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<p><strong>DAILY DEVOTIONAL FOR YOUTHS AND STUDENTS.</strong> Today’s devotional for 14th August 2026, inspired by the teaching of Apostle Arome Osayi. Topic: <strong>God Will Strip You Before He Uses You</strong>.</p>
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<p><strong>MEMORY VERSE:</strong> <span style=”color:#8B0000;”>”And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no.” — Deuteronomy 8:2 (KJV)</span></p>
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<p><strong>TEXT:</strong> Deuteronomy 8:1-3</p>
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<h3>TODAY’S DEVOTIONAL</h3>
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<p>Before God lifts anyone, He first empties them. This is one of the quietest but most consistent patterns in scripture. Joseph went to a pit and a prison before he went to a palace. Moses spent forty years tending sheep in obscurity before he stood in front of Pharaoh. Israel did not walk straight from Egypt into Canaan; God led them through the wilderness first. Not because the wilderness was the shortest route, but because it was the necessary one. Something in them had to be stripped before they could be trusted with a land flowing with milk and honey.</p>
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<p>The wilderness in Deuteronomy 8 was not punishment. It was training. God says plainly that He led them there “to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart.” He was not discovering anything He didn’t already know as God; He was exposing it to them. Pride is deceptive precisely because it hides from the person carrying it. You rarely feel proud. You feel capable, confident, sure of yourself. It takes pressure, delay, or lack to reveal how much of that confidence was quietly resting on your own strength instead of on God.</p>
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<p>This is why stripping so often looks like loss before it looks like gain. A door closes. A plan falls through. A season of silence stretches longer than expected. It can feel like God has stepped back, when in reality He is doing the deeper work of separating you from whatever you had begun to lean on instead of Him — your talent, your popularity, your certainty about how your life was supposed to go. He is not trying to break you. He is trying to find out, and let you find out, what is really in your heart when the props are taken away.</p>
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<p>If you are a student or a young person reading this, pay attention here. Grades, gifting, followers, and early success are wonderful, but they can also quietly build a version of you that trusts itself more than it trusts God. You can ace an exam and still be spiritually unprepared for what God wants to do with your life, because ability was never the thing He needed to strip — pride was. Don’t resent the delays, the rejections, or the seasons where nothing seems to be moving. Some of them are the wilderness doing exactly what it was sent to do: making room in you for God before He hands you more than you’re currently able to carry with a humble heart.</p>
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<p>Notice too that God let Israel hunger before He fed them manna. Lack is one of His most patient tools. It is easy to trust God when you have enough; it is a different kind of faith to trust Him when you don’t yet see provision and still refuse to take a shortcut. That is exactly what was tested when Jesus, hungry in His own wilderness, was told by the tempter to turn stones to bread. He could have. Instead He answered with the word: man shall not live by bread alone. Presumption grabs at what it wants and calls it faith. Real faith waits on God even in hunger, because it trusts His timing more than it trusts its own appetite.</p>
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<p>So if your life feels stripped right now — fewer comforts, fewer certainties, more waiting than you expected — receive it as an invitation rather than a punishment. God is not distancing Himself from you; He is preparing you to carry what He has planned without it destroying you. The wilderness always ends. But it only does its full work in those who let it, instead of fighting to escape it before God is finished.</p>
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<p><strong>KEY POINT:</strong> God cannot safely give you greatness until He has first stripped away the pride that would ruin you in it.</p>
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<p><strong>FURTHER READING:</strong> Deuteronomy 8:2-3; Matthew 4:1-11; James 4:6-10; Psalm 91:1-10; 2 Corinthians 1:8-9</p>
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<h3>DAILY PRAYER</h3>
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<p>Father, strip me of every pride I cannot even see in myself. Where I have leaned on my own strength, my own name, or my own understanding, humble me and turn my heart back to You. Teach me to trust You in seasons of lack as much as I do in seasons of plenty, and give me the patience to let Your process finish in me before You hand me what You have planned. Prepare me quietly so that when You lift me, it is You alone who gets the glory, in Jesus’ name. Amen.</p>
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