Comfort Re-examined

What makes you so certain you have all the facts?  Do you know everything you need to know when you make your decisions?  Are you clear on all the factors involved as you move forward?  We find in 2 Thessalonians 2: 7ff that there is a great set of unseen forces at work all around us and we are like mindless bobs bouncing at the whim of a seething  ocean storm if we do not seek the Lord in all we do and say.  The deception is at every level and in each turn; everything that is of God is opposed by the power of lawlessness and we pretend to our great harm that it is not present in our spot of the world.  The vast majority of our personality is hidden from our view and therein is the rub.  What we don't see we pretend doesn't exist but we cannot continue to hide from it.  Forces are at work within us and without and it is the fool who does not bring Christ into each part of his day because those forces are most certainly there already.  If insanity is the mental deviation from the norm, then it is insanity to take into consideration forces operating within each of your moments influencing your emotional reactions and marring your mental acuity.  Yet insanity is sanity when reality goes unnoticed and denied by the acknowledged "norm".  Jesus Christ died to free you from slavery to the rebellion in the universe and to let yourself be subservient to that rebellion without a care is the remaking of General Custer's march into the Little Big Horn.  The Lord broke your bondage to Satan and the will of his cohorts; why put back on those chains by ignoring the working of Holy Spirit in your heart; guiding you, inspiring you, elevating your view.  The man of lawlessness is no comic book character...he is at the heart of our world's misery even in your corner of the world.  Take action.  Pursue with determined fortitude the power and might of Holy Spirit at the very spot where you are in your day through all those spots of your day.  You are at the front line of the battlefield and you must have the eyes of God Himself seeing through you if you are to be of any good in this fight.

The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with the work of Satan displayed in all kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs and wonders and in every sort of evil that deceives those who are perishing.  They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.  2 Thessalonians 2: 9-10

History in the Making

If we look back upon the losses we have endured over the years, we might see certain trends...bad breaks, poor timing, lack of attentiveness to crucial details, slovenly habits, dysfunctional relationships, distorted views of self.  It could be that we got sick at the wrong time, were tripped up by our lusts or were mistaken about the character of certain people.    The regretful glance backward that morphs into self-pitying is corrosive to the working of God in you.  The very thing He came to do, redeem your life completely gets hindered by the regret you keep eyeing.  If we take God at His word, that Christ came to save us from our sin, then the obstinate pout must be put away.  But you may wonder how God could do this, how He could make the ugly moments of your past "redeemed".  His answer to you is the same as it was for the withered Elizabeth past child bearing.  "Nothing is impossible with God."  The worst of your circumstances are made new by Christ upon His sin bearing.  They are bought back and rebuilt...remade just as thoroughly as if an old wreck of a car were blown to smithereens and the molecules of it put together into the most spectacular of yachts.  "Nothing is impossible" includes your past and what has been done to you and by you is of no account anymore.  What matters is what God will do with it and that is, "make all things new."    The Lord is not afraid of your past even if you have built it up into a monster.  He has faced it squarely while dying on the Cross and mastered it.  You have nothing to hide anymore...it is out in the open...out in the bright sunlight of God's love for you.   Is it not perfectly reasonable that the bearing of your sin took place as day splintered off into darkness and the redeeming of your life came to pass as the first sparkles of sunlight broke upon the dawn?  You can moan about the missed opportunities and the regrettable decisions you have made but what is the point of that?  It is like weeping over winning the lottery or despairing over the successful surgery that saved you from cancer.  You have been redeemed!  Never look past that.

"Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine.  Isaiah 43:1 NIV