Trust and Faith

I recently went to dinner with a friend who I realized I hadn’t talked to for a while.  It’s difficult during tax season to catch up.  Work wears you out and by the time you get home the last thing you want to do is get on the phone or stare at a computer screen.  Keeping communications alive with friends you love and care about gets tough, especially when you work the kind of crazy schedules we do.  From one week to the next I may be working a different schedule, making it hard to stay connected.

As soon as we sat down and began to talk I realized that she had completely lost faith in people, and more importantly, anyone connected with “the church.”  People had let her down time and again, in one way or another, and many of her dreams slid away unrealized.  Sadly, while she believed God existed, she didn’t believe he had any real part in her day-to-day life.  She seemed lost in the desperate hole of the disenfranchised.  She finally seemed to have bought the great lie called Why Bother – they don’t see your potential or are scared by it, they don’t like you and are against you, it’s just a job or just a lousy life, and if you want anything you’ll have to get it on your own.  No one is going to help you – not your friends, not your supervisors, not anyone who says they are a Christian, not the church, and certainly not God.

She has been “turned off” by those who profess Christianity in front of the boss but who curse and tell ugly jokes with the best of them as soon as the boss leaves the room.  They know how to praise God and spout Bible verses they’ve memorized but their belief is only a façade, part of the game they play to make others believe the lie.  They are part of the lie, part of the enemy’s plant to turn us away from God.  They are the false prophets whose job it is to convince us that following God is the wrong choice.

I want her to know this is not the God I know, nor the church I know.  My God never fails; he always works things out for my good, even when I don’t understand how he plans to do that or how he can find good in the situation – like battling cancer.  How can he see good in that?  How can he see good in letting your husband die so young, or a child commit suicide because that’s what all the kids are doing on a Friday night – playing the choking game and dying for want of love.  God uses the situations in our lives in his fight to get us to see that without him there is no good.  He fights to get us to see through the lies and find the truth in him and in his Word. 

People will always fail you but God never will.  If we fail it is because we did not trust him to do what he says he will do. Our fear drives us into unbelief and distrust. I would like my friend to understand that everything depends on believing God and trusting him without regret – and without trying to control the situation ourselves.  Trust, Pastor G says, demands commitment – we cannot trust that to which we are not committed.  I am committed to God and his Word.  There is nothing man can offer that matches God, his Word, his Truth.

But I don’t think my friend can hear me.  She’s bought into Satan’s lie – that God and his church are worthless when it comes to her life and its path.  I don’t know what to do other than to keep loving her, keep praying for her, and keep showing her that God is the truth, the way, and the light.  I want so much for her to know that God (and God alone) can take care of anything you find yourself caught in. I want her to know that God has a place for everyone in his Kingdom, even those of us who are female, are not married, and do not have any kids.

Isaiah 54:1-5 says:

 “Sing, barren woman,
   you who never bore a child;
burst into song, shout for joy,
   you who were never in labor;
because more are the children of the desolate woman
   than of her who has a husband,”
            says the LORD.
“Enlarge the place of your tent,
   stretch your tent curtains wide,
   do not hold back;
lengthen your cords,
   strengthen your stakes.

 For you will spread out to the right and to the left;
   your descendants will dispossess nations
   and settle in their desolate cities.

  “Do not be afraid; you will not be put to shame.
   Do not fear disgrace; you will not be humiliated.
You will forget the shame of your youth
   and remember no more the reproach of your widowhood.
For your Maker is your husband—
   the LORD Almighty is his name—
the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer;
   he is called the God of all the earth. 

I consider myself married to Christ, so why would I worry about hunting down some poor man to marry?  Christ is all I need.  If God thinks I need a husband to do his work, I’m sure he’ll put one in my path.  Until then I will keep on walking and believing God for all the things in my life, including cancer and the loneliness of being single in a world that is only made for couples.

I wish my friend could see the peace that is in Christ.  I wish she could know how safe it is to be held in his hands, to be guided by his Spirit, to find comfort and healing in his Word.  Whenever the enemy has come crawling back with his lies, I always find peace in the Word of God.  The Sword of Truth is my weapon of choice.  His Spirit refreshes my soul and keeps me moving forward on the path he has set for my life.

I would like my friend to experience the Living Water that never runs dry.  I want her to experience the beauty and joy in Christ.  I want her to place her hands over her heart and surrender to a God who will never leave her, never forsake her, and whose love will last for all eternity.

