The NIV 365 Day Devotional
What Pushes Your Dread Buttons?
The phone ringing in the middle of the night. The doorbell ringing at 11:00 p.m. when your 16-year-old daughter has taken the car out for the first time. The waiting period as you sit at the doctor’s office because you were called in to discuss your test results.
Do you know your “dread buttons”? These moments of panic instantly wrap cold fingers of fear around your heart. Some dread buttons are almost universal. “I don’t know how to tell you this, son, but your mother has just passed away.” “The company is having a hard time financially, and we need to cut our salary exposure, so . . . “ “We’ve taken your son from school to the hospital in an ambulance . . . “ Push any one of these and the sweat begins.
Now consider Job’s situation. How could this father possibly have survived the day when God allowed Satan to push not just one of Job’s dread buttons but essentially to jump up and down on the whole keypad?
If you felt your own dread buttons pushed while reading Job’s story, then you’ve made a connection with Job across thousands of years. We read about the disasters that crushed Job and we instinctively pray, “Lord, please don’t let that happen to me.”
Some men struggle with tragedy and heartbreak all their lives. Others seem to sail through relatively unscathed when it comes to such traumatic interruptions as job loss, injury or illness. Still, when troubles come, we may have a hard time echoing Job’s prayer in Job 1:21, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away.” Instead, we expect God to give and then give some more. We certainly don’t expect God to take anything away, and we usually resent it when he does. Yet everything remains his. At most, we’re stewards of what he’s entrusted to us. When we hold on to people and possessions as though they belong permanently to us, we only set ourselves up for deep disappointment.
Jesus taught that we wrap our hearts around whatever we treasure most (see Matthew 6:21). But if what we treasure can be taken away or destroyed, our hearts will always be in danger. God was the center of Job’s life—his treasure. Job appreciated what he had, but his life didn’t revolve around his possessions. Instead, his heart was wrapped around his relationship with God. What lessons can you learn from Job’s experience?
Taken from the NIV Men’s Devotional Bible.