Tag Archives: Blog Post

Great Expectations-Part One

05 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by in Walking in the Way

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday was the anniversary of the car accident that left me differently-abled.  I am grateful to be walking and that, once my hair grew back in, I was not left with visible scars but I do live with limitations; both physical and cognitive.  Which brings me to what I want to discuss in this series of posts:  I say I have a relationship with Jesus…why then am I not healed?

2 Corinthians 1: 20 says, “For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ.  And so through Him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God”.  There are many promises of healing I could quote from both the Old and New Testaments but, for the sake of brevity, I’m going to focus on Exodus 15: 26 which states, “If you listen carefully to the Lord your God and do what is right in His eyes, if you pay attention to His commands and keep all His decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord who heals you.”  If He is the Lord who heals me and this promise is “yes” in Jesus, then I should be able to expect healing, right?

And, it does seem Exodus lays out the rules for receiving healing.  IF I pay attention to His commands and keep all His decrees, THEN He will heal me.  I have attempted to pay attention to His commands and keep all His decrees.  I attended churches (not forsaking the assembling like Hebrews 10:25 says!) and attempted to do what they told me to do.  I read my bible, attended multiple services per week, and devoted time to prayer.  Then, I would miss a day of reading or a prayer time. Since I could not do these simple things on a regular basis, how could I expect God to heal me? 

I sought healing through biblical methods.  I had hands laid on me, was anointed with oil, stood in healing lines, and was prayed over.  One traveling evangelist insisted that if he laid hands on me I WOULD be healed so I imagine my disappointment when he did so and I was not.  Of course then the fault was mine because “a double-minded person is unstable in all they do” and “such a person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord” (James 1: 8 and 7) so my still being in pain caused me to doubt which meant I didn’t really trust God and didn’t have any faith so He could not heal me. I had these things said to me.

Then I realized that, if I was following the rule laid down in Exodus, all I had to do was pay attention to His commands and keep His decrees.  What simplicity!  Jesus only left me with one: “Love one another.  As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”  (John 13:34)  Well, has anyone else tried this?  Have you found it as difficult a command to keep as I have?  Failure after failure after failure.  No wonder I didn’t have my healing!  How could God heal someone who so consistently fell short of His standards of behavior?!

Have any of you been subjected to this?  If you have, know I empathize with you.  I have been trapped in this never-ending cycle of just not being good enough to please God and finally receive of His promises.  I was already tired from the effects of the car accident and all this striving only made me more so.  Then, I had a life crisis so devastating I was certain I could not and never had heard from God.  I had failed Him so completely I should just curl up and die so He could send me to hell and get it over with.  It was in this place that I met God!  The living God.  The gentle, loving Father who so desired a relationship with me, He sent Jesus into my darkness and death to get me and bring me out.  (John 3:16 and especially 17!, John 17: 3, Ephesians 2: 4-7)

My feet were set on a new path and I began to get to know The Father.  I do not say the path has been easy.  In fact, it felt like the moment my Father began to show me who He was, the floodgates of hell were opened in my life.  Even though…through every devastating circumstance, my Father has revealed a little more of Himself to me and I have been filled with awe and wonder.

But still I struggled with limitations from the car accident and, as the years went by, I developed other health problems.  I prayed about them, tried to “Amen” all the promises of God, and received no miraculous healing.  I ended up having a major surgery and afterwards had the opportunity to speak with a close friend.  I told her how I had prayed leading up the surgery-that I would be spared having to go through it-and how the answer I had received had been “no”.  I told my friend that, while I could accept the no, I had expected things to be different.  It had been years since I’d come to know The Father in a new way and I’d expected I would level up somehow: like in a spiritual video game. 

We both laughed at that but, after hanging up with her, I continued to think about it.  That had been my expectation: that with greater understanding came greater blessings.  Wasn’t that the rule?  Within a few months of this conversation, I had to have another minor procedure.  I threw up my spiritual hands.  Whatever the secret was, I clearly had not discovered it.

Again, while a painful place to be, it is not a bad place to be.  It has been my experience over the last seventeen years that these valleys of deepest darkness are where my Father’s light shines brightest.  And so it proved.

To be continued…

Bible verses are quoted from the New International Version

Making My Footsteps the First

21 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by in Walking in the Way

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

This coffee mug was a Christmas gift from my Mother.  The phrase on it spoke to me but I was not purchasing things for myself so put it back on the shelf. My mother had seen and surprised me with it.  In case you can’t read it (I’ve had the mug for some years and it’s been through many washings), the phrase is “Each new wave rearranges the patterns in the sand so we can pretend our footsteps are the first”.  I can’t tell you why this phrase spoke to me the way it did but, as the Holy Spirit has worked in me, opening the eyes of my heart to the truth of who Jesus is in me; I have garnered a deeper understanding of this phrase.  Even though the Holy Spirit has been at work in God’s people for over 2,000 years, each revelation is new to me. When my eyes are opened to see, it’s a brand new discovery. 

