We, in the church world, have often tried to approach God through our formulas. For example, if I do A + B, God will do C. Hey, sometimes it works! But what I find as I know God more is that He loves mystery. Yes, He does have principles in His Word that are immutable, unchangeable, sure, and firm. In fact, it is not his principles that I am speaking of. It’s His ways. And they are mysterious.

When someone tries to sell you a gospel of formulas, you need to beware. Formulas can be our attempt to control God.  He is untamable and mysterious. Our individual journeys with Him are just that, individual. Yes, we can learn about God’s ways. We can learn His truths. We can learn His precepts. But applying them and living daily as believers in covenant with God through Christ, filled with His Spirit, involves mystery. He daily invites us into the mystery. He is doing something uniquely individual in each of us.

From the beginning of time, as God’s Spirit hovered, moving in creation, the mysteriousness of God has invited us in.

The mysteries of God are not meant to make Him unreachable. They are not designed to confuse us. They are designed to draw us into Him. To lead us to seek Him out. To intrigue us.

When you find yourself facing life and faced with questions, feel invited! You are being invited deeper into the mysteries of God. Living in His mysteries is living in the richest, most beautiful depths of Him.

To define our God as one who can easily be explained by a formula is to limit Him to the parameters of our humanity. His ways are truly beyond our natural knowledge. In this life, we can only glimpse into His amazing  ways.

To define our God in ways that box Him in is an attempt to make Him safe. And as John Eldredge so wonderfully says, God is anything but safe. Oh, He is altogether good, but life with Him is not to be thought of as a safe formula bound trip. It is an amazing adventure!

I find this is true when we think of how God brings healing to us. Yes, there are principles God Himself has instituted for us. But then those principles are subject to the mysterious ways of God. Again, this is not meant to make God sound confusing (although can we admit that His ways are confusing to us at times as we try to make Him fit our formulas).

I think the mysteriousness of God’s ways is, in part, necessary for our humility. When I bow at His feet in awe at how He has worked something bad for my good, I acknowledge His mysteriousness and my humanity.

When my life fell apart at its seams, I had no way to know that God was redesigning me, doing deep corrective surgery, and bringing an opportunity for the deepest healing I’d ever known. Now that is mysterious!

As layer upon layer of my life progressively shattered, I came face to face with my own deep brokenness. God offered me a gift. Would I, in one hand, hold the pain and grief, acknowledging my own humanness, and at the same time, in the other hand, hold the truth about Him? That He is all-knowing, ever present, promising never to leave me or forsake me? Could both things be true?

Would I acknowledge that God, in His mysteriousness, was at work in my life during what appeared to be utter disaster? Oh, it took me a while. Honestly, for a while I questioned the reality of God. Had everything I had based my life on been an illusion? And God allowed me to wrestle with Him. In fact, He invited me to.

Faith can look into mystery, darkness, complexity, ambiguity, and doubt, and come out on the other side, stronger still.

Eve, in the Garden, wanted to know all the mysteries of God. She thought in a formula. (The tree is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) + (I eat its fruit) = I will be like God.

Mary, the mother of Jesus, pondered, waiting, willing to not know. Was that hard? Oh yes, her heart was torn apart, yet she one day saw the wonder of the coming of the Spirit and the birthing of the church. One day she bowed at Jesus’ feet in heaven as the mystery became clear.

As we walk through this life, there will be unexplainable, painful events and seasons for all of us. There will be things we cannot fix. There will be no formula that works. And it will be during those times, that we are afforded the greatest opportunities to know Him.

We will find that our healing is not sequenced but is in the context of mystery. Then we can truly say that there is no one like our God, who brings good out of bad, life out of death, miracles out of disasters, and hope out of darkness.

Will you look into the mysteries of your life and acknowledge that God, and God alone, is able to transform your life? Doing so will mean giving up control, and your formulas, and your well-intentioned best-laid plans, and will make it possible for you to join God on the great adventure He has destined for you!

 

 

 

I’ve been quite committed to the upward journey of knowing God for most of the past 30 years, and yet in the last two years, I have found that He is not only committed to me in my journey to know Him, but He is committed to my journey to know others and myself.

The more I have learned about myself, the more I have found my commitment to being in control of my life, which may sound like all that and a bag of chips for after all, shouldn’t we be in control of our own stuff, but the truth I have found in my journey is that I am not really in control at all.

I am, in fact, powerless. 

Yes, I can do all things through Christ but somehow the last part of that verse often eludes me…Who gives me strength…

And this is where I get screwed up. The tension is between my being able to do all things and my total dependence on Christ to give me the strength.

How do we live in this place?  I believe it is the place of true discipleship. True dependence upon Him.

Somewhere along the way, we often either become prideful and dependent upon our own selves or we come to believe we are complete failures, which is yet another way of being too self-important, another way of saying, “It is all about me.”

The treadmill of self-sufficiency is so subtle, so insidious, so deceptive, and goes all the way back to the beginning of time and the initial deception of mankind.

God has been showing me a path which leads to life and the path is one of utter dependence upon Him. It’s not an easy path to stay on. I so easily revert back to my faulty patterns of living. We all are, umm, well, should I say, hell-bent, on finding our own ways?  Surely God would not require us to be utterly dependent upon Him? It is so, well, offensive, to suggest I am nothing without Him. My flesh resists such an idea!

Jesus said, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it.” Luke 9:23-24

And yet, our modus operandi is to lean wholly on our own wisdom to live.

Self-sufficiency doesn’t die easily. Faced with one failure, we often just take our same ways of thinking, our same patterns of relating, and repackage them, while all the while God waits for us to deny our own abilities and lean fully on Him.

