Blogs to God: 10/30/12 | Parchment and Pen:
Lord, I am thankful to you that I have yet to experience anything like the dreaded time of 2010. I still don’t know the reason such a depth of depression came upon me, and you know that I am weary of trying to figure it out.
When I left you for those three days, I have never felt so lost. My life–-you—were taken from me. Along with that all meaning, hope, and happiness. My faith was gone and along with it any hope for joy. My kids were rocks, my wife was a plant, and all people were, to me, as worthless as a scrap of metal. That is what life is like without you. I understand that now. My best thought are that you were teaching me what it was to be in such darkness. I had never experienced it before. Yes, you know, there are many times when I think “Is this all really true?” But such thoughts until that dreaded day on March 15, 2010 at 12:01pm were merely fleeting. At least they were fleeting until the crash of my soul. For three days you allowed a coroner’s blanket to be laid over my spirit. I know now that if I were to have died during this time, I would be with you know. I think I even knew it then. Somehow I knew you were responsible. I knew that you were teaching me a lesson. But it will take me many more years to realize the purpose of such things.
Has a child ever woken up to see their parents were dead? That feeling could be said to have shared the land of my darkness, but it still was close to the shore. My darkness was even more hopeless. My cries were even more desperate.
But you rescued me from the despair. You pulled me up out of the mire.
You know how I second guess all things. I often have to pray for forgiveness for my own skepticism. I often resemble those deists who say you are uninvolved more than I do my confession which says you will never leave me or forsake me. I admit, I have felt forsaken many times before. But what do you expect? Did you not create our ability to experience life? Is that not a reality from which we saturate our mind with knowledge and truth. If I experience getting into my car and driving to my mom’s, is the experience not enough to permit belief that I did follow such a path? You are the God of history, not just the God of the Bible. You move in our lives and we are to attempt to perceive it. Yet you don’t talk, ring door bells, or knock books off the table, or send deer when we want to see them, or heal upon our calls, or show even your shadow across the wall. I have to rely upon the experience of others. Is this enough? Yes, it is enough to believe, and you know I do believe. However, oh God of history and experience, I would like you to show up in a way that crosses that breach that those dreaded angels proclaimed when they said “this Jesus has been taken from you.”
But you did show up. You showed up when my faith was taken from me with no warning. It was a dramatic entrance and a confusing entrance. However, you showed up again when my faith returned three days later. I have no ability to explain this other than that you cross that experiential divide. It was a miracle. Have some doctor show me that it was not. Have an explanation that it was some medical or chemical problem in my body and I would be relieved. I would be relieved mostly because I would be able to explain it and control it. I would set up precautions so that it could never happen again. That dreaded doubt. That dreaded unbelief. Make it far from me for you know it was not the desire of my heart. But it was a miracle. It was one of two miracles in my life. The first was when you miraculously had me find my sister before she killed herself. I don’t know why you did not send me the night—oh dark night–that she finished her work. Yet, it was a miracle. The day you took my faith and the day you gave it back was the day that I said to myself “The Lord has shown up again, yet, aain, in a very odd way.”
But from that dark day, I learned something by experience that was but mere doctrinal confession before. I learned that faith is something that you give. You alone Lord control the will. You alone can break through the heart of unbelief. Oh how I wanted to believe those three days. I begged for you to give me my faith back. I wept in fear. I wept in confusion. I wept as I was lost in a meaningless void. I do understand. You are the one who gives faith. I went through all the logic and evidence for your reality. It all made sense, but I just could not believe. I suppose that you were giving me a sight of what those who are in darkness see. I suppose that you were showing me that the will of man cannot open the door of belief. We can get to that door, we can know that we need in, but we don’t have the power to open it.
Thank you for opening it for me again on March 13, 2010. Please don’t ever close it again. Please, please don’t leave your children who are in despair outside crying. Your love is greater than mine. Your purpose is greater than mind. But that darkness is too dark. Please let me help your children who cry in darkness.
Oct 31, 2012
Oct 25, 2012
Submitting to God’s Purpose
A Christian worker has to learn how to be God’s man or woman of great worth and excellence in the midst of a multitude of meager and worthless things. Never protest by saying, “If only I were somewhere else!” All of God’s people are ordinary people who have been made extraordinary by the purpose He has given them. Unless we have the right purpose intellectually in our minds and lovingly in our hearts, we will very quickly be diverted from being useful to God. We are not workers for God by choice. Many people deliberately choose to be workers, but they have no purpose of God’s almighty grace or His mighty Word in them. Paul’s whole heart, mind, and soul were consumed with the great purpose of what Jesus Christ came to do, and he never lost sight of that one thing. We must continually confront ourselves with one central fact— “. . . Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2).
