goodness

The Day After My Birthday

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“Through my whole life (young and old), I have never witnessed God forsaking those who do right, nor have I seen their children begging for crumbs” (Psalm 37:25, The Voice).

I’m 53 and I’m still learning that even when you don’t feel it, still you can choose to trust in God and His promises. You can claim God’s provision even when it seems slow in coming. You can thank God in advance for prayers He’s yet to answer.

The Bible says to keep asking, keep seeking, and keep knocking for as long as it takes. I said before that sometimes we don’t have because we don’t ask, and now I wonder if we don’t have simply because we asked a few times and gave up instead of keeping on keeping on asking. We should be like Jacob who wrestled with God and would not let go until He blessed him.

I think prayer is a taking hold of God in the secret place and not letting go. It’s claiming the promises, confessing sins of commission and omission, giving thanks, interceding for others, and waiting to hear what He would say to us.

Even when the heart is heavy with hope delayed, we can pray God’s future promises for us as if they’re already ours. We can show gratitude ahead of the gift. We can pray for those loved ones who are far from God believing that God can bring them home. We can lift up the hurting and dying in the name of the One who is able to bring life from the dead.

I’ve heard that we should never stop preaching the gospel to ourselves. I suppose that’s what this is. Me reminding myself of God’s goodness that remains when He is absent or silent.

“I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living” (Psalm 27:13, New Heart English Bible).

Five Helps for the New Year

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I found this on the interwebs and thought I’d share. It’s something to work on if you haven’t already made your new year resolutions. In fact, these are things you can work on at any time and at any point of the year, new or old.

“1. Thank God. Often and always. Thank him carefully and wonderingly for your continuing privileges and for every experience of his goodness. Thankfulness is a soil in which pride does not easily grow.

2. Take care about confession of your sins. As time passes the habit of being critical about people and things grows more than each of us realize. …[He then gently commends the practice of sacramental confession].

3. Be ready to accept humiliations. They can hurt terribly but they can help to keep you humble. [Whether trivial or big, accept them he says.] All these can be so many chances to be a little nearer to our Lord. There is nothing to fear, if you are near to the Lord and in his hands.

4. Do not worry about status. There is only one status that Our Lord bids us be concerned with, and that is our proximity to Him. “If a man serve me, let him follow me, and where I am there also shall my servant be”. (John 12:26) That is our status; to be near our Lord wherever He may ask us to go with him.

5. Use your sense of humour. Laugh at things, laugh at the absurdities of life, laugh at yourself.

Through the year people will thank God for you. And let the reason for their thankfulness be not just that you were a person whom they liked or loved but because you made God real to them” (Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, 61-74).

Not Good but God’s

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“For years, I begged God to help me be good. Didn’t you join up because you wanted to be good? I’d worked years trying to be good and I wasn’t good! Oh, I was gooder than I was when I started out, but I still wasn’t good because as good as I was getting, I still wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t sustain it long enough. Sometimes I’d go 7 or 8 minutes without sinning. But it still wasn’t long enough!

And the Lord spoke to me very clearly that day. He said, ‘The issue isn’t being good, the issue is being God’s. Just come to Me and I’ll provide goodness for you. Just come and love Me. Seek Me with all your heart.’

Now I’m not arguing for sin, but I am saying this: my focus these days is not on trying to be good. I am gooder than I’ve been in the past, but it’s not because I’m focused on trying to be good, it’s because I’ve focused on Him and doing His bidding. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for me and my sinning” (John Wimber).

As I’ve heard before (and maybe you have as well), Jesus didn’t become incarnate to make bad people good but to make dead people alive. See, it’s not about behavior modification and better morals. It’s about being made new.

I still think that more than being gooder, I need to focus on being more like Jesus. That can only happen when the Spirit of Jesus inside me starts to manifest outward from me as I live more surrendered and obediently. It’s no good if I behave better when I still have the illusion of control over my life and my destiny. It’s only when I acknowledge that I belong to another that I really begin to transform.

It’s not about being good as much as it is being God’s.

A Prayer for Another Thursday in July

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“O Heavenly Father
I praise and thank You
for the peace of the night;
I praise and thank You for the new day;
I praise and thank You for all Your goodness
and faithfulness throughout my life.

You have granted me many blessings.
Now let me also accept what is hard
from Your hand.
You will lay on me no more
than I can bear.
You make all things work together
for the good of Your children”

Amen

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer).

Not everything that You give, God, seems good to us at the present time, but we know in faith and will soon see by sight that everything You give us ends up being for our very best.

Give us grace to endure the hard things, the in-betweens, the waiting so that we may see the fruits of long-suffering and find out how true You are to Your Word.

