Performance and Failure

The Multi-Faceted God

May it never be! Rather, let God be found true, though every man {be found} a liar, as it is written, THAT THOU MIGHTEST BE JUSTIFIED IN THY WORDS, AND MIGHTEST PREVAIL WHEN THOU ART JUDGED.--Romans 3:4

Matthew 6:26, “Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns, and {yet} your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?”

Yet I have watched birds starve to death in the winter months.

Matthew 6:28, 29, “And why are you anxious about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin; yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory did not clothe himself like one of these.”

In the interior of Liberia the locals were afraid to return to church, for they did not have clothes. They had lost them in the war.

Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it.” Many, many parents have done all that they knew to do, and yet their children departed from the Lord.

Psalm 121:7, “The LORD will protect you from all evil; He will keep your soul.”

History is replete with the stories of millions of martyrs that died at the hands of evil men.

I could continue with the illustrations, but I am sure you get the point. Let God be true, but what do the facts say? The simple answer is that you must believe God when bad happens. The emphasis is on belief, and yet believing is exactly what the believer was doing, believing God for food, clothing, protection, and a child that would be blessed. Is the Christian to believe God’s words or believe that God causes all things to work together for good? Which is it?

We live in a world of dimensions. I have seen Mount Everest! I have, and I will argue the point; I saw it with my own eyes in Nepal. However, the mountaineer would beg to differ, saying that I only saw one side of Mount Everest, and therefore I did not really see it. To see it, I would have to walk around it, climb it, and possibly look under it. I am, to them, less than a novice. I bumped into former President Ford one day. As I was leaving the restroom he was entering. “I know President Ford! President Ford has met me.” Do I? Has he? Is it not interesting that as dimensional creatures we insist on being non-dimensional or one-sided in our views? If someone is employed to paint and it is discovered that he is not a good painter, he is dismissed with the words, “You are worthless!” Is he worthless? Later that same person attends university, becomes a physicist, then a Nobel Prize recipient. Yes, but he could not paint; he was labeled worthless. My point is that Church history is replete with examples of teachers, scholars, and preachers that are non-dimensional when it comes to God. They have never walked around God, so to speak. They only see one side of Him, and if something comes at them from another side, they manipulate it until it fits their single-minded view of Him. Ecclesiastes 11:5, “Just as you do not know the path of the wind and how bones {are formed} in the womb of the pregnant woman, so you do not know the activity of God who makes all things.” Some evangelists, teachers, and others only see the provision side of God. They preach Him as the great general store in the sky. Whatever someone may want is his if he has the faith. Their airplanes, diamonds, and wealth prove it. If that is their single-sided view of God -- God created man to give to him, and that is all God does -- then this single-sided view will eventually drive them into deception, manipulation of Scripture, self-image protection, and shipwreck. Of course they will be presented with Scriptures that are “outside the box” of what they see God as being. If a person sees God non-dimensionally as the Great Physician only, a variety of blame will be heaped on the sick, illness in his own family will have to be spiritualized away, and again more Scripture distorted and twisted.

What glasses do we wear when looking at God? Can we take time to walk around the mountain, climb on top, and mine underneath? If our awareness of God embraces the fact that He is multi-faceted, we will see each Bible passage as part of a giant jigsaw puzzle that reflects God. We will see that all things work together because God is in all things. We will see that only God can do what God does. 

I like kit cars. They come in hundreds of pieces in a huge container with three-dimensional diagrams; a one-dimensional diagram would be useless. The job is to use a variety of tools to put together the automobile, using the exact tool for each exact job. It is impossible to find the one tool that will do everything. Oh, people claim to make all-purpose tools! However, at some point the user throws it to the ground in disgust.

The day Jesus received me I was in pieces. No one would have imagined that I was made in His image! Who would think I was a Son of God, holy, righteous, acceptable, and equipped for every good work? He set about to put me together. The tool that He used would be the perfect tool for that day and purpose. It would have been the wrong tool for the next day, but He does everything in order. My multi-dimensional God has such a vast array of tools, every one true and every tool absolute. In His tool chest are sickness and health, wealth and poverty, good and bad, mercy and judgment, love and hate, wounding and healing, broken relationships and mended ones, adornment and nakedness, excluded and included, decreasing and increasing, pruning and reaping, giving and taking, drought and rain, sanity and insanity, rebelliousness and compliance, death and life, and I could go on. If someone does not believe that these are His tools, I can show a Scripture for each one that proves they are. Job is a good example in that God used good and bad to perfect him. Hebrews 1:3, “And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representationof His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power.” Jesus was never one-sided. He was putting every man back together. See Him use a unique tool on a unique person. He was love but not the one-dimensional love that man has and perceives. 

Stop seeing so one-dimensionally! Stop protecting your limited view of God! Start trusting that God is putting you together. To begin your journey out of a flat world, start by taking a walk around Jesus. If a passage does not make sense to you, if it has not been your experience or you do not see how it fits into the whole, do not just stand there! Walk around Jesus and look at Him from a different angle; it all fits perfectly. The passages mentioned at the beginning of the article are for a particular time, to accomplish a particular task in our lives. If a passage applied all the time we would be thwarted and never grow into the revelation of Christ. I am not copping out! Look at your own life! In times of darkness and need you grew up in Christ. Generally Christians define love one way, but for Jesus every act--from cleansing the temple to healing the leper--was one of love. James 1:17 reminds us that “every good thing bestowed and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation, or shifting shadow.”

- Mike Wells

Does Disobedience Disqualify You from God's Blessing?

Romans 5:19 deals with this once and for all —> Through one man's (ADAM's) disobedience, many (WE) were made sinners. And through one man's (JESUS') obedience, many (WE) were made righteous.

