Week Seventeen Question and Response

Week Seventeen Question:

…can God’s love hold when everything says that His love is a lie, and that there is no such thing as justice? – can we not only believe in the love of God but be more than conquerors, even while we are being starved?

“It does not matter what actual troubles in the most extreme form get hold of a man’s life, not one of them can separate him from his relationship to God.” Chambers  May 19

My Response to Week Seventeen Question:

Chambers’ words from My Utmost for His Highest, dated August 26, echoes my heart and says it all:

“Are you painfully disturbed just now, distracted by the waves and billows of God’s providential permission, and having, as it were, turned over the boulders of your belief, are you still finding no well of peace or joy or comfort; is all barren? Then look up and receive the undisturbedness of the Lord Jesus. Reflected peace is the proof that you are right with God because you are at liberty to turn your mind to Him. If you are not right with God, you can never turn your mind anywhere but on yourself. If you allow anything to hide the face of Jesus Christ from you, you are either disturbed or you have a false security.

Are you looking unto Jesus now, in the immediate matter that is pressing and receiving from Him peace? If so, He will be a gracious benediction of peace in and through you. But if you try to worry it out, you obliterate Him and deserve all you get. We get disturbed because we have not been considering Him. When one confers with Jesus Christ, the perplexity goes because He has no perplexity, and our only concern is to abide in Him. Lay it all out before Him, and in the face of difficulty, bereavement and sorrow, hear Him say, 'Let not your heart be troubled.'”

Lord of all my days, I fix my eyes on You and lay my burdens before Your holy throne of grace. You are my life, my desire, and my peace.

May I Have This Dance?

I had a dream last night. Images from my past – high school days and friends – mostly just silly fleeting faces and situations. But toward the end of the dream, I was sitting on the ground at a gas station playing my guitar. Someone heard me and stopped their car by the side of the road and made suggestions about how I might change the tuning to make the sounds more substantial. I agreed and started to play a song that I made up on the spot.

During what I remember to be the chorus, I heard sweet harmonies blending with my voice. Although I don’t really remember all the words, I knew that the song was a sorrowful love song – I was singing the depths of my heart. I could hear myself sing the last words of the song – “Why don’t you dance with me” as clear, now awake, as when I was dreaming.

In the morning as I thought about my dream, the words kept mulling around my heart. When I sat down to spend time with the Lord, the words kept coming back to me – “Why don’t you dance with me?”

My heart stared to break when I realized that it was the Lord’s voice asking me this. He wanted to “sweep me off my feet” and take me in His arms and rejoice not only with me but in me.

You speak to me: “Come away with me, just for a while. Let me take your weary hand in mine. Let me hold you close

Lord, I release my hold on myself. I repent of the way I’ve delighted in the dance of the world.

I close my eyes and see You take my hand in Yours. The music begins. You hold me close and whisper in my ear, “May I have this dance?”

Jeremiah 2:2: I remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the desert, through a land not sown.

Week Sixteen Question

Week Sixteen Question:

What is the sign of a friend? Have we ever let God tell us any of His joys, or are we telling God our secrets so continually that we leave no room for Him to talk to us?

“The things that make God dear to us are not so much His great big blessings as the tiny things, because they show His amazing intimacy with us; He knows every detail of our individual lives: - Chambers June 3

My Response:

Getting up close and personal with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit – this is why He came.

John Eldredge says it best in his book Beautiful Outlaw:

“The records of Christ are written so you can experience him as they did, this intimate connection with the Father and the Son. John says that you can enjoy the same friendship with Jesus that he knew (refers to 1 John 1:1-3). For this Jesus came.

So, if you do not know Jesus as a person, know his remarkable personality – playful, cunning, fierce, impatient with all that is religious, kind, creative, irreverent, funny – you have been cheated.

If you do not experience Jesus intimately, daily, in these very ways, if you do not know the comfort of his actual presence, do not hear his voice speaking to you personally – you have been robbed.

If you do not know the power of his indwelling life in you, shaping your personality, healing your brokenness, enabling you to live as he did – you have been plundered” (12).

