Tag Archives: Faith

The Narrowing

It was subtle, so I didn’t notice it at first. And then one day I looked around and realized that most of the things I wanted when I was much younger, I no longer want. But it goes deeper than that.

I was having breakfast with a friend recently and she asked me what I’m looking for in community. I told her that I had come to a place of wanting to be around people who just want to talk about Jesus, that not much else interests me, and I wasn’t sure why. She nodded in understanding and dubbed it “a narrowing” and that term just felt so perfect. A narrowing.

When I was in my young decades – 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, the space of my life was filled with oh so many things. Family and work. Fears and pain and wants and dreams, and a past I was trying to outrun. At the far end of my 20’s, Jesus moved into that tattered, crowded space, and I had no idea of the narrowing that had begun and now, three and half decades later, I see it, and it is a joy to behold.

My narrowing is still in motion, and it’s painful at times, but man do I find it to be beautiful. I wish for a narrowing for us all. Instead of the wideness of everything this life has to offer, I want us to find life in the narrow space of the one thing, and to feel utterly satisfied in that space.

“One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek Him in His temple.” Psalm 27:4

It is the space of His presence, where the need for company narrows to just the One, and the desire to be with Him eclipses every other desire.

Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” He said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.” Mark 10:21

It is the culling of our idols. Letting go of the one thing most of us lack—the giving of it all, especially that which is most dear. The ability to lay down what we have held so close. Everything that gives us our sense of security, or allows us to feel in control. What provides our comfort and gives us value. It is a painfully necessary narrowing, this one.

“The Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has made the right choice, and it will not be taken away from her.” Luke 10:41-42

When the many things get crowded out by the one thing. In this narrow space, we find the value of being, over doing and we finally understand that doing must flow from being, or it will wear us out.

 He answered, “Whether or not he’s a sinner, I don’t know. One thing I do know: I was blind, and now I can see!” John 9:25

My thirst to know the ins and the outs and the greek and the hebrew and the what the when and the where has been narrowed to one thing. I was blind and now I see and I want to know the God who did that. This has been the continual, sweetest, narrowing for me – the pursuit of the heart of my Father, who pursued my heart first.

Sometimes I still strain to make space for other things, only to find that those things do nothing to satisfy the true longing in my soul. So I pray for the narrowing to continue in me. And I pray it for you.

May you find that God has been narrowing your life in all the best, even painful, but beautiful ways.

The Weight of a Life That’s Not Mine

Life gets heavy when it becomes about you.

It was a Holy Spirit whisper that won’t go away, so I know I need to talk about it, because I think there’s a lot of heaviness going on.

I remember how life felt so many years ago. Like I was perpetually bent over from the weight of what I carried, and what I carried was my imploding life with a marriage that was in pieces, and chidren that were hurting. What it was and what it wasn’t. What I wanted, felt I needed, thought I should have, deserved. Why was I here, was I good enough, was I doing it right, did I ruin everything.

I was strong, but not that strong, and eventually I ran out of stubborn. So I quit. Threw in a towel and said no more. I fell under the weight of a life that was mostly about me, and God caught me in a fire that my flesh sorely needed.

I came out of that fire knowing one thing more than anything else: Every inch of my life is from Him, to Him, and for Him. Everything is about Him.

It’s hard though. Seeing everything through a lens that isn’t focused on us takes getting used to, but it is the road to freedom. When our lives are our own, with that comes the stress of doing it right. Comparison. Being enough. The fear of failing. The pressure of succeeding and of living a life of purpose and leaving our mark and pretty quickly we are bent over with the weight of a life that isn’t even ours.

I’ll (maybe) end with this question: Is it possible that at least some of the high levels of anxiety and depression that we are experiencing might be caused by the weight of lives that are mostly about us?

Oddly enough, there is great freedom and healing in the untangling of ourselves from our lives, averting our eyes from the mirror, and letting Him be the main character in our story.

Questions to start asking:

God, what do You want? What will bring You glory? What are You doing in this place, at this time, and how can I obey You here? How can I cooperate with what You want to do in me, with me, and through me in this season?

Where has my life become my own and how do lay it down again?

Exodus 4: He’s Got Your Back

I try to imagine the conversation between God and Moses.

God: Ok, I want you to go to Pharoah and tell him that I said to let his entire workforce go, so that they can come out here to the desert and worship Me.

Moses: *blink*

God:

Moses: I mean. They’re not gonna believe me. Or even listen to me. Right? I mean, like, I think maybe this might not be … *trails off, just short of telling God He’s got a messed up plan.*

God: *sigh* Throw down your staff…

That’s how I imagine it, but odds are it didn’t go down quite like that.

