Hi Everybody -- I don't know what's wrong with me this week -- I think it may be the heat but I'm just not focused. I apologize for the lateness of this post.
I've been working on a new song - learning one - not writing one (oh that God would bless me with that talent - but alas...). It centers around the things we pray and ask God for and how in our "human-ness" we react when God chooses not to answer our prayers according to our requests but instead chooses mercy through our trials. The question throughout the song is What if? --
As I listened to the lyrics, I found myself wondering if I believe or agreed with them. I'm not saying it's a bad song or that it's in error Scripturally - in fact, it's just the opposite...I'm asking myself the questions because if I'm going to sing it, I feel like I need to believe it -- or at least agree with it.
Suffering is a part of our walk with Christ. Sanctification is the process we go through. Our goodness is as filthy rags apart from the blood of Christ. I get that. But do we have to suffer through hard times in order to truly understand His love for us or know Him? Are we that hard-headed and self-centered that we can't just believe Him and take Him at His Word? Would we avoid all the hard times if we could do this? These are the questions that I'm asking myself as I prepare this song...
Sometimes all we want in life are the good times, and sometimes our prayers are merely habits - such as asking God to bless our food, prayers before we sleep, corporate prayers in worship, for example. Sometimes our prayers are desperate cries for deliverance from difficult circumstances or healing from terrible diseases - either for ourselves or for someone we love. We pray and believe at whatever level we can -- and sometimes we don't get the answers to our prayers because God has a different plan - a higher plan that we don't understand.
I think that may be the struggle. Because God created us to have a free will there's just something about us that wants our own way. He tell us this in His Word - "All of us like sheep have gone astray, Each of us has turned to his own way; But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all To fall on Him." Isaiah 53:6 None of us wants to go through hard times or be sick or take care of a sick loved one or experience betrayal, devastation or loss. We wouldn't volunteer to do it - and God knows it. But He also knows that we wouldn't really have a lot of substance to us if we didn't experience things in life that challenge us at levels we never want to go. Does this mean that God doesn't love us? Does it make him mean, unmerciful or cruel? It feels like that sometimes...but as perfect as He is - our Creator, God gives us such a wonderful illustration of this process in nature.
Look at the butterfly. It starts life as a worm - ok - a caterpillar. It is not beautiful it has too many legs and it crawls around on the ground or in trees hiding so that it's not consumed by a predator bird, frog or lizard or spider. If it survives long enough, it finds a place to transform. The caterpillar attaches itself to the underside of a branch or on the eave of a house - somewhere where it can go seemingly unnoticed for a season and creates for itself a cocoon. From the outside it seems there's nothing going on. This little creature is bound up inside of itself, hiding from the world and not interacting with anyone or anything. But after a few weeks the cocoon gets a little bit tight. It's getting hot in there too. It's painful, uncomfortable and...boring. What this little caterpillar can't understand is that he no longer fits in this place. He's outgrown it and is beginning the struggle to freedom. He moves just a little and the shell cracks - it's still strong though and binding - really binding. And as he wiggles and fights and moves the shell begins to break away and suddenly he's free! But wait. He's bigger, and has these big "things" on his back - they are heavy and wet. And there are these long protrusions coming from his head - what in the world could they be -- and he's got LEGS!!! 6 of them!! How in the world do you walk with 6 legs...but wait -- this things on his back move -- and if he moves them up and down and up and down they begin to dry. And suddenly, a gust of wind comes by and lifts him up off the ground and instinctively - without any training at all - he does a new thing -- He flies -- legs are more like shock absorbers for landing than for walking! A few short weeks ago he was crawling on his belly or short little feet trying to survive - looking for whatever food he could find and today -- oh today he has reached his destiny. But he had to struggle to get there -- in fact scientists have discovered that if butterflies do not struggle to emerge from the cocoon their bodies don't produce the kind of strength that they need to be able to carry their wings and they'd never be able to fly if they didn't go through this struggle. It seems cruel to let this beautiful creature struggle like that but it's crippling if he doesn't...and will kill him in the end.