Doorways

I’ve made up my mind that the only truth that exists is God’s truth.  I am determined to believe God and that he has a plan for my life.  He promised me so in Jeremiah 29:11 – For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.  Who am I to dispute what God says in his Word?

Believing God’s promises means that I have to build a door in my wall and then go out it.  Fear would have me believe that the door will bring bad stuff my way, but hope and faith in God says that he does all things for my good, so out the door I must go, no matter what it looks like when I open it.  Appearances can be deceiving and it may look like a dismal choice (most people would say opening that door to cancer certainly is).  But I have to make a choice – either give in to fear or walk in the power of the peace of God.  I choose God.

Fear’s greatest purpose, I’ve learned, is to make me lose my faith.  Losing my faith would be absolutely debilitating.  It robs me of all forward movement, keeping me in the same place, doing the same old things, going nowhere at all.  Next thing I know there’ll be a really deep hole where I’m standing and it will be filling in with swamp water.  Now, it’s not the swamp water I have to worry about – it’s the alligators waiting to devour me that have me shaking in my boots.

There are lots of things that steal our peace – stupid little things that aggravate and annoy us, tiny little actions by others we think are unnecessary or rude, and all that road rage on the way to work.  We let them come in and rob us of our God-given peace.  Oh, doesn’t the enemy know how to sneak in and try to lead us off-course!

Funny things is, Pastor G says, is that God wants to move us into a places that require his peace.  I know what he means; cancer is that kind of place.  Stepping out in faith and trusting God for my healing is difficult by the world’s standard, easy when God’s leading the way.  It’s a daily leading because I’m only human, but God is faithful in always bringing me a song or a word of Scripture to keep me walking in faith.

Pastor G also said that where there is fear there is also unbelief.  How did he know to say that?  Because the Holy Spirit was guiding his words – that I firmly believe.  We choose not to believe because we fear God won’t do what he says he will do.  I think that part of the problem is that we expect him to do it our way, forgetting that God’s way is not ours and cannot be judged in human terms.

Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid, God says.  The most important battle we face is what we allow to destroy our peace, our faith in God.  I know exactly what that means – I can’t count the number of times I’ve allowed someone cracking their gum to get on my nerves, or the sound of someone clearing their throat to nearly make me physically ill.  Stupid little things that don’t matter at all, yet I let them destroy my peace.  Like Pastor G says, I go to pieces instead of going to peace.  Point taken.

Christ is my deliverance from fear.  He heals, delivers, sets free, and forgets.  I don’t know any human being who can do all those things and do them so effortlessly. And when God opens a door, there’s not a soul, including the enemy, who can close it.  Oh, they may try, but they will not succeed.  God (as Pastor G says) will blow right past them and open the door anyway.  He’s that kind of God – the one and only true God.  He is our doorkeeper.

Since God is our doorkeeper, not only can he open doors but he can also close them.  Sometimes he moves them so that those things which once had access no longer do.  God can say ACCESS DENIED to all those things not of his making and that may harm us.  There’s not a hacker in the world who can get past God’s security software.  I suppose they will try but they’ve never met a firewall like God!

One analogy that I loved from Pastor G’s sermon was that Satan cannot cross the bloodline on our doorway.  Once we are Christ’s he cannot cross and God closes the door on things that once tied us up into intricate knots.  I remember in the Old Testament when the Israelites put blood on the doors to send the spirit of death away; it could not cross. Pharaoh, on the other hand, wasn’t covered by the blood, and so he lost his first-born son.  Pharaoh, you should have listened when God spoke through Moses.

Man is not my doorkeeper, nor are my circumstances.  God is my doorkeeper.  God opens and closes doors on my behalf.  It’s in the hallway between doors where I have to be careful.  I have a tendency to want to hurry and go through a door, literally kicking it down, before considering whether or not that’s the door God wants me to go through. God says it’s his door – so if I’m trying to kick it down and he wants it closed, all I’m going to come away with is a broken leg.

Sometimes God’s doorway is for privacy.  In our private closet is where he speaks to us, heals us, teaches us.  It’s here that he heals our hidden past and hides our dirty laundry away from the rest of the world, laundry that no one else needs to see and that God has already forgotten. God doesn’t expose us.  Instead he shuts the door on all our “stuff,” heals us, forgives us, and opens doors to use us. And doors that God shuts remain shut.  No man can open them again. 

Remember when they rolled a stone in front of the tomb?  How silly!  Who did they think they would stop?  A holy God of unfathomable strength?  The Christ who rose from the dead?  Crazy, crazy. He caused the stone to roll away and the stone the builders rejected walked out, a risen and glorified Savior.

