and sometimes we act like we don’t feel the same about Him. Our actions and priorities get all mangled up.
‘Man’ and mangled. Isn’t that an amazing coincidence. The the first 3 letters of the word mangled are MAN.
Man always gets in the way of connecting with God because we are mangled up in our own lives and in our own turmoil and we think we can solve all of our own problems without His help. How mangled is that kind of thinking?
Jesus is here, He is with us, and He waits, more than patiently, for us to come to Him—to bring all of ourselves to Him, so He can love on us and minister to us and meet the needs He knows we have.
Prayer:
Father, help us not to be blinded by our circumstances. Help use the free will you gave us to chose to come to You and to remember that when we don’t, we are the reason that we don’t feel connected to You. You are always there waiting for us.
Help us to have a hunger and thirst for You and Your righteousness in our lives so that we will experience Your goodness, mercy and grace during our times of need. May we chose to submit to You so that our path doesn’t become mangled by our need to do life our own way. Amen
Scriptures:
“Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him.” Isaiah 30:18
“But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” Matthew 6:33
“Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act.” Psalm 37:5
“When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles.” Psalm 34:17
Whispers from God 