Lord Jesus, do I know my friends better than I know You? Have I excluded Your personality from the equation and reduced You to a pristine statue – hollow and void of emotion or to a distant, universal something? I pray the prayer that Eldredge inserts in his book after the above passage:

“Jesus, show me who you really are. I pray for the tru you. I want the real you. I ask for you. Spirit of God, free me in every way to know Jesus as he really is. Open my eyes to see him. Deliver me from everything false about Jesus and bring me what is true.”

The Light of the World

I was meditating on the things of God the other day and I felt him say to my heart, “I am the Light of the world.” I thought, Wait aren’t we the light of the world? Again I heard, “I am the Light of the world.” Because this was different from the scripture in the New Testament (Mt. 5:14), I was set back some. You always need to check what you’re hearing to what God has already said.

So because I realized that the Lord was not simply stating scripture and wanted me to understand something else, I started to meditate and ask God what He meant by the phrase “I am the Light of the world” and what He wanted me to get out of it.

The first thing that came to mind when thinking about the phrase was that when Moses asked God His name, He said, “I Am who I Am” (Ex. 3:14). He is the eternal, self-existent One. Lord, you are the great I Am, the Lord over all creation. Help me to give my life to you today as a living sacrifice and as an act of worship. Too many times I seem to get absorbed into the busyness of my day and forget who God really is and how He wants to express His eternal love in the everyday things of my life. Yes, Lord, You are the great I Am. Now help me to understand what You mean by light of the world.

I started thinking how the very first thing God created was light (“Let there be light” Genesis 13). The Lord brought me to the idea of how the presence and absence of light affects us - the necessity of light for life. I thought about it for a few days – a few very gray days – and realized that on the days when the sun was not shining, it was harder for me to get going and harder to stay motivated. I am definitely one of those people who gets affected by lack of light. I love the sun. I feel better when it’s shining. I feel more motivated, even healthier. I know, I know – skin cancer and all, but even the medical community is now saying that we should expose ourselves fifteen minutes a day to the sun without sunscreen so our bodies can absorb vitamin D.

Consider this article that discusses the connection between the lack of light and depression:

 The association between darkness and depression is well established. Now a March 25 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals for the first time the profound changes that light deprivation causes in the brain.

Neuroscientists at the University of Pennsylvania kept rats in the dark for six weeks. The animals not only exhibited depressive behavior but also suffered damage in brain regions known to be underactive in humans during depression. The researchers observed neurons that produce norepi-nephrine, dopamine and serotonin—common neurotransmitters involved in emotion, pleasure and cognition—in the process of dying. This neuronal death, which was accompanied in some areas by compromised synaptic connections, may be the mechanism underlying the darkness-related blues of seasonal affective disorder.

Principal investigator Gary Aston-Jones, now at the Medical University of South Carolina, speculates that the dark-induced effects stem from a disruption of the body’s clock. “When the circadian system is not receiving normal light, that in turn might lead to changes in brain systems that regulate mood,” he says.*

OK, Lord, I get it now, what you wanted me to know. That you are the great I Am and without the sustaining power of your light, the essence of your greatness and power, I will be negatively affected – the world will be negatively affected. Light is necessary for health – in the natural and in the spiritual.

Thank you Lord for your desire to speak to my heart, my soul and my mind.

*http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=down-in-the-dark

(Editor's Note: This story was originally printed with the title "Down in the Dark")

Week Fifteen Question

Week Fifteen Question:

The one great challenge is - Do I know my Risen Lord? Do I know the power of His indwelling Spirit? Am I wise enough in God’s sight, and foolish enough according to the world, to bank on what Jesus Christ has said, or am I abandoning the great supernatural position, which is the only call for a missionary, viz., boundless confidence in Christ Jesus?

“Jesus Christ did not say – Go and save souls (the salvation of souls is the supernatural work of God) but – “Go and teach,” i.e. disciple, “all nations,” and you cannot make disciples unless you are a disciple yourself.” – Chambers October 27

My Response to Week Fifteen Question:

When Jesus told Peter, “Feed my sheep” (not just once but three times I might add), He was speaking to all of us. I heard the call to feed God’s sheep many years ago, and He has made me a teacher. But is the teacher teachable?