Brevity of Life

Today a co-worker passed away at noon.  Only three weeks ago she found out she had cancer.  Stage five.  I didn’t know there was a stage five.  Stage four is the most difficult to treat and the most invasive; five must be when humans give you no hope of healing and your death is imminent. My take on this is that when the doctors gave up God stepped in.  God healed her and took her home to be with him.  That’s the kind of healing that lasts forever.  Cancer does not win. Ever.

The passing of this sweet woman makes me yearn to be in the presence of Christ myself.  She was so beautiful and gentle. Now she walks with the most beautiful and gentle of all – face to face and in person.  Wonderful!  Glorious!  Yes, she leaves a grieving family behind but one that understands the healing of God.

I think we misunderstand healing sometimes.  We often think of it in terms of the physical and emotional.  When we are saved we think of it in the spiritual realms.  What we forget is that our concept of healing often isn’t God’s concept.  God doesn’t always grant us the miracle of physical and emotional healing.  In fact, he often asks us to wait.  Sometimes our healing comes by the hands of the physicians he places in our path.  Sometimes it comes by the change in our lifestyles and our eating habits.  And sometimes it comes through death.  Through death we are ushered into the presence of God.  It is a healing that is immediate and forever.

Cancer is a blessing.  I know most people will disagree because they see it as a death warrant.  I have friends who see it as a reason to mourn you before you’ve passed.  They certainly think you should act differently.  Perhaps they’d be more happy with my behavior if I clothed myself in rags, sat on a trash heap, and felt sorry for myself and what God has done to me – because surely I must have committed some huge sin to be stricken with cancer.

Sorry, folks, that’s not how it works. Truth is that cancer has taught me more in a year than I learned previously my whole life. It has taught me what is important (doing God’s will) and what is not (who gets credit for what great idea or the number of calls taken at work).  It’s taught me a great deal about love and about fear.  It’s taught me how very short our lives are and how very little time we have to be about the work God has set before us.

Fear.  It’s an ugly word.  Pastor G talked about fear today in his sermon.  Fear, he said, is a great tool for the enemy, who walks about like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.  When we open ourselves to fear, we open ourselves to the enemy’s destructive wiles.  The fear factor is why we need the armor of God and why we need to stand firm and be alert. 

Satan hates it when the love of God pushes fear to the rear.  He would rather we be timid and fearful all the time, because when we are timid and fearful we don’t do anything.  We curl up in a little ball and bemoan our existence.   It’s then that we start blaming God for all the things we’ve gotten ourselves into (probably with a little help from the enemy). We become distressed, discouraged, and depressed.  We also become ineffective in the Kingdom’s work. 

We do not have to be bound by fear.  God did not give us a spirit of bondage.  Romans 8:15 says:  The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.”  We may fight against principalities and powers but we never fight alone.  God is with us through his Spirit.  When his children cry out, he hears, listens, and takes action.  With his presence, evil and fear must flee.  Bye bye, Satan!

We can become trapped in our fears, to the point where they destroy everything around us – our families, our health, our future, our careers, our faith, our testimony.  We even conjure up our fears from things that don’t even exist – ooooh, she doesn’t like me, I can tell by the way she looks at me. We invent rumors and then believe them, we read more into an e-mail than is really there, and we expect more from people than they can give.

But when we choose to trust in the Lord, by action as well as by word, we automatically put fear away.  Love and fear cannot co-exist, Pastor G says.  I think he’s right.  Where one is, the other is not.  When I am afraid of outcomes or presentation, I don’t work from love, I work from mis-trust and sometimes resentment.  I find myself waiting for someone to disapprove or call me a failure.  I won’t take risks.  And like Pastor G says, I begin to withdraw from people for fear they will hurt me.  I build walls a mile high and hide behind them in bitterness, defeat, and loneliness.

Then Pastor G lays down the bombshell – so why we told to fear the Lord?  He gave us an acronym for it:

F     aithfulness of the Father

E     ver interceding Christ

A    rmor of God in place

R    einforcement of angels round about us

Fearing God is a healthy thing.  When we fear God we know how big he really is and how powerful he is.  We respect and worship him because he deserves our praise.  No one can defeat him.  With God on our side who could we possibly be afraid of?

It is long past time to be sitting behind our walls fearing everyone and everything around us.  Life is short.  It’s brevity is like a vapor.  We need to be about God’s business.  We need to be running toward people to share our joy and hope with them.  They are in need of what we have – our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.