Help us to continue to find ways to bless and encourage each other, to help carry each other’s burdens, and to not accept the “I’m fine”s when we ask how someone is doing. And may we in turn be honest when someone asks us that question.

Give us grace not just for ourselves but so that we can give it to those around us who need it as badly as we do.

Thank You that You are forever faithful in every season and won’t ever give up on those you call by Your name.

Thank You that You will finish what You started in us and the end result will have been more than worth it.

Thank You that You are already worth more than any price we will ever have to pay or any ordeal we will ever have to undergo.

Amen.

 

 

 

 

Going Public

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“God’s readiness to give and forgive is now public. Salvation’s available for everyone! We’re being shown how to turn our backs on a godless, indulgent life, and how to take on a God-filled, God-honoring life. This new life is starting right now, and is whetting our appetites for the glorious day when our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, appears. He offered himself as a sacrifice to free us from a dark, rebellious life into this good, pure life, making us a people he can be proud of, energetic in goodness” Titus‬ ‭2‬:‭11-14‬ MSG).

I think that pretty much covers it.

When You Can’t Think of Any Good Blog Ideas . . . .

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Since I am fresh out of original material, I thought I’d pick the brain of one C. S. Lewis and see if he has anything worthwhile to say. I found this in an email and thought it worthy enough to share with you. Plus, it uses words like solecism, which I’m going to have to look up now because I have no idea what it means. Here goes:

“If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed. Before and behind all the relations of God to man, as we now learn them from Christianity, yawns the abyss of a Divine act of pure giving—the election of man, from nonentity, to be the beloved of God, and therefore (in some sense) the needed and desired of God, who but for that act needs and desires nothing, since He eternally has, and is, all goodness. And that act is for our sakes. It is good for us to know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object, God. But to know it as a love in which we were primarily the wooers and God the wooed, in which we sought and He was found, in which His conformity to our needs, not ours to His, came first, would be to know it in a form false to the very nature of things. For we are only creatures: our role must always be that of patient to agent, female to male, mirror to light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not an illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His demand, our conformity to His desire: to experience it in the opposite way is, as it were, a solecism against the grammar of being.”

I looked up solecism. According to my handy-dandy Merriam-Webster dictionary, it means “an ungrammatical combination of words in a sentence.” In other words, to experience the love of God in an illusory form is basically to go against the very fabric of our existence. Or something like that.

The fact that God created us and redeemed us and loves us for no other reason than He chooses to do so blows my mind. God didn’t– and still doesn’t– need me but He still wants me. He still wants you, even when it seems nobody else does.

That’s a good thought to take with you as you drift into dreamland tonight.

 

The Kingdom Of God

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“If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we would know that the Kingdom of God in the sense of holiness, goodness, beauty is as close as breathing and is crying out to be born both with in ourselves and with in the world; we would know that the Kingdom of God is what we all of us hunger for above all other things even when we don’t know its name or realize that it’s what we’re starving to death for. The Kingdom of God is where our best dreams come from and our truest prayers. We glimpse it at those moments when we find ourselves being better than we are and wiser than we know. We catch sight of it when at some moment of crisis a strength seems to come to us that is greater than our own strength. The Kingdom of God is where we belong. It is home, and whether we realize it or not, I think we are all of us homesick for it” (Frederick Buechner).

I think that says it way better than I ever could.

I posted this on Facebook two years ago today and it still has an impact on me. I still long for this Kingdom of God and for all the wrongs of this world to be made right.

I still think heaven will look a lot like Narnia with a little Middle Earth thrown it. Hobbits in heaven? I’d like to think so.

Conflicted But in a Good Way . . .

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I’m feeling a bit conflicted at the moment, but in the best way possible. Right now, you’re probably feeling confused, so let me explain.

I’m very sad that a friend of mine is leaving for overseas missions tomorrow and I won’t get to see her for a while, but I’m filled with joy that she is fulfilling God’s call on her life and going to a place where her deep gladness will meet the world’s deep need and lives will be transformed and changed and a country will never be the same because of her (and I “borrowed” part of that from Frederick Buechner, for the record).

I’m unsure of my next step, but confident that the God I serve is more than able to get me there. Since I lost my job, I’ve felt as if I’m free-floating without an anchor to hold on to or to keep me centered, yet I’ve never had more peace that God really is in control and guiding me toward exactly where He wants me to be.

I’ve never been in a place where I’m more keenly aware of my deep need for God at every waking moment, but I’ve never been more sure of God’s goodness or power. I’ve never been as able and willing to boast in my weaknesses to find that the power of Christ really is made perfect in my imperfections.

Ultimately, I am filled with a longing that nothing in this world can satisfy, yet at the very same time,  I am completely satisfied in Christ and content with where He has me.

What about you?