For instance:

There was a time I used to read Matthew 27:46 where Jesus cries out “My God, My God, Why have You forsaken me?” and thought I understood how He felt.  There have been so many times when I’ve walked through such darkness I was certain God had forsaken me.  I couldn’t hold that against Him though because He’d forsaken Jesus too so at least Jesus understood how I felt.  This is a terrible belief to hold and I thank God He didn’t let me keep it for long.  The Holy Spirit led me to Hebrews 13:5 where I read, and the Amplified translation says it best: “Let your character [your moral essence, your inner nature] be free from the love of money [shun greed—be financially ethical], being content with what you have; for He has said, “I will never [under any circumstances] desert you [nor give you up nor leave you without support, nor will I in any degree leave you helpless], nor will I forsake or let you down or relax My hold on you [assuredly not]!”  While this passage is more about financial worries, this promise of God appeared to hold true for every aspect of my life especially when the verse 16 says “So we take comfort and are encouraged and confidently say, “The Lord is my Helper [in time of need], I will not be afraid. What will man do to me?”

Here was a thought:  If God promised to never leave nor forsake me, was my belief that He had forsaken Jesus mistaken?

I began to read the bible with this question in mind and saw Isaiah 53:4 which states, “surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by Him and afflicted.”  This struck me.  “Punished by God” is how I saw Jesus’ sufferings and death but this scripture appeared to tell me that wasn’t true.  Then the Holy Spirit drew my eyes to 2 Corinthians 5:19 where Paul writes “…God was reconciling the word to Himself in Christ” and Colossians 2:9 which states “in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.”  With these two passages ringing in my mind, I began to question my interpretation of Matthew 27:46.  If I were incorrect and The Father had not forsaken His son, what did Jesus’ words mean?

Then came the day when the Holy Spirit answered that question.  I was reading Psalm 22.  I cannot count how many times I’d read it before and felt David’s pain but had NEVER realized what was going on.  The opening lines of this Psalm are exactly Jesus’ words on the cross.  I have read the writings of bible teachers who have said that every Jew within earshot would not have needed Jesus to say anything more.  They would have known the Psalm in its entirety just hearing the first lines and would know exactly what He was saying.  What was He saying?

Even though David wrote this Psalm hundreds of years before Jesus’ birth, this entire Psalm is about Him.  As the Holy Spirit opened my eyes to that truth, I read through the Psalm in dawning wonder.  Passages leapt out at me.  “He trusts in the Lord, they say, let the Lord rescue him” (verse 8) I found paralleled in Matthew 27:43.  I discovered the horror and shame of crucifixion in verses 16-18 of the Psalm: “they pierce my hands and my feet.  All my bones are on display, people stare and gloat over me.  They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment.”

I read David’s words and saw that they mirrored Jesus’ agony.  I continued reading and knew for certain God had not forsaken Jesus on the cross for the Psalm itself declares Jesus was not forsaken in verse 24: “He has not hidden His face from him but has listened to his cry for help.” 

The Psalm ends on a note of exultation.  Verse 31 says, “They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!”  The last words of the Psalm, “He has done it”, are exactly Jesus’ words when He cries “It is finished!”

I couldn’t believe it. It was like I’d never read the Psalm before.  My entire mind was flooded with revelation and I had an entirely new bible.  I also had an entirely new understanding of Jesus’ cry on the cross. I read the Psalm again and then went back to Matthew 27 to read the entire passage.  And then I read it again because I finally saw what Matthew’s gospel was saying. Jesus’ cry on the cross was not a cry of agony at being abandoned by God.  Rather, it was a shout of triumph.  Even when the situation looks as bad as it possibly can, my God shouts His triumph.

This was a brand new discovery for me and the Holy Spirit and I delighted in it together.  I felt like I’d been the only one ever to have seen this to be true even though, at the same time, I knew I could not be.  Indeed, I am not the first nor will I be the last but it doesn’t matter.  I delight in my seeing.  Those who have already seen share my delight and I have an equal share in the delight of their having seen.  Even though many have walked the shoreline of this particular revelation, the Holy Spirit made the sand smooth so that I felt my footsteps were the first.  He makes it smooth again once I’ve passed so that another can discover Him for the first time.

*All scriptures are quoted from the Amplified and NIV translations.