Sunday, September 23, 2012
Hope Restored
Saturday, September 23, 2012
Blessed Hope Restored
Tonight I had a hope restored that I have been missing for a very long time. It's not like I feared I I would miss out on eternity in Heaven when I died. I have no doubts about the eternal destination of my soul. No, what I have wrestled with for a very long time is arriving at my final destination absent of joy. I wouldn't hear the words, "depart from me you worker of iniquity I never knew you," but I might never hear the words, "well done my good and faithful servant" either.
I have spent thirty years in steadfast pursuit of a genuine calling that I have never seen come close to being a reality. I have never sat idle waiting for the perfect ministry opportunity to fall into my lap. I have plugged into and served whatever faith community I have called home and have left a trail behind me of lives positively impscted for the kingdom of God.
Yet, I have never reached that level to which I was called to and I have counted myself a failure.
I currently work with some coaching ministries with my current church and and am back in school finishing my bachelor's degree, studying to be a professional life coach. One of the most important lessons we try to teach a client early on, in Christian life coaching, is that God is less interested in the travelog of their lives than He is who they are becoming as a result of it.
This semester, as part of my Bible curriculum, I have been intensely studying Genesis. I have developed a bond of identity with Abraham. Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming to be the father of the next chosen race. It's the other things. Abraham was a man who was no stranger to having regular conversations with God. Now, I have never experienced any of the fantastic ways in which God communicated with Abraham, but for most of my life I have heard Him speak.
But this is not the only similarity I share with Abraham. He suffered a long period of waiting between the promise of an heir to a barren couple and when that child is finally born. I have been preparing and waiting for thirty years to see my calling become a reality. During the time of waiting God reaffirmed His promise to Abraham multiple times. In That time he tried to come up with practical solutions to help make the promise happen. He offered to adopt the son of one of one of his servants. He fathered a child with a surrogate. Yet, still God, said He had a plan to bring forth innumerable offspring from Abraham's seed legitimately. By the time God came around the final time to tell him he would have a son through Sarah, his wife, Abraham had given up believing God was ever going to deliver on His promise. I too experienced repeated reaffirmations of my calling and the big dreams God had for my life along with continued periods of great waiting without seeing any sign of my calling becoming a reality. And, I too lost the will to trust thst God would be faithful to keep His promise.
As I wrote in a previous post I recently had a major breakthrough in this area and am walking in freedom from the bondage of fear and despair. I am walking in the freedom of the knowledge that I can trust God with the end of my story. And as a result of that I now know that when I tell a client how God is more interested in who they are becoming I can mean it. I am no longer worried about how long it may take to get to the destination He has set for me. All I know is that when the final page is written on my earthly existence it will all have been put in perspective and the end of the end of the story will speak of His glory and plan for my life.
Tonight we were at a worship experience and were singing about that final moment of our lives and looking forward to praising the Lord with even our last breath. My heart melted and I began to weep. It was nothing as severe as in the middle of the rock concert last week, but no less significant. Suddenly I realized that for the first time in many years I actually looked upon the moment that I past from this world to the next with anticipation, knowing the first thibg I would see after I closed my eyes in this world for the last time and opened them up in the next would be the face of my Savior.
In that moment I felt the Holy Spirit speak to me and I realized that I was the only one Counting myself a failure. God never counted Abraham as a failure or unrighteous for lacking in patience or expressing doubt while waiting for the promise of Isaac to be fulfilled. God is preparing for an incredible ending to my story.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Friday, September 14, 2012
Trust Restored
Fiday, September 14, 2012
Reflecting on a conert attended on Thursday, September 13, 2012
Grace Community Church
Roswell, New Mexico
Kutless in concert with Fireflight, The Rhett Walker Band and Hyland
Last night I spent an incredible evening with my teenage son Cameron at a concert headlined by the contemporary Christian rock band Kutless. He probably would have enjoyed if I had spent more time in the auditorium with him, but his mom and I were working at the concert and had gotten him a reduced priced ticket.
My wife had joined our son off and on during the opening acts and I stayed out and manned the various merchandise tables and occasionally socialized with some of the band members from those opening acts.
At the completion of the opening acts there was a presentation from Compassion International and then an intermission. We were quite busy during the break but afterward I joined Cameron for the headline act. Cameron still enjoys having his dad attend events like this with him because I will sing, shout, scream, jump up and down, punch my fist at the air, clap my hands over my head and everything else that he and his enjoy doing.
