Wow. So much to thank God for right now!
First, I owe you the revealing of the pending explanation of the Ecclesiastes verse. I believe God used that verse to have me wrestle with the wrong mentalities (found among other correct ones) in Ecclessiastes. He spoke how He has designed me to be a a harbinger of joy. My design and the mentality of "well, everything is meaningless, so I guess I'll just do what I can and hope that's enough" don't match at ALL. The humorous thing is that for a good while earlier this semester I felt like my wheels were stuck in the mud. To spoil the ending of these revelations, it all comes down to this: obey God. I stayed in the dirt and God made it rain. All the teaching I received in Sweden had primed my heart for an explosion of God's power at Olaf and for a new earnestness found in the sweetness of Christ alone, not born of my brothers and sisters. God prepared my heart with list of three things I would focus on: Relationships, Musical worship, and Art (I now see that this is also a tier of importance).
I suffered heavy wounds from the disconnect between the vision I had and the actuality of my own heart which could not get over the faults I saw in the path I was walking (studying English and Art, my specific classes) and frustration settled in. I simply would not agree that the circumstances He placed me in were appropriate. The artifice in my heart (false humility, not being real with God) showed me that although I can learn a thing (like walking in His Spirit no matter what) it is completely and only ever God who can do the actual change in the heart to line up a life with Truth (because in not agreeing with Him I let my judgement of the experience dictate His faithfulness). Somehow I forgot that the first tier, Relationships, also has a sub-tier. And God is the first.
Reader's Digest version of how this affected my life:
Things God did regardless of my lack of obedience: speak truth to me through friends, taught me about receiving gentle love, gave me a specific area of the Enemy's influence to pray over, increased responsibility and gifting in musical worship (praise God for the church!)
Things that were hindered by my disobedience: lack of joy, lack of desire to bring Glory to God, annoyance with things I normally love, disheartenment, lack of revelation from God (I mean, how can you receive it if you don't ask for it or won't take it when He gives it to you?), lack of faithfulness in praying for specific works, less poetry writing, less photography, less letter writing, doubt about whether messages God had given me in the past for the campus really mattered anymore.
You guys, everything in the second grouping COMPLETELY STINKS. It IS like Ecclesiastes 4:3: better to be unborn! WHAT?!
The passage Max gave me talks a lot about Wisdom. What is our wisdom? God. The Spirit of God which guides us in all truth shelters us and preserves us (Ecc 7:12). He purifies those who submit to Him, and Jesus is coming back to restore all things, therefore "the end of a matter is better than its beginning" (7:8) We are not to look backwards because, as Paul says, we strive to lay hold of that for which He laid hold of us. So I was a fool to question "Why were the old days better than these?" (7:10) because the freshness of His Spirit is OF COURSE better than yesterday's manna!
Praise God!
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