The Lord woke me up a little after 4 a.m. one morning recently. I won’t bore you with sordid details of my background but I will share this; that over the course of my life God has called me to what I now understand to be the Ministry of Reconciliation. With that said, there have been many times when He shared something with me concerning this ministry whether matters of the heart, forgiveness, restoration, etc. and I am compelled to break my silence at that moment. So here is what He shared with me this particular morning…
We are in a time when we must no longer waver between two opinions. (See 1 Kings 18:21) God is calling for our hearts. That includes much more of us than we are usually willing to give up. Even when we feel we’ve given our all, He requires more. We don’t like the word “requires” because it is a mandate. We hate giving our control to someone else and we have bought the lie of Satan that we can be our own boss and god. We don’t want to admit it but it is evident in the self-help, self-reliance, self-determination and self-esteem thinking we have adopted over the years. Looking at the lucrative self-help industry which includes talk shows, videos, books and even ministries; we can not deny its effect on our society, families, churches and our lives. We want to be individuals, taken seriously and doing what makes us happy. We want to purse happiness but what about godliness? God has called us to be God-help, God-reliant, God-determined and God-esteem people!
Now it is easy for us to hear/read this and feel like responding in our words by ‘amen’ing or preaching our own message but we must allow the Holy Spirit to discipline us to the point where we take moments to pray and reflect inwardly. We need to allow the Word of God to penetrate the dividing of soul and spirit in our lives. (See Hebrews 4:12)
Let’s meditate on this. God is calling us to give Him all of us. Not just the small parts of our days we are willing to give up because they don’t conflict with our own agendas the rest of the day. Not just the few seconds we decide use to forward an encouraging email to our entire email contact list. Not just when we go to church or watch church services on our TVs or computers while sitting there thinking about all the other things we are going to do as soon as we are done with our “God moment”. Not just our MySpace, Facebook and Twitter status updates. Not just when we decided not to curse at someone who really gets on our nerves anyway. Not just when we decide that we will “submit” in action but not in our hearts to our boss, spouse or other leader while in our hearts we are sucking our teeth and rolling our eyes. We think God does not see but He does.
To be continued next week…
