We, God’s children, are all equal in His sight:  God does not love one of us any more than the other; He sees us all the same.  Man has such a tendency to measure and compare, but when we each hear, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant,” we are judged by our faithfulness not by our production, because all God expects from each of us is to allow the Holy Spirit to work the gifts that have been given to us freely so that God would be glorified in our lives.  If you are faithful with your one talent, God is just as pleased as with those to whom He has given ten talents.  One is not more important than the other.  Beloved, hear me:  God is no respecter of persons; He calls you by name; the very hairs on your head are numbered; He has a stone with a name written on it, just for you, that only He knows; amen?  That will be so cool.  You know, it could be like “Whoa.  ‘Bubba’.”  God has a pet name for you that nobody else is going to get; nobody else gets that attention—just you.  “Are ye not much better than they?”

As He talks about His care for all of His creation, He says in verse 31, “Therefore take no thought, saying…”  We have heard the extreme cases of “negative confession.”  Somebody shared with me just the other day about a person with whom he was dealing who had lived in that extreme realm of thought, and was in a very difficult position:  He had been confessing an outcome that he had derived in his own mind about how God should do what he thought should be done.  He believed that, by faith, he could make God do whatever he wanted God to do.  We all know that’s not how faith works; amen?  Faith is not a force that we can control.  Faith is not faith if it doesn’t have an object to believe in or to trust in.  The object of our faith is Almighty God manifested to us in the Son (praise God.) our Redeemer and our Savior—our Lord.  Our faith is not just in the Word of God; our faith is in the God of the Word.  Amen?  This Word is true and infallible:  it is sure to a thousand generations; but, it is backed by the One who breathed it, who inspired it, who is the eternal I AM—Jehovah—the great God whom we declare as El Shaddai (from the Old Covenant) and is manifest as the Christ—the Messiah—for the kingdom fulfillment, and understood to be very God Himself in the Second Person of the Trinity as revealed to us by the angel that proclaimed, “Thou shalt call his name Jesus: for he shall save his people from their sins.”  Hallelujah.

We know God.  You can know the Word without knowing God.  You have got to know God; you must have fellowship with Him.  You can’t just read about Him:  you need to hug Him, and you need to let Him hug you.  You can’t just read about the great men of God who walked in faith and raised the dead and cast out devils and stepped out of the boat and walked on water and prayed and shut the heavens up.  It’s not enough to just read about Jesus; you have to have your own miracles, praise God.  You need to have your own answers to prayer.  Until you commit to it and get out of the boat and make those divine declarations, you will never be able to walk in that same rest and peace that these whom we read about had.