Nothing is Happening Part 2

Once I prayed with great anguish:  “Lord, I’ve prayed and prayed for You to use me, and nothing is happening.”  The answer I received in my spirit was awesome.  I sensed the Lord saying to me:  “Child, are you willing to let me use you, even if I don’t reveal to you what I am doing?  If I use you mightily, in the dark so to speak, and you become aware of it, might you not become puffed up?  If you begin to think too highly of yourself, you may take over the work yourself and cease to be my servant.”

Nothing is Happening

It may seem to us that nothing is happening in our lives, but that is not true, for God is never idle.  When it appears quiet, He is always working behind the scenes, preparing people and circumstances for His future plans.  If God has placed a dream in your heart, He will fulfill it.  If He delays, something is not yet ready.  It will be.  Just follow Him today and do those things He has put in your path today.  Perhaps you are doing a work right now of which you are not even aware.  We may be so surprised in eternity to find how mightily He has used us when we didn’t even know it.  It is, after all, all about Him.  We are simple servants.

The Prodigal Son

The story of the prodigal son is so famous in our culture, even people who don’t know the origin of the story know the word “prodigal” to mean someone who is rebellious and estranged from family.  The original story told by Jesus has many different lessons contained in it,and to fully understand, it has to be looked at through the prism of ancient Hebrew culture.

The son who asked for his inheritance committed a sin, which in that culture deserved the death sentence.  He not only denied his father any respect, he as much as said “I wish you were dead because I only care about the wealth I will get.”  His father, unbelievably, gave him his inheritance, and further disrespect followed.  The prodigal son sold his portion of the land.  In Hebrew culture, the land was a gift from God, never to be sold.  With the money he got from the sale, he left his father, his country, his culture and in all that as well as spending his money in “wild living” he trashed every one of his father’s values.

When the money ran out, he found himself friendless and starving.  He hired himself out to a pig farmer.  The pig was considered filthy in his native culture, yet he was so hungry he wanted to eat with the pigs and was denied even that.  The story says “he came to his senses”.  There’s hope in that little phrase.  God often brings people to a place where they see the light.  God gave this young man such a longing for home, he was willing to risk throwing himself on his father’s mercy.  He recognized being a slave in his father’s house was better than his present situation.

When he comes home, the story shows the father seeing him “from afar”, meaning the father has been watching the horizon.  When he recognizes his son, he runs to him.  This was unheard of in this culture.  This son had wronged the father, and the father’s running to the son was the height of indignity.  Then he threw himself on the son, hugging the young man who probably reeked of pigs.  The father bestows all the symbols of sonship on his son once again, the ring, the robe and the sandals.  There was no earning of this favor.  It was sheer mercy.  Then the father throws a party.

This is a picture of God.  God is a father who so loves his errant children, there should be no fear, ever, in returning home to him.

Another interesting part of the story is the reaction of the older son, who is jealous of all the attention being paid to his treasonous brother.  He had, after all, been the perfect son, staying behind, caring for the father’s interests, and doing a double share of the work.  However, it is clear he also wants something from his father.  He wants recognition and reward.  He wants to be considered better than his brother.  He is a model of the religious person who hopes to earn reward from God by “being good enough”.  He hopes to earn through works what the father gives through grace.  He has no understanding of his father’s heart, nor does he truly love his father.

The summary of the whole story is this father has two sons who neither love him nor appreciate him for who he is.  None of their actions show a care for the father or a putting of the Father’s interests first.  In that way, neither of the sons is truly the better son.  Both are in the relationship for what they can get out of it.  One is just more socially acceptable.

Again, we see the father who loves both his sons when neither has earned the father’s love.  How like God and his human children.  Who of us can say we truly put God first.  Who of us can say we truly love God with our whole heart, mind, soul and strength.  Thank God, through his grace and revelation of himself, some of us are beginning to come to our senses.  He has a long way to take us yet, before we understand His heart, appreciate Him and begin to become like Him.

Grateful for Faith

I feel overwhelmed today.  I just feel so much gratitude for my Christian faith.  I remember a time when I wasn’t sure that God existed.  I didn’t know the history of Jesus, and how he rose from the dead.  I didn’t know all the proofs that he is God.  I didn’t know His promises of eternal life.  I was afraid of death.  I was afraid of bad happenings after death.  I was also afraid that death might be the end.

Humans are the only beings on earth with self awareness.  We know we exist.  We are able to wonder why we exist.  We are aware of our mortality.  We are able to wonder what happens after our death.  Our awareness would be cruel if we didn’t have any answers, or if our lives were so short and death was final.  What would be the purpose of all we learned and all the loves in our lives?  What would be the point of a love that was so great you couldn’t believe it would one day die, if that were all there was…the death of love.  But then I began to learn and discover the promises of Jesus Christ.