“Then Moses answered, “But behold, they will not believe me or listen to my voice, for they will say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you.’” The Lord said to him, “What is that in your hand?” He said, “A staff.”  And he said, “Throw it on the ground.” So he threw it on the ground, and it became a serpent, and Moses ran from it. But the Lord said to Moses, “Put out your hand and catch it by the tail”—so he put out his hand and caught it, and it became a staff in his hand— “that they may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has appeared to you.” (Exodus 4:1-5)

When God tells us to speak something, He will back up our words with His power.

The Lord said to Moses, “… Lift up your staff, and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it…

… Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the Lord drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. (Exodus 14:16, 21)

When God tells us to do something, He will back up our actions with His power.

Joshua and his men circled Jericho the way God told them to, and it fell.

Elijah confronted the prophets of Baal at the word of the Lord, and fire fell on a water soaked altar.

Ezekiel, in obedience to God’s command, prophesied to an army of bones, and that army came to life.

Servants filled the water jars at Jesus’ command, and the water became wine.

 “I [Paul] came to you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling. My speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not be based on human wisdom but on God’s power.” (1 Corinthians 2:3-5)

Our obedience to God will result in the presence of the power of God.

Has He called you to speak something? Do something? Preach, teach, prophesy something? Lay something down, take something up, let go, grab hold, walk away from, return to? Let me ask it this way… what has God been asking of you?

“Do whatever He tells you,” His mother told the servants. (John 2:5)

Through the life of Moses, and beyond, we find this principle at work –

We bring the obedience, He brings the power.

But soon, we will discover another principle from Moses and the Israelites –

When we bring disobedience, He still brings the power. But the results are a lot different! Stayed tuned.

Exodus 3: Exodus Easter

Sometimes I read a chapter of scripture and nothing really catches my eye. Other times I find something that jumps off the page and into my heart. But this chapter filled my heart with beautiful things to ponder.

Then He said, “Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”  

Exodus 3:5

This was not the first time God encountered Moses’ life, but it was the first time that Moses encountered God. We know that from the beginning God had been actively setting Moses up for what is about to come. And then one day God drew Moses to His presence through a burning bush. What had been an ordinary bush was now holy ground because it was occupied by a holy God.

God is holy, so what He inhabits with His presence becomes holy. If you want to know if God inhabits a place (or a life), look for holiness in that place.

Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey…“

Exodus 3:7

He saw. He heard. He knew. And He came. This can go one of two ways in our lives. In our suffering, we can know that He sees it, hears our cries, and knows our pain, and it can provide us with comfort, and compel us to seek His nearness. Or, it can make us blame Him for our suffering, be bitter toward Him, and compel us to push away from Him.

God is intimately aware of our suffering. What we do with that knowledge is a testing ground for our heart.

 But I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless compelled by a mighty hand. So I will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt…

Exodus 3:19-20

A mighty hand was needed, and a mighty hand is what Pharoah received. In the same way, Satan was never going to let go of his hold on this world unless a mighty hand compelled him.

Yesterday, we observed the Friday when God stretched forth His hand(s) and struck the kingdom of darkness.

And tomorrow we will celebrate the resurrection that brought us out of our death and into His life.

Because He saw. He heard. He knew. And He came.

Exodus 2: Destiny

Vs. 2: “The woman conceived and bore a son, and when she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him three months.”

I recently heard a Jewish Rabbi teach on this verse. In the Hebrew language, the word “fine” (in the ESV, other versions may use a different word) is Tov, which means good. But it has such a deeper meaning than simply “good”. It’s a word that means something is directly related to the will of God.

In a time when Pharoah was set on exterminating the male Hebrew babies, Moses’ mother looked at her newborn son and knew that he was born as a result of God’s will. This boy who should have been killed as soon as he was born, was not only kept alive, but raised in the house of Pharoah himself! And this same boy would one day be the man God would use to destroy Pharaoh and his army, and deliver an entire nation of people from captivity.

We next see Moses as a grown man, and his destiny comes into view:

When the Egyptian was beating the Hebrew – Moses stepped in.

When two Hebrews were going at it with each other – Moses stepped in.

When the shepherds were harassing the daughters of Midian – Moses stepped in.

Moses was made for rescue. God’s use of Moses to deliver his people, which we will be reading about soon, was not a random choice. He was formed in his mother’s womb to be a rescuer.

God is intentional in the way He forms us, and the purpose He puts in us.

Ephesians 2:10 – “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

Moses’ mother, Jochabed, knew that his birth was God’s will. And Hebrews 11 tells us that it was by the faith of his parents that Moses was hidden from Pharaoh, and that they were not afraid of the Egyptian king’s command.