So it comes back to us - we sheep that we are...God isn't cruel in allowing us to go through hard times. We live in a broken world and if He rescued us or fixed everything before we met the challenge, we'd be weak and ill-equipped to live here and we wouldn't have the desire or wherewithal to begin to help others who struggle in the same areas we do and we'd certainly never reach our destiny or spread our wings and fly. Bad things happen because this world is broken. Sickness comes because our bodies are not made for eternity - they are for this world...and they are born into a sin nature. The moment we are born - the clock starts until we die...if we never learn to walk, we crawl forever -- this has both physical and spiritual implications -- crawling isn't for grown-ups -- neither is spiritual immaturity. I meet adults every day who have never stood on their own 2 feet spiritually. They attend church regularly, read the Bible when they have time, get involved if they want to - but they never grow up spiritually. They may take a Bible study and attend - but don't read the material - they simply wait on the teacher to "spoon-feed" the material to them. When the going gets tough they don't have any foundation and their world comes crashing down and they lash out in anger, create trouble or walk away. Likewise, I also meet adults who have grown callused and hard. They had a fire for a while but hard times caused them to grow cold. They gave up living and quit. Life is merely existence until death. They just don't care anymore. They are wounded and weary and don't think it's worth the bother to grow anymore. They've allowed the cocoon to paralyze them to the point that they may never fly or reach their spiritually destiny. Both types of these people are spiritual crawlers. They've become crippled by their growth because the struggle weighed more than they could take. One is bound by immaturity and the other is bound by past hurts. The cocoon has choked their growth and they don't have the spiritual strength to struggle out of it.
I believe we have a choice in this life. I believe that God is good and that He is happy. I believe He created us to enjoy this life too - but that's not our primary purpose for being here. If we give our lives to Him, we are made for more. We are made to live lives that bring glory to Him. We are made to be a reflection of Him to others in good times and bad times. We are made to serve Him and others so that they see Jesus in us and understand sacrifice. We are made to want more - not material gain - but more of Him. The enemy will tug at our hearts and make us want to escape the hard times - the struggles - just like that caterpillar doesn't enjoy the struggle to get out of the cocoon. But if we'll trust God and keep moving when things get tough - what's on the other side of the struggle is something we could never imagine. I doubt that caterpillars really know or care about their transformation - they just do what they are created to do and don't struggle with sin or self.
I don't know if our "other side" of the cocoon happens here or not. I haven't reached mine yet as far as I can tell. But I do know that we are promised that God knows the plans He has for us - plans to have a hope and a future. (Jeremiah 29:11) I know that Jesus came that we might have life and life more abundantly. (John 10:10) and I know that waiting on the Lord will bring a renewal and will cast us forward to fly higher if we cooperate with Him in the waiting. (Isaiah 40:31). John 10:10 tells us who is at the root of the bad stuff -- "The thief (satan) comes steal, kill and destroy." We are promised that life is seasonal - (Ecclesiastes 3) and that what satan means for evil, God means for good. (Genesis 50:20 and Romans 8:28).
Does this mean that we are always going to have hard times if we follow Christ? No. It means that we have hope when the hard times come and they WILL come. Does it mean that God doesn't love us when He allows hard things to come our way? No. If He allowed His own Son to suffer and bleed and die, in order to accomplish His will and if we believe Romans 8:28 to be true then in ALL things - both good and bad - God will cause to work out for the good for those of us who are called His children.
There is a belief system out there today that is full of lies of the enemy. It's called prosperity gospel. The basis of this belief is that if we have a good enough attitude and if we believe God hard enough then He will bless us abundantly - meaning with money, success, material gain, fame, etc. etc. I truly wonder whose god these people are believing. Jesus was God's only and perfect Son. No one had the capacity to believe God at a deeper level than Jesus when He was on this earth. No one could have had a better attitude than Jesus - he knew he came to die and yet he lived fully while he was here. God didn't bless Jesus with a big home, fancy chariot, a harem, a record deal or book tour. In fact Jesus didn't even have a place of His own to sleep at night. If God didn't "prosper" His own son here on this earth - why in the world would we think we could be good enough or believe hard enough to expect those things to happen to us...
Friends, don't buy into the lies. The enemy wants us to beg God for deliverance from our struggles. I've bought them lock, stock and barrel more times than I can count and prayed and begged God to remove me from situations that were so very hard. But just like the butterfly - we must struggle with our own cocoons (our "selves") in order to break out into the fullness of God's purpose and glory in our lives. If we skip this step, we might as well go from being born right into eternity. God calls us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. (Philippians 2:12) -- in other words, stay the course - do the thing even when it's hard. We are called to run the course and finish the race for the ultimate goal - to bring glory to God.