No other religion has the promise of the Christian faith.  With some religions the best I can hope for is some kind of melding with the eternal–a loss of my self.  With other religions, I can only hope for some eternal reward from a God who is quite unknowable, not at all personal, and quite arbitrary.  With other religions, notably atheism and agnosticism, I can hope for, well, nothing at all.  That is my best hope with atheism–that there is nothing following this life.

Christian faith offers a personal God, a God who has had our experience of human life and understands what that is like to be human.  Christian faith offers the promise of God that life can be forever.  Christian faith offers the love of God, grace, forgiveness and the promise of a future home being prepared just for us.  It is backed up by the historical evidence of Jesus life, the miracles that proved his credibility as God, and His resurrection which proves His promise of eternal life to be true.  The resurrection of Jesus is one of the best attested facts in history.  If one were to throw out His history, we would have to throw out history books completely. 

I’m grateful for the Christian faith’s promises, I am grateful for a God who loves his creatures, and I am grateful He never made it necessary for our faith in Him to be a blind faith.

Suffering

I have just finished reading the book of Job in the bible.  He is a very familiar name in our culture, and even unbelievers have frequently heard of him and associate him with suffering.  Job was a person who had literally lost everything but his life.  He lost his children, possessions, health, and apparently the love and respect of his wife.  His many, many questions are questions we ourselves have asked.  His number one question, asked in different ways was “What did I do to deserve this?”  He kept answering his own question in various ways, insisting he did nothing to deserve it.  While that may have been true in the context of the story (Satan inflicted the suffering on Job, trying to prove to God that people only use God and do not love or trust Him), Job was trying to insist he was righteous, and of course that is not true.  None of us are righteous.  While we can’t understand God’s purposes in allowing our suffering , we can know that evil does not come from God, but only from the evil one.  God only allows people to suffer in order to accomplish a purpose beyond our understanding.  The book of Job shows us there are workings in the heavenlies that we cannot see or hear.  It shows us that God does care about our welfare.  The book of Job shows us that God somehow more than makes it up to us when we have suffered.  It shows us that God is so far above our ability to comprehend Him that our inability to understand our suffering is a foregone conclusion.   Don’t we trust him when He is doing what we perceive as good?  We never question why he allows good things to happen to us.  The only question remaining, is whether we will trust this magnificent, awesome, almighty God no matter what happens.  The challenge is whether we will love Him.  Thank God He came to us in human form in the person of Jesus Christ.  We can know He understands our human weakness, our faulty understanding, our questions and our pain.  He suffered more than any of us can imagine.  And, really, we don’t even understand completely why Jesus had to suffer as He did.  May God accept our praise and thanksgiving.  He understands how limited even that can be, and He loves us as we are.

In Winter

I have been praying a long time for a person who is very smart, talented, charming, and was at one time quite beautiful.  She has become bitter over her disappointment in life, depressed, angry, and seems to have little of her beauty left.  I pray for her daily, and my heart aches for what could be. 

I had a dream last night, and in my dream I was rubbing my hands over the stump of a rose bush.  There was not a trace of life left in it.  In my dream I heard God’s voice say: ” Can you believe in the roses inside?  When spring comes, the life will come back and this stump will once again bloom with beautiful fragrant roses”.   I understood, even though dreaming, this was God’s answer to my prayer for my friend.  I must have faith to believe roses are there in embryo form, although I can’t yet see them.  I have hope to believe  the life will come back, although I see no hint of it now.  I do know roses bloom every spring from lifeless twigs, and I do know God does bring renewal, to roses, to nature and to human souls.

This too shall pass

I have been reading the Old Testament of the Bible, the stories.  Stories tell truth in a different way than the other books.  Prophecy tells truth often symbolically, or it tells of a time yet unknown.  Doctrinal books tell truth directly and those books are chock full of truth and have to be read slowly.  Wisdom books tell the truth in often witty ways, but again the truth is compact and has to be taken slowly.  The stories tell truth more indirectly.  After reading many of the stories, one gets a sense of God’s truth through the repetitiveness of how he acts or speaks in the stories.  This truth settles slowly, almost imperceptibly, then suddenly you, the reader, realize you’ve been given quite a deep picture of God without being aware of how its coming about.

One of the pictures of God I get from the Old Testament stories is that God never lets evil just go on indefinitely.  Even though the evil is hated by God, it doesn’t control him.  Quite the opposite.  He always has the situation covered.  He knows what will happen and often directly turns the circumstances of evil into good for His own people.  Evil always has a definite end in God’s sight, both a real end in time, and an end in the sense that it is being used for His purposes.

The other theme I see is that God doesn’t allow evil to continue indefinitely IN his people either.  He will deal with it.  Because He knows hearts and attitudes, he sometimes deals directly through revelation to the person, allowing His grace to become a vehicle for change in a persons life.  Other times, he abruptly ends the person’s life.  Its quite awe inspiring, rather like watching one’s dad go to battle to defend you, or having him quite sternly rebuke or punish you. 

Nothing lasts forever, but God, and those who are His.