It wasn't our disobedience that made us sinners.
It wasn't our obedience that made us righteous.

As soon as you're born again, by accepting Jesus as your substitute, you become the RIGHTEOUSNESS of God, seated with Christ! And no sin, no mistake, no "disobedience", can eliminate you from your seat of righteousness or the blessings that come with it!

We Don’t Always Want What We Want

I am traveling through the south of Florida at the moment, having spent the weekend in Miami, and now headed up to the Sarasota/Tampa area for the weekend. Yesterday, I had an amazing lunch conversation reconnecting with someone I’d visited several years ago. He’d come here to plant house churches and ended up discovering that the church was more wild and wonderful than that could contain as well. He, too, is learning that life moves at the speed of relationships.

While we were eating, I sat facing the wall pictured above. We were in a restaurant called Ford’s Garage that commemorates the life of Henry Ford, who had a summer home near here, which just happened to be right next door to a summer home for Thomas Edison. Can you imagine the conversations they must have had together? Oh, to have been a fly on that wall…

Anyway, I was taken with this quote of Henry Ford’s: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” He had dreamed up something so much better, what people didn’t even know they wanted, and his automobile has taken over the world.

I wonder how many of our prayers sound like that to God. We are asking him for the thing we think we want when he has things in mind for us that are more wonderful than we can even conceive. Most of my prayers used to ask God to do things that would make me comfortable or happy, and he had things in mind that would radically change the way I think and live in the world. I’m so glad God did not answer most of my prayers the way I wanted him to. His ideas have proved to be so much better and higher than mine.

It made me think of my favorite line from the movie, Bruce Almighty. “Since when does anyone have a clue about what they want?” So true! We think we do, but then God works in other ways.

I’ve long thought that’s what Ephesians 3:20 is talking about. “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever! Amen.”

It doesn’t mean if I’m asking him for a three-bedroom house, he wants to give me a five-bedroom one. It merely means that what we want now is rarely what we would really want if we could see our lives through God’s eyes. We want comfort, ease, and a pain-free existence, he wants to invite us into the adventure of a lifetime that transcends all of those things to embrace his reality in a way that changes how we live in a broken world.

As I’ve continued on this journey, I am much more aware that what I thought I wanted wasn’t what I really wanted. Almost twenty years ago, I found myself saying to a friend, “Over the past few years, God has defied to the nth degree every expectation and desire I had for my life.”

“Is that a good thing?” he asked me.

I found myself answering, “It’s the best thing!” And it has been, though it often takes the added perspective of two or three years to pass so I can look back and see that what he was doing was far better than what I had in mind. It has led me on a path to The Deepest Freedom—freedom from the tyranny of my own best wisdom or my desires.

I’m glad that Jesus said the Father knows what we need even before we ask him. I’m relieved by that because I’m sure many of my prayers don’t make much sense to him. Now, if we could just relax and trust that in the present, we would be so much more at peace.

- Wayne Jacobsen

I Know Him – Case Closed!

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today, yes and forever.

Hebrews 13:8 (NAS)

We get many prayer requests because of our Prayer Community site. If you haven’t noticed it, investigate and become a part’it is totally private and your anonymity is secure. The neat thing is that you can be completely truthful and tell everything’your deepest needs/hurts.

There are many concerns for healing and salvation mentioned with these requests, but there’s one that appears more than any other: “I want a closer relationship with the Lord. How do I get that? What do I need to do?”

Let’s just think about closeness in relationships for a minute. I’ve told you about Wesley, our mostly Jack Russell terrier. He rarely lets me out of his sight. Why? Well, the main reason, I’m confident, is because I know where his food dish is, where the food is, and can tell time. But, Wes knows me. We do a lot of things together. He has come to know that I will let him sit with me, that I will walk with him around the block, that I let him go in the car with me, that I love to pet him, that I laugh at his antics, and will play with him. Yes. Wes knows me. We have a very close relationship.

Hopefully there is someone in your life who has the ability to calm you when things go wrong just by listening to you and saying, “It’s going to be all right. I’ll be here with you.” (This defines security and is to be conveyed most importantly by your wife or your husband. That’s why “listening” is one of the most important facets of a marriage.) There may be someone in your life who has been your main confidant over the years and you know’unequivocally’that person would never betray a confidence. I know him. He would never do that. Case closed!

But how do close relationships come about? It is so simple’spending time with each other, doing things together, being transparent and trusting each other with the deepest thoughts’secrets’in your life. You build trust through experiences and find that this person has those two qualities that spell closeness: Loyal and Truthful.

How well do you know Jesus Christ? Is He a loyal Friend? Oh, is He loyal! That’s one of His main characteristics, isn’t it? How about truthful? Is He truthful with you? He can be no other way! This is part of His being! God cannot lie![1] So, when someone shares something with you that brings into question His truthfulness or His loyalty, it’s your turn to say’emphatically’I know Him. He is not that way! Case closed! If I cannot trust Him completely’without a shadow of doubt’then I cannot trust Him at all! One episode of His failure to be truthful will shatter my trust for Him. That simply cannot be!

How do you establish a close relationship with Jesus? By getting to know Him’spending time with Him’sharing yourself with Him’and listening as He shares with you’and believing what He tells you. “But Anabel, He doesn’t talk to me!” Oh, yes He does. He has “written” a love letter to you’the Bible’choose those special parts that reveal His love to you and read them again, and again, and again.

Read Isaiah 40:11. Picture it. Put yourself in that scene.

Read Matthew 11:28-20. Picture it. Are you there?

Read Ephesians 3:17-21. Read it again. Is He talking to you?

Read Deuteronomy 31:8. Is this truth? Then walk in it.

Lovingly, Anabel

By Anabel Gillham on October 12, 2019

All-Seeing Presence