I wish you godspeed in your journey. I know this isn't what you usually get on Tips and Tricks Thursday. I'm sorry. My heart just needed to write these things today. Be blessed dear sister or brother and keep walking! I love you! Amy
I've been working on a new song - learning one - not writing one (oh that God would bless me with that talent - but alas...). It centers around the things we pray and ask God for and how in our "human-ness" we react when God chooses not to answer our prayers according to our requests but instead chooses mercy through our trials. The question throughout the song is What if? --
As I listened to the lyrics, I found myself wondering if I believe or agreed with them. I'm not saying it's a bad song or that it's in error Scripturally - in fact, it's just the opposite...I'm asking myself the questions because if I'm going to sing it, I feel like I need to believe it -- or at least agree with it.
Suffering is a part of our walk with Christ. Sanctification is the process we go through. Our goodness is as filthy rags apart from the blood of Christ. I get that. But do we have to suffer through hard times in order to truly understand His love for us or know Him? Are we that hard-headed and self-centered that we can't just believe Him and take Him at His Word? Would we avoid all the hard times if we could do this? These are the questions that I'm asking myself as I prepare this song...
Sometimes all we want in life are the good times, and sometimes our prayers are merely habits - such as asking God to bless our food, prayers before we sleep, corporate prayers in worship, for example. Sometimes our prayers are desperate cries for deliverance from difficult circumstances or healing from terrible diseases - either for ourselves or for someone we love. We pray and believe at whatever level we can -- and sometimes we don't get the answers to our prayers because God has a different plan - a higher plan that we don't understand.
I think that may be the struggle. Because God created us to have a free will there's just something about us that wants our own way. He tell us this in His Word - "All of us like sheep have gone astray, Each of us has turned to his own way; But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all To fall on Him." Isaiah 53:6 None of us wants to go through hard times or be sick or take care of a sick loved one or experience betrayal, devastation or loss. We wouldn't volunteer to do it - and God knows it. But He also knows that we wouldn't really have a lot of substance to us if we didn't experience things in life that challenge us at levels we never want to go. Does this mean that God doesn't love us? Does it make him mean, unmerciful or cruel? It feels like that sometimes...but as perfect as He is - our Creator, God gives us such a wonderful illustration of this process in nature.
Look at the butterfly. It starts life as a worm - ok - a caterpillar. It is not beautiful it has too many legs and it crawls around on the ground or in trees hiding so that it's not consumed by a predator bird, frog or lizard or spider. If it survives long enough, it finds a place to transform. The caterpillar attaches itself to the underside of a branch or on the eave of a house - somewhere where it can go seemingly unnoticed for a season and creates for itself a cocoon. From the outside it seems there's nothing going on. This little creature is bound up inside of itself, hiding from the world and not interacting with anyone or anything. But after a few weeks the cocoon gets a little bit tight. It's getting hot in there too. It's painful, uncomfortable and...boring. What this little caterpillar can't understand is that he no longer fits in this place. He's outgrown it and is beginning the struggle to freedom. He moves just a little and the shell cracks - it's still strong though and binding - really binding. And as he wiggles and fights and moves the shell begins to break away and suddenly he's free! But wait. He's bigger, and has these big "things" on his back - they are heavy and wet. And there are these long protrusions coming from his head - what in the world could they be -- and he's got LEGS!!! 6 of them!! How in the world do you walk with 6 legs...but wait -- this things on his back move -- and if he moves them up and down and up and down they begin to dry. And suddenly, a gust of wind comes by and lifts him up off the ground and instinctively - without any training at all - he does a new thing -- He flies -- legs are more like shock absorbers for landing than for walking! A few short weeks ago he was crawling on his belly or short little feet trying to survive - looking for whatever food he could find and today -- oh today he has reached his destiny. But he had to struggle to get there -- in fact scientists have discovered that if butterflies do not struggle to emerge from the cocoon their bodies don't produce the kind of strength that they need to be able to carry their wings and they'd never be able to fly if they didn't go through this struggle. It seems cruel to let this beautiful creature struggle like that but it's crippling if he doesn't...and will kill him in the end.
