Causes For Heart Wanderings-Looking At Our Difficulties

Another cause of the loss of grace is looking at our difficulties. 

It is to be expected that life is full of difficulties, and living in a fallen world implies this. 

There are difficulties in the spiritual life in the way of seeking pardon or holiness-difficulties in growth in grace-difficulties that spring from our own minds or from heredity, our social surroundings, our temporal affairs, our temperament or our poor and false teaching difficulties innumerable, that spring like weeds in every field of life; and to get the eye on these difficulties will weaken faith, sap perseverance, distract the mind, cloud the vision and draw the soul from God. 

The divine life is pre-eminently the way and life of faith. 

When Peter looked at the waves of the sea, his mind lost the bright conception of the omnipotence of Jesus, and so he began to sink. 

When Abraham looked at the difficulties of how he was going to retain his beautiful wife in the presence of the greedy heathen king, he did not know how to manage it; and so he was induced to tell a falsehood, just because the difficulties of the situation, for the time being, shut out the omnipotent care of God.

Our heavenly Father permits His children to be hemmed in many times by the network of difficulties, and the Devil uses such circumstances to plead the necessity of committing sin in order to get through. 

The very things that God permits as a test of our faith, the Devil uses as an argument for some disobedience.

~G. D. Watson~