So here’s what I want to ponder today –  do we see the importance of destiny, and how the enemy will attempt to thwart it? This is why we must be people who will stand in the gap for the destinies of the next generation. Our children, their children, those in our churches who are stepping in to take the baton from our generation… they have destinies on them that the enemy wants to kill. I believe Moses’ mother saw it, and followed the leading of the Spirit of God in hiding him, and then in putting him into a basket in the river. She allowed him to be rescued by the very people who wanted him dead, because she trusted the will of God. This was her intercession for the destiny of her son, and it provokes me.

What will be my intercession for the destiny of the next generation?

Exodus 1: Who Is Afraid of the Men?

It started in Genesis when Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers and taken to Egypt. Then God sent a famine, which brought the rest of Joseph’s family to Egypt seeking food. Tears, forgiveness, and grace all flowed freely, as did favor. Because Pharoah favored Joseph, he also showed kindness and favor to his family.

And then Joseph’s generation died, a new king came to power, and everything changed.

And this is where we can learn an important lesson.

 He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and powerful than we are. Come, let’s deal shrewdly with them; otherwise they will multiply further, and when war breaks out, they will join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the country.” 

Exodus 1:9-10

Oppression doesn’t always come from a desire to have more power and control. Sometimes it comes from fear. Maybe we try to hold down and control the thing (or people) we fear the most. And maybe when it works, we feel powerful, and we want more of that feeling. Maybe.

But sometimes it backfires. Egypt’s king was afraid of the large number of Israelites, so he had them oppressed and what do you know? The more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied, and I wonder if that’s what happens when we try to push down and control the thing we fear. It just gets bigger.

So the fearful king tried a different strategy. He tried to control their population by killing off the boy babies, because boys become men and that was actually the fear the king was trying to hold down.

“…otherwise they will multiply further, and when war breaks out, they will join our enemies, fight against us, and leave the country.” 

Women didn’t go to war, men did. So the king needed to stop boys from becoming men.

And that right there is a rabbit trail I wish we had time to explore. Instead, the conspiracy theorist in me is just gonna throw out a few questions to ponder –

Why is our culture trying so hard to keep boys from becoming men? Why are they being encouraged to become girls? Why are they calling masculinity toxic and encouraging men to suppress who they were created to be? Who is afraid of men being men?

Thankfully, the midwives feared God more than they feared the king, and the plan to eliminate the growing population of boys who would become men failed.

What is your fear? How are you handling that fear? Is it working?

Do you fear God more?

As the Church, have we adopted the fear of our current culture and bought into the lie that men are bad, or toxic? God forbid. I pray that we will be the ones who fear God enough to speak the truth and who encourage men to be men. Godly men, but by all means, men.

But Some Doubted

Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had directed them. When they saw Him, they worshiped Him; but some doubted. Jesus came near and said to them, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations…

Matthew 28:16-19

Judas was gone, so they were down to eleven. Eleven would eventually become twelve when they add Matthias. All but one of these twelve men would be martyred for their faith. Only John would survive, but would be exiled to Patmos, an island inhabited by criminals and political prisoners.

But as they stood here on this mountain, looking at the man they watched die and be buried in a tomb, some of them waivered. Some of them were uncertain as to what they were seeing. Some of them wondered if it could really be true. Some doubted. And yet, Jesus commissioned them all to go and make disciples.

At some point, their doubts became faith. How can we know this? Because people don’t risk, and ultimately give, their lives for something they doubt ever took place. I mean, I wouldn’t, would you? Would you go into a place that kills Christians and share the gospel, which includes the resurrection, if you doubted it happened?

Here’s my point with all of this –the doubters weren’t disqualified.

We all doubt, at some point. We may not doubt the resurrection, but maybe we doubt when we’re told that someone was completely healed of an incurable disease. Or when someone gives a testimony of seeing a deformity become undeformed in front of them. And don’t we often waiver between doubt and belief when we hear the stories that come out of places like Mozambique of dead bodies being raised to life? We want to believe it’s true, but doubt shows up anyway.

Some of us doubt things a little closer to home. Maybe we think our church is too dead to revive. Our bank account is too low to pay our bills. Our health is too far gone to be healed. Maybe our loved one has wandered too far to be brought back or we’re too broken to be of any use to the Kingdom of God. See what I mean? We are some who doubt.

He knows our doubts just as surely as He knew the “some” of His own disciples who doubted. But like them, He commissions us anyway. Calls us to go, to make disciples, to lay down our lives. He still fills us with His Spirit and His gifts and puts us into His body in whatever way He sees fit. Our doubts do not deter Him from calling us to keep following and keep going.

If Jesus doesn’t disqualify us because of our bouts with doubt, then who are we to disqualify ourselves?

Some doubted. Some still doubt. It’s ok. Let’s tell one another, pray for one another, and then go make disciples anyway.