But in the middle of all of the hard rockin' fun last night I had a divine appointment.
Jon Micah Sumrall, lead vocalist for Kutless, was introducing the song Even If from there recent release Believer. He introduced it by talking about how in the thirteen plus years that he has traveled all over the world with Kutless the one thing hat has remained constant is that he has always encountered lots of hurting people. While he has seen plenty of miraculous answers to some people's prayers far more never shared this same experience. While it may seem unexplainable in human terms, God most often answers prayers during times of human suffering with a "no."
Life will be hard and it will contain suffering and while God heals some for reasons known only to Him for most healing may never come. Dreams dies, finances fall into ruin and Christians are persecuted for there beliefs. Jesus even prayed and asked God to provide any other way for mankind to be redeemed other than the gruesome ordeal he was going to pass through in the following days, but God said "no" and Jesus trusted Him that the end of the story was more important than what he was facing right then.
Then he said something that hit me like a cosmic sledgehammer. He said, "I don't know why God doesn't miraculously change everyone's situation that cries out to Him in their hour of desperation, but I do believe God when he said in Jeremiah 29:11 that his plan is to give us a future and a hope. All I know is that even though I can't understand the moment I trust that God is working it all together for His good and the end of the story will make any moment of pain pale by comparison."
Every part of me crumbled into dust in that moment: my mind, my flesh, my spirit, my soul, my will, my heart, my emotions, my everything. I slumped over and collapsed on the chair in front of me.
You see what you may not know about me is that I am a man with an unshakable calling from God on his life. I originally received this call when I was 12 but I resisted because I desired the riches of this world and I knew that ministry was a path in the opposite direction. I ran from God and this calling for nearly five years. Finally, shortly after my seventeenth birthday I surrendered everything to God, embraced that calling and had such a real encounter with the living and resurrected Christ that it would be impossible for me to ever turn away from Him.
From that moment I have set my hand to the plow, never looked back, never even imagined what my life might have been like if I had taken a different path. Everything I have done has been with the purpose of moving me in the direction of pursuing that calling yet it has never been fully realized.
In all of this time God had been faithful to constantly remind me that His calling has never been repealed and no matter how much I have messed things up, He still has great plans for me. But, after nearly thirty years of dedication, no results and empty promises my response to God was "I don't trust you any more. Stop being so cruel to me, promising something you're just going to keep from me!" I was a man trapped in a miserable paradox. I couldn't shake the need to pursue my calling, but I also didn't feel I could trust God to fulfill the promises he was making to me. Most people would be excited just to know that God would speak so freely with them and here I was telling Him to shut up and stop torturing me.
Even though I couldn't shake my calling or my commitment to pursuing it, I truly felt I could no longer trust God to fulfill His promises. I could not trust him with the story of my life. I would teach others, quite convincingly to do what I was incapable of doing myself.
Well, anyway, when Jon said that about Jesus trusting God that the end of the story was more important than what he was facing in that moment and relating Jeremiah 29:11 to trusting that God would make the end of our stories make our moments of suffering pale by comparison every part of my being was crushed and I literally collapsed on the back of the chair in front of me. I began to weep and sob uncontrollably. I began to cry, louder and louder, until eventually I was shouting and sobbing at the top of my voice, "I TRUST YOU! I TRUST YOU GOD! I TRUST YOU GOD WITH THE END OF MY STORY!" I slid out of my chair and onto my knees, arms raised high over my head, and then eventually I lay in the aisle prostrate before God, still screaming, while my body convulsed to my heavy sobs, "I TRUST YOU! I TRUST YOU GOD! I TRUST YOU GOD WITH THE END OF MY STORY!"
I'm sure I made an utter fool of myself, but I didn't care. The heaviest burden I have ever carried was being spiritually sandblasted off of my being. For all I know I was making enough noise and commotion to compete with the band performing on stage.
I got up at the end of the song and stayed for the next song, one of their iconic hits What Faith Can Do then went back out and took up my post back at the merchandise tables. When I arrived I obviously looked like a wreck because my wife immediately asked med what was wrong. I told her I would have to tell her later.
This was a major breakthrough. I went home that night and had the first restful night's sleep that I've had in twenty years. I fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow and the next thing I knew it was noon the next day. For the first time in over twenty years I awoke and wasn't still as at least exhausted as when I went to bed the night before. I even had people ask me on the phone that day, "Are you feeling better? You sound better than you usually do."
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)