I am not quite prepared to say, "Eureka" or claim to have had an epiphany yet. I am still scratching at it, praying about it, meditating on it. As always you can let me know what you think via comments to this post. They always get published, unedited, in their entirety. Drumroll please.
The reason the grace of God often is not at work in our lives is that we do not let it work. That is it. Simple really. In order for grace to work in our lives we must yield to it, allow it the chance to work. To the contrary, the human condition, the sin nature, the needing to have things be happening all the time, compels us to circumvent the working of grace by getting involved in and aborting the process.
A good friend of mine has been heard to refer to Christians' desire for things to happen as "microwave Christianity." That goes right along with, "God give me patience, and give it to me now." That is not the way it works. Gaining patience is a process. First there is the tribulation, then the patience. (Romans 5:1-5)
There was a television commercial when I was a child (that is long enough ago that most of you will not remember it) that asserted, "Paul Masson will sell no wine before its time." Ecclesiastes 3:1 tells us, "To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven." Just as wine takes time to ferment and attain its full body and flavor, grace works little by little in accomplishing God's purposes in and through His people.
Just as Jesus performed His first miracle at the wedding in Cana of Galilee when He changed water into wine, (John 2:1-11) God is able to cause His grace to work instantaneously. In fact, many times it looks to the observer as though grace came upon someone quickly. That is because the observer does not know when the process began or how long it actually took. Someone remarked to Kenneth Copeland that his ministry had taken off overnight. His response was that if that were true, it was the longest night in recorded history.
One does not have to read far into new reports or watch very much television news to know there are a lot of people experiencing greater tribulation than they ever have. We consider that a bad thing for the most part, but ponder this: if tribulation does indeed work patience, with the ultimate result being a greater hope in God, is not tribulation a good thing? That is not to say we should enjoy tribulation (sorry James).
Tribulation comes because we are not who God wants us to be. The proper attitude would be to embrace the tribulation that we are involved in to discover what the lessons are. That is no small task. We do have the Word of God and the fellowship of the saints to assist with that. Often when we cannot see what God is doing in our lives, others can. We typically pray the wrong prayers. We ask God to shorten the tribulation rather than asking Him to give us the grace to see the situation as it is and to make the necessary course corrections. When we have done that, the tribulation has worked correctly. We want to cut the process, but cutting the process also means we do not learn the lesson.
Please be encouraged to, "...let patience have its perfect work..." (James 1:4) God bless!
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Wow! Surely a prophet's reward has been bestowed upon you. Speechless. Amazing that you used Romans 5 because that is the exact scripture that compelled a text message to you yesterday morning. It is amazing when you give it all up to God, how fast He truly works in your life. It is only when you release and surrender to His grace, that we realize "microwaving" our spiritual condition, it takes longer for His grace to come into our situations. We all want so bad for everything to be fixed right now. But, like Ecclesiastes says, a time for everything under heaven. It is much easier to see God's grace when we sit back and watch it, knowing God will bring everything to perfection, as opposed to trying to make it happen on our own time.
ReplyDeleteYou're onto something for sure!
Of course, this is just our opinion.
Eph 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God,
ReplyDeleteEph 2:9 not of works, lest anyone should boast.
I believe grace is His part. (Talking here about salvation in its broadest sense.) Our part is faith and the faith we are talking about is not human faith but God's kind of faith working in us. Such faith is something we already have in the born again spirit man and is (naturally) of the Spirit. Since faith (not really faithfulness) is part of the fruit of the spirit -- Gal 5:22 -- it comes from the spirit/Spirit.
Someone is reading my mind. Either that or we are listening to the same Spirit. This was going to be the topic of the next post, or maybe the one after that. Thank you for the prod.
ReplyDelete