INYOU WINDOW, August, 2006: “How God Feeds Me.”
“Open your mouth wide and I will fill it” (Ps. 81:10).
When God is ready to feed me, humble pie and the Beatitudes are almost always on the menu!
“I am broken, I am mourning, I surrender, I am hungry, Have mercy, Purify me, Peace abiding, in Your Kingdom, Be glorified revealing Christ in me.” These are the words of a chorus God sang through my heart this month (based on Matt. 5:3-9). They encompass the requirements for a heart ready to receive from Him; perhaps they are even the evidence of Jesus pressing in on mortal flesh. Without the recognition of personal bankruptcy and depravity there will not be a desperate thirst and hunger for the life God wants to give; there will not be a mouth wide open.
Mike Wells says “God comes for your words.” Well, He came for my last INYOU WINDOW and I have been eating them all August long. If “God sees me as spirit” is true, then why do I keep trying to improve what I don’t like about me? Why don’t I just trust what God says is the truth and move on in Him? When God invites (or requires me) me to worship Him “in spirit and in truth” (Jn. 4:24), I must or I won’t worship rightly at all. God knows I will become what I worship and that I don’t see Him for who He really is when I am in the flesh. Instead, I interpret my life and circumstances in light of who I am at that moment—what I feel and have experienced to that point, and what I can see! My heart (seedbed of emotion), being impure, cannot see God rightly (Mt. 5:8). This view of Him, being unworthy of Him, must be remade. Pascal wrote: “God created man in His own image and man returned the favor.”
When God initiates this “remaking”, when He is ready to “open a new chapter” in my life, He must first “close the book” on my old image of Him. This “turning of the page” often involves misery—my response to circumstances that reveal to me just where I am (discontent,
discomfort, disappointment, depression). Until I admit where I am, I will likely remain where I am. If God is going to “write His story” in my life, He must allow that which I have been counting on to get me this far to fail. Henry Blackaby says, “I cannot stay the way I am and go with God.” There IS a crisis of belief that requires faith and obedience, and this is the root of the issue! It is faith and not the flesh that “sees” the truth when what is true seems permanently scripted into my memory.
Hebrews 3 & 4 perfectly describe the “deeper walk” with God—the walk He intends each of His children to enter into: “Take care, brethren, that there not be in any one of you a evil, unbelieving heart that falls away from the living God” (Heb. 3:12). That’s it—an unbelieving heart! In my broken, captive, and helpless state, I will either look to myself and question how and why I got here (in an effort to improve myself), or I will “die to self” and see God for who says He is, believe Him for what He wants to do and follow Him in obedience against all odds. When I am in comfort or in doubt, I turn from Him and His ways and, while seeking to accomplish His plans without Him, end up defeated and frustrated. It’s a simple cycle we all know well. We’ve taken this course before.
So how then does God feed me? Is it by Biblical instruction and my own discipline and study alone? Does God feed me through education or situation? Again, Blackaby says “God speaks by the Holy Spirit, through the Bible, prayer, circumstances, and church, to reveal Himself, His purposes and His ways.” “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” And what is that purpose? “For those He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son” (Rm. 8:28-29a). God is using all things to remake us into the likeness of His Son, Jesus—even our past sins and wounds. Only faith can see this. Our image of Him must be exchanged so that we can see Him as HE IS and receive from Him what He wants to feed us!
“When Israel was a youth I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son…it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them in My arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of a man, with bonds of love, and I became to them as one who lifts the yoke from their jaws; and I bent down and fed them” (Hosea 11:1-4).
In his book, The Rest of the Gospel, Dan Stone asks: “Do you think some of this pain you and others go through, where you don’t seem to get any strokes from God, is part of the process whereby the real love that He has poured out in your heart (Rm. 5:5) comes out? So that you’ll be able to love Him with that love—His own love loving Him back?” How else will I learn to love as God loves? What will open my mouth wide to receive Hs love and His life of love? I believe God uses “all things” to feed me His love, His presence, Himself. When I “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8); that praise returns to Him, and when that which flows from His very character is reflected back to Him, that glorifies Him!
NOTE: Hannah Sobeski is home. Pray for her continued healing. Also, my cousin, Nathan, sounds great and continues to recover from his bone marrow transplant in April. He, too, is home and resting.