“I chose you . . .” (John 15:16). Keep these words as a wonderful reminder in your theology. It is not that you have gotten God, but that He has gotten you. God is at work bending, breaking, molding, and doing exactly as He chooses. And why is He doing it? He is doing it for only one purpose— that He may be able to say, “This is My man, and this is My woman.” We have to be in God’s hand so that He can place others on the Rock, Jesus Christ, just as He has placed us.
Never choose to be a worker, but once God has placed His call upon you, woe be to you if you “turn aside . . . to the right or the left . . .” (Deuteronomy 28:14). He will do with you what He never did before His call came to you, and He will do with you what He is not doing with other people. Let Him have His way.
We have no right to judge where we should be put, or to have preconceived notions as to what God is fitting us for. God engineers everything; wherever He puts us, our one great aim is to pour out a whole-hearted devotion to Him in that particular work. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”
Oct 19, 2012
The Unheeded Secret
The great enemy of the Lord Jesus Christ today is the idea of practical work that has no basis in the New Testament but comes from the systems of the world. This work insists upon endless energy and activities, but no private life with God. The emphasis is put on the wrong thing. Jesus said, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation . . . . For indeed, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:20-21). It is a hidden, obscure thing. An active Christian worker too often lives to be seen by others, while it is the innermost, personal area that reveals the power of a person’s life.
We must get rid of the plague of the spirit of this religious age in which we live. In our Lord’s life there was none of the pressure and the rushing of tremendous activity that we regard so highly today, and a disciple is to be like His Master. The central point of the kingdom of Jesus Christ is a personal relationship with Him, not public usefulness to others.
It is not the practical activities that are the strength of this Bible Training College— its entire strength lies in the fact that here you are immersed in the truths of God to soak in them before Him. You have no idea of where or how God is going to engineer your future circumstances, and no knowledge of what stress and strain is going to be placed on you either at home or abroad. And if you waste your time in overactivity, instead of being immersed in the great fundamental truths of God’s redemption, then you will snap when the stress and strain do come. But if this time of soaking before God is being spent in getting rooted and grounded in Him, which may appear to be impractical, then you will remain true to Him whatever happens.
Oct 5, 2012
The Place of Ministry
His disciples asked Him privately, ’Why could we not cast it out?’ ” (Mark 9:28). The answer lies in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. “This kind can come out by nothing but” concentrating on Him, and then doubling and redoubling that concentration on Him. We can remain powerless forever, as the disciples were in this situation, by trying to do God’s work without concentrating on His power, and by following instead the ideas that we draw from our own nature. We actually slander and dishonor God by our very eagerness to serve Him without knowing Him.
When you are brought face to face with a difficult situation and nothing happens externally, you can still know that freedom and release will be given because of your continued concentration on Jesus Christ. Your duty in service and ministry is to see that there is nothing between Jesus and yourself. Is there anything between you and Jesus even now? If there is, you must get through it, not by ignoring it as an irritation, or by going up and over it, but by facing it and getting through it into the presence of Jesus Christ. Then that very problem itself, and all that you have been through in connection with it, will glorify Jesus Christ in a way that you will never know until you see Him face to face.
We must be able to “mount up with wings like eagles” (Isaiah 40:31), but we must also know how to come down. The power of the saint lies in the coming down and in the living that is done in the valley. Paul said, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13) and what he was referring to were mostly humiliating things. And yet it is in our power to refuse to be humiliated and to say, “No, thank you, I much prefer to be on the mountaintop with God.” Can I face things as they actually are in the light of the reality of Jesus Christ, or do things as they really are destroy my faith in Him, and put me into a panic?
The Vision and The Reality
Thank God for being able to see all that you have not yet been. You have had the vision, but you are not yet to the reality of it by any means. It is when we are in the valley, where we prove whether we will be the choice ones, that most of us turn back. We are not quite prepared for the bumps and bruises that must come if we are going to be turned into the shape of the vision. We have seen what we are not, and what God wants us to be, but are we willing to be battered into the shape of the vision to be used by God? The beatings will always come in the most common, everyday ways and through common, everyday people.
There are times when we do know what God’s purpose is; whether we will let the vision be turned into actual character depends on us, not on God. If we prefer to relax on the mountaintop and live in the memory of the vision, then we will be of no real use in the ordinary things of which human life is made. We have to learn to live in reliance upon what we saw in the vision, not simply live in ecstatic delight and conscious reflection upon God. This means living the realities of our lives in the light of the vision until the truth of the vision is actually realized in us. Every bit of our training is in that direction. Learn to thank God for making His demands known.
Our little “I am” always sulks and pouts when God says do. Let your little “I am” be shriveled up in God’s wrath and indignation–”I AM WHO I AM . . . has sent me to you” (Exodus 3:14). He must dominate. Isn’t it piercing to realize that God not only knows where we live, but also knows the gutters into which we crawl! He will hunt us down as fast as a flash of lightning. No human being knows human beings as God does.
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