What am I teaching? What I’ve read? What I’ve heard? What I’ve seen? Or am I teaching what I know – what I’ve gotten directly from God myself? A religious person simply “begets” religion, but a disciple of Jesus Christ "begets" disciples of Jesus Christ.

What will your legacy be?

He Will Not Forsake You

Lately, I have been surrounded by doubts – oh, not the BIG doubts as to whether God exists or if I’m saved, but the little doubts that creep in, like: am I putting my hands to what God would have me do or am I just wandering aimlessly? And if I am in God’s will, why does it seem like He has disappeared in the work – where is the evidence of His approval – the blessings, the success?

Yes, I like the blessings – there, I admit it. When it comes to business affairs, it seems that the accepted meter of whether or not God is in it or that you are right with God is success.

When you pour your heart (and money I might add) into something for two years, and it appears that you are sinking fast, do you continue – stay the course?

I suppose that if I knew without reserve that I was definitely following God’s lead I would continue no matter what happened. But along the way, I have found that I am not so sure anymore. Everyone cites the economy – bad time to grow a business – but I’ve always believed that God is above the unpredictability of the economy. I really do believe it.

So this morning in my angst over failing financial statements and bleak prospects, I stopped listening to the voices of fear and doom and gloom and went to God’s word. I was willing to have Him tell me – “Look, you’ve strayed, you missed it – you’re not only off base, you’re in another game altogether.”

But in His quiet, still small voice, He ministered to my fear of failure, my fear of abandonment – my fear of disappointing Him.

I pray you will let His words of life into your fear today.

I Chronicles 28: 9-10; 19-20

 “…acknowledge and learn about, recognize, experience, and confess the God of your father, and serve him, be tilled like the soil for him with wholehearted devotion, with complete and perfect peace and with a willing mind, emotion, appetite, and passion that delights in God, for the Lord searches and seeks with care every heart – the soul, the understanding, the mind, and the will and understands, discerns, perceives and regards every motive and purpose behind your thoughts, plans, inventions, and purposes.

If you seek, resort to, frequent, and consult him, he will be found by you; He will acquire and fall in with you; but if you forsake, leave, abandon, forsake, neglect, and depart from him, he will reject and spurn you forever because of the stench of your sin. Consider now, perceive, regard, give attention to, watch, learn, observe, and have vision for the Lord has chosen and selected you to build up and establish a family and rebuild a house as a sanctuary and sacred place. Be strong, prevail, be firm, be secure and do the work – accomplish it, act with effect, produce, prepare, attend to, and bring it about it.

All this, said David, the LORD made me understand, to have insight and comprehension in writing – every character and letter - by his hand, strength, and power upon me, even all the works, business and service of this image and pattern.

Be strong, firm, bold, be caught fast – and give strength and be courageous, solid, brave, determined and do, produce, make, and attend to the work.

Do not be afraid or feel dread nor be discouraged, broken, shattered, and afraid, for the Lord God, my God, is with you. He will not fail you, let you sink or withdraw from you; He will not forsake, desert, abandon or neglect you …”

Week Fourteen Question and Response

Week Fourteen Question:

Have you anything to hide from God? Are you willing to obey your Lord and Master whatever the humiliation to your right to yourself may be?

“Never discard a conviction. You were looking for a great thing to give up. God is telling you of some tiny thing; but at the back of it there lies the central citadel of obstinacy: I will not give up my right to myself-the thing God intends you to give up if ever you are going to be a disciple of Jesus Christ” – Chambers September 24

My Response to Week Fourteen Question:

In the center of myself, there is a throne – a throne where my will sits, giving orders, demanding supremacy in all aspects of my life. There is room for only one King on this throne. Either Christ is enthroned or I am – there is no sharing because the One who sits on the throne must give all to sit there.

If I sit there, I give over peace, joy and forfeit grace because all things flow from me, the King on the throne. On my own, there is no inner peace or lasting joy and grace is a just meager, superficial concession.

If Christ sits there, all things spring from Him – peace beyond understanding and circumstance, joy that is not emotion-dependent, and grace, oh, the sweet grace of forgiveness.

All this is possible because He has given all – everything – He did not withhold anything, so He can give everything.  

Jesus, Savior, and Lord, You have given all so You could give it to me. Help me to obey and release.