August 3, 2012
Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. -- Hebrews 12: 7 (NLT)
Life is filled with changes. One minute we are up, sitting on top of the world and the next we are down - walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. It is very difficult to find any consistency within this fallen world. God however, never changes. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. He is the solid rock upon which we should be building our lives. We need to realize today that God speaks to us through all circumstances -- but are we listening? I joke around with some of my employees that they have selective hearing. They choose to listen to what they agree with, but seemingly never heard the instructions if they disagreed with it. Parents always complain the same about children who never seem to hear the "clean up your room" chants but jump up like Pavlov's dog when the Ice Cream man's bell is ringing a block away. When it comes to matters of the Holy Spirit however, it is very dangerous to be selective. We cannot selectively decide when something is spiritual and something is not.
but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man's spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. -- 1Corinthians 2: 10-11 (NIV)
By ourselves, we cannot know the thoughts of God. It is the Spirit that reveals to us the deep things of God. It is the Spirit that searches us, teaches us, edifies us, and convicts us. We like the first three but it is that last one that we sometimes shy away from. We do not often like the conviction of the Holy Spirit because in our pride we do not like to be corrected. Even further, we often fall into the trap of convincing ourselves that something is spiritual and God-ordained when we have not actually heard from Him. The most common and dangerous practice related to this is when we gloss over everything negative in our lives with worldly reasons and excuses but attribute everything positive as a move of the Holy Spirit.
Let us deal with the positive things first. Not everything that happens in your life, which the world concludes is positive, is necessarily a move of the Holy Spirit. We might get a promotion at work for example and be very happy because of the prestige, salary, or career advancement but that does not mean that God ordained it. Yet we can convince ourselves that God was behind it all. Then six months later that same promotion has drawn you away from God. Perhaps it requires you to work when you used to be in ministry. Perhaps it has made you so busy that it affects your personal devotional time with the Lord. Perhaps it starts to affect your marriage. In these examples it is easy to see how the initial positive occurrence could not have been a move of God in our lives because God sees all time. God sees the end result and He would not orchestrate things in our lives that do not bring glory to His name and which negatively affect us. Now, while God may not have orchestrated events, He surely allows them and we should properly reflect praise to His name for positive events in our lives but be very careful to make sure that our walk is not negatively affected. Remember, what the world values is rarely what God values.
Making situations like this worse is when we seemingly dismiss how we got to where we are. God is infinitely more concerned with how we arrived then the fact that we are there. Building anything, including a ministry or even a church, upon a rotten foundation will not work. It will be man-made and thus must be man-maintained. Sometimes we can get so hung up on our intentions. We think that because we have convinced ourselves that our heart was pure that our actions do not matter when the opposite is true with God. He is concerned with our actions, not our intentions. Dismissing the past by claiming present righteousness is simply not how God operates. It is a worldly rationale that is ignorant of the spiritual realm in which God operates.
The real danger however is on the other side. The side that seeks a worldly excuse or reasoning to explain any negative occurrence in our lives. The world will always be willing to provide a rationale or excuse that dismisses God. The church and believers should always err on the side of what is happening in the spiritual realm. The key verse today has God imploring us to accept hardship as discipline. Sometimes we become too enamored with God as our loving Father and never consider God as our chastising Father. Parents do not seek to chastise their children because they want to but because they are trying to teach them something. God is often trying to get our attention. Yes He often does it through love and prospering us but He also does it through a refining process:
I will bring that group through the fire and make them pure. I will refine them like silver and purify them like gold. They will call on my name, and I will answer them. I will say, "These are my people,' and they will say, "The Lord is our God.'" -- Zechariah 13: 9 (NLT)
The process of refining gold and silver is one that seeks to remove all of the impurities. The same process applies to us as children of God. What parent would allow their child to continue to play with matches? The fear of the child being burned and hurting themselves would motivate us to try and get their attention as to why they should not be so careless. The same goes for sin in our lives and in the life of the church. God does not want us playing with the fire of sin because He knows how easily we can get burned. Discipline is always for our good.
This is not suggesting that every hardship we encounter is a result of God's discipline. Hardly. The world we live in is fallen and sometimes things are what they appear to be. The point is the danger in not even considering a spiritual reason when we face the trials of our lives. Selective spirituality will result in a believer or a church not being able to recognize when God is trying to get our attention. When we turn God into only being responsible for the good things in life then we become spiritually lazy. We always assume we are walking in divine providence and never are able to see what it is that we need to do better, or change, or avoid altogether. It weakens our relationship with God and drives us farther away from Him. As the key verse states, He is treating us like sons when He chooses to discipline us. There is a spiritual lesson He is seeking to impart to us. It will make us stronger in our walk. It will purify us for His work. But we have to recognize it first for what it is.
Lastly, it is dangerous because it shuts off the path to getting right with God -- repentance. Proverbs teaches us:
People who conceal their sins will not prosper, but if they confess and turn from them, they will receive mercy. -- Proverbs 28: 13 (NLT)
Here is the problem beloved. One can never repent of something they do not believe they did wrong. When we attribute everything negative to worldly excuses we run the risk of missing what the Spirit of God is trying to tell us. We miss the opportunity to see our part in things and thus, the desire to repent. The impurities then continue and deepen. God always has a new level for us to go to in Him, but first we must be aware of what His Spirit is trying to say to us.
Rev. Anthony