The challenge, no, the opportunity, is to give up. Give up our self-strength. Give up our self-wisdom. Give up our self-sufficiency. Give up our control, and give in to God’s control.

Admitting our powerlessness gives us hope for we all know, somewhere down deep within ourselves, that our attempts to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s in our lives, falls short of perfection. We may get one thing right, but another one falls between the cracks. When we can admit that, in and of ourselves, we will never be able to control this life, then we are in a position to receive hope and power for it is at that very place, with our self-sufficiency lying broken at the feet of Jesus, that we can receive His all-sufficiency.

The divine exchange. His strength for my weakness. His wholeness for my brokenness. His victory for my failure. His power for my powerlessness.

Life is about the journey to see our need for the exchange. As we surrender, bit by bit, day by day, to His power and His plan, we become whole. We become vessels of His glory instead of our own.

We’d be a fool to be unwilling to take His offer for this exchange, and so often we are just that – stubborn, prideful, foolish, resisting His help, like a two-year old who screams, “No, I do it myself!”

Would you offer this prayer to God today along with me?

May you find, as I am finding, that giving up and giving in is the way we grow up in Him. It is the pathway to living dependent upon His grace and receiving the victory that He gives.

 

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately some Christians’ theology denies the place of pain and suffering in the Christian life. This is a tragedy because such a theology shames a believer when they try to make sense of their trials and suggests that a good Christian, a faith-filled Christian, wouldn’t be subject to such difficulties. It is also unfortunate because it shames or rejects one of the primary paths to knowing God and becoming useful to Him and others.

The reality of living in a sin-cursed world has to be reconciled to the heart of God. God never intended us to live under the curse of sin and in the end all will be restored to us as it was in the Garden of Eden. And we are in a process of restoration. However an honest Christian faith which represents an honest Christian God must deal with the truth about pain and suffering in order to throw the rope of faith to struggling believers in the midst of difficulty.

My life has not been exempt from pain and suffering although I am certain mine has been far less than many others’. Yet from my personal walk I can offer a few thoughts which can help you make it through hard times and become better. As I begin this list, I am going to assume that you know prayer is important. I am going to assume that you know the Word is important. I am going to assume that you know communion with God is important. My intention is to focus on some of the other things that I have learned as a result of my trials.

1.       God is giving you an opportunity to know more of His heart. He is working to reveal a greater knowledge of Himself to you. He wants to use this difficulty to deepen your relationship. He is teaching you that He is faithful. We really can’t understand what God’s faithfulness is until we feel abandoned and eventually, and I said eventually, wind up in the place where we can see His handiwork. When I walked through my darkest storm 2 years ago, I felt abandoned by so many and by God most of all. God allowed it and He used it.

 

2.       God is giving you an opportunity to know more of your own heart. God knows your heart better than you do. He is working to teach you more about your own heart. This is a priceless gift from His hand. Contrary to what you might think at first, I am not talking about how dark your heart is. I am talking about how God uses every storm to reveal your woundedness, your unwholeness, which is hindering your relationship with Him and others. For example, my storm brought up every core issue in my life. The fear of abandonment. Rejection. And on and on, but here’s the point. God is getting at something – or many things – inside you. When you know your heart better, you can recognize the lies of the enemy when they come against you again.

 

3.       God wants to use your storm to make you better.  Your faith will be tested and tried and PURIFIED.   There is nothing too dark, too black, too hopeless, too hard, that God cannot use it for your glory.   As 2 Cor. 4:17 says, our afflictions are working something greater in us that we can know. The end result will be glorious for us if we embrace what God wants to do in our hearts.

 

4.       You will fail God during the storm.  I am not trying to discourage you or speak a curse over you, but it the nature of a storm distorts your vision. Everything becomes dark and hopeless. You lose your footing. You grope in the darkness. God offers mercy to us all. He “remembers that we are made from dust.”

 

5.       The storm has the potential to destroy you. Storms are powerful, destructive forces. As during all our life experiences, we have the power to chose each day whether to trust ourselves or to trust God.  Do we rely on our own strengths to fix this thing? Perhaps you default to manipulation or control. Whatever or however you react in the storm, it really comes down to this: Will I trust myself or will I trust God? We often choose to trust ourselves even though our mouths are saying we trust God. Our actions are screaming, “I am going to fix this!”

 

6.       Freedom can be found in the suffering. Just as our ultimate freedom was found in the suffering of Christ on the cross, our emotional, mental freedom can be found in our suffering. As we find ourselves vulnerable, we can learn to deny ourselves and find freedom in and through the suffering. Again, the ways of God often make no sense to us in our humanity.

 

7.       Your suffering can provide a way for you to be like Christ and provide healing for others. As Henri Nouwen teaches, you can choose to make your wounds available to others as a source of healing just as Christ was our wounded Healer.

 

8.       In God’s reign, “everything belongs,” even the broken and poor parts (Richard Rohr). Nothing catches God off guard. He really does work everything together for our good.

So if you find yourself in a storm, in hard times, my testimony to you is that you hold something powerful  in your hands.  It is an opportunity to be destroyed or it is an opportunity to be transformed. The darkness will pass eventually, the clouds will clear, the wind will cease, and the end result for you individually can be that you know more of God’s heart, that you have learned to trust, and that He has healed your heart in ways that you didn’t even know you needed before. That is one of the beautiful things about serving a God who is mysterious, powerful, and all-knowing.

Perhaps you might pause and ask Him to help you cooperate with His plans in your life, submitting your heart and will to His anew. Is it hard? Yes. Is it worth it? Unequivocally.