So it comes back to us - we sheep that we are...God isn't cruel in allowing us to go through hard times. We live in a broken world and if He rescued us or fixed everything before we met the challenge, we'd be weak and ill-equipped to live here and we wouldn't have the desire or wherewithal to begin to help others who struggle in the same areas we do and we'd certainly never reach our destiny or spread our wings and fly. Bad things happen because this world is broken. Sickness comes because our bodies are not made for eternity - they are for this world...and they are born into a sin nature. The moment we are born - the clock starts until we die...if we never learn to walk, we crawl forever -- this has both physical and spiritual implications -- crawling isn't for grown-ups -- neither is spiritual immaturity. I meet adults every day who have never stood on their own 2 feet spiritually. They attend church regularly, read the Bible when they have time, get involved if they want to - but they never grow up spiritually. They may take a Bible study and attend - but don't read the material - they simply wait on the teacher to "spoon-feed" the material to them. When the going gets tough they don't have any foundation and their world comes crashing down and they lash out in anger, create trouble or walk away. Likewise, I also meet adults who have grown callused and hard. They had a fire for a while but hard times caused them to grow cold. They gave up living and quit. Life is merely existence until death. They just don't care anymore. They are wounded and weary and don't think it's worth the bother to grow anymore. They've allowed the cocoon to paralyze them to the point that they may never fly or reach their spiritually destiny. Both types of these people are spiritual crawlers. They've become crippled by their growth because the struggle weighed more than they could take. One is bound by immaturity and the other is bound by past hurts. The cocoon has choked their growth and they don't have the spiritual strength to struggle out of it.
I believe we have a choice in this life. I believe that God is good and that He is happy. I believe He created us to enjoy this life too - but that's not our primary purpose for being here. If we give our lives to Him, we are made for more. We are made to live lives that bring glory to Him. We are made to be a reflection of Him to others in good times and bad times. We are made to serve Him and others so that they see Jesus in us and understand sacrifice. We are made to want more - not material gain - but more of Him. The enemy will tug at our hearts and make us want to escape the hard times - the struggles - just like that caterpillar doesn't enjoy the struggle to get out of the cocoon. But if we'll trust God and keep moving when things get tough - what's on the other side of the struggle is something we could never imagine. I doubt that caterpillars really know or care about their transformation - they just do what they are created to do and don't struggle with sin or self.
I don't know if our "other side" of the cocoon happens here or not. I haven't reached mine yet as far as I can tell. But I do know that we are promised that God knows the plans He has for us - plans to have a hope and a future. (Jeremiah 29:11) I know that Jesus came that we might have life and life more abundantly. (John 10:10) and I know that waiting on the Lord will bring a renewal and will cast us forward to fly higher if we cooperate with Him in the waiting. (Isaiah 40:31). John 10:10 tells us who is at the root of the bad stuff -- "The thief (satan) comes steal, kill and destroy." We are promised that life is seasonal - (Ecclesiastes 3) and that what satan means for evil, God means for good. (Genesis 50:20 and Romans 8:28).
Does this mean that we are always going to have hard times if we follow Christ? No. It means that we have hope when the hard times come and they WILL come. Does it mean that God doesn't love us when He allows hard things to come our way? No. If He allowed His own Son to suffer and bleed and die, in order to accomplish His will and if we believe Romans 8:28 to be true then in ALL things - both good and bad - God will cause to work out for the good for those of us who are called His children.
There is a belief system out there today that is full of lies of the enemy. It's called prosperity gospel. The basis of this belief is that if we have a good enough attitude and if we believe God hard enough then He will bless us abundantly - meaning with money, success, material gain, fame, etc. etc. I truly wonder whose god these people are believing. Jesus was God's only and perfect Son. No one had the capacity to believe God at a deeper level than Jesus when He was on this earth. No one could have had a better attitude than Jesus - he knew he came to die and yet he lived fully while he was here. God didn't bless Jesus with a big home, fancy chariot, a harem, a record deal or book tour. In fact Jesus didn't even have a place of His own to sleep at night. If God didn't "prosper" His own son here on this earth - why in the world would we think we could be good enough or believe hard enough to expect those things to happen to us...
Friends, don't buy into the lies. The enemy wants us to beg God for deliverance from our struggles. I've bought them lock, stock and barrel more times than I can count and prayed and begged God to remove me from situations that were so very hard. But just like the butterfly - we must struggle with our own cocoons (our "selves") in order to break out into the fullness of God's purpose and glory in our lives. If we skip this step, we might as well go from being born right into eternity. God calls us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling. (Philippians 2:12) -- in other words, stay the course - do the thing even when it's hard. We are called to run the course and finish the race for the ultimate goal - to bring glory to God.
I wish you godspeed in your journey. I know this isn't what you usually get on Tips and Tricks Thursday. I'm sorry. My heart just needed to write these things today. Be blessed dear sister or brother and keep walking! I love you! Amy
Well said dear sister and dearest friend! You are working out your salvation with fear and trembling and staying in awe of the One who knows you...who knew you would be at this place in your life. He has chosen to pour His perfect love into your imperfect heart and accessing His love, you can love anyone and get through anything. Stay the course...do not loose hope because our hope is in Him. He is everything we need and more....be real, transparent, and totally dependent on Him. I love you Girlfriend!
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