Father God, bring your peace to Tina and Mark and to the girls. I thank you for encouraging Echo to make the decision she has made to move to Anacortes. I praise you and your glorious nature for inspiring Mark and Tina to encourage her to follow her heart, despite the fear and concerns they may have about her future. Thank you for providing for me and Eric today. You keep placing upon my heart the importance of remaining firmly rooted in today's provision. My heart is often distracted by the future, concerns that aren't even on the horizon...weeks or months away. And I know you are faithful. I know that you are faithful to provide for our needs. I know that I must push past my enemy, fear, and press into your faithfulness. You are faithful, not because of what we do but because of who You are. Reveal to us Your faithfulness today. Lord, I pray a special prayer for Ruby today. I pray for your ministering angels and your people to meet her, to encourage her, to love her. Father, give her the security of being a daughter of the King. Give her the security she needs right now. Father, I pray right now for the lies to be broken over Mark. I pray for Mark to have a great awakening to his partnership with fear, depression, and discouragement. I pray that he would have a great awakening to the way he has been partnering with the lies of the enemy, who only desires to keep him low, pressed down, oppressed, and depressed. Father, lift his eyes to see your countenance shining upon him. Call forth his spirit into true communion with Your Spirit. Break through the lies and bring forth Your truth in greater and greater measures each day. Fan the flames and renew for him the joy of his salvation. Your good news is really good news. The life he is living, the life he has settled for, is not the life you planned for his family. Father, spark in Tina prayers and songs of deliverance over her family. Father, remind her of the dreams she's had, and give her fuel to fan the flames of her intercession and prayer. Give her hope and life in these times. A smoldering wick You will not snuff out. I breathe life into her soul. I breathe life into her spirit. I call her forth into communion with Your Spirit...nourish her, strengthen her, revive her, give her tools and truths to combat the lies of the enemy in this season. Give her swift breakthrough, Father God. Thank you. ~Amen.
1:18-19 "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them."
This really stirs my heart in righteous anger against the enemy right now. It is such godless and wicked teaching that has Christians at the bottom of the barrel, oppressed by poverty, fear, and depression. It is wicked and godless teaching, the false doctrines of demons, that keep us under the finger of fear that God is not who He says He is, that keeps us from seeing the great victory and triumph that has been given to us by Christ's sacrifice. The sentence right before this is "The righteous will live by faith." That is as plain as plain can be. Just like you said this morning, it is that SIMPLE!!
LIVE: Fully alive, fully infused with the joy that is the very nature of God, fully confident of purpose and destiny, fully assured of all provision (all that we need for life and godliness). The promises are clear in the Bible, but somehow we feel we are disqualified. We fear that somehow we have done something, or not done enough to be sure that God will make good on His promise to provide. It is by faith that we live. Anything less or more is a teaching borne out of wickedness and godlessness.
I have long since stopped seeing people as wicked and godless...I see the principalities behind these lies as wicked and godless. If we are oppressed or downcast, we have only to see that these things are not from God. We have only to recognize our true nature...our new nature...the one that is free to believe all the good things that God says about us. If someone doesn't know the Lord, I still see them the same way...loved by God, the promises are for them, they only need to meet the Promise Maker (the Promise Keeper).
1:20 "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."
So often when discussing this verse, I have been tempted to focus solely on the fact that men are without excuse. I have used this verse to fuel a judgmental attitude of superiority...I know God, and you don't. You missed the signs. Oh shucks, too bad.
In reading this today, though, I see a very different focus. It is a question that this verse begs an answer to...what are the invisible qualities of God? This verse implies that they should be obvious, yet so many of us seem to look at creation and see only the bad...the violence, the disease, the darkness. None of these are God's qualities, so this is not what Paul is talking about. God reveals His nature in the fruit of His Spirit...Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self-Control.
I want to turn my attention toward these qualities of God. I want to look at creation, at my brothers and sisters, at my husband, at my children, through the eyes of God's immutable nature...from beginning to end, God's kindness, gentleness, patience shines forth from all of creation. I want to see God clearly, and I want to see my fellow humans clearly, and I want to see creation clearly. I want my mind to be completely renewed to see the earth as good, to see all of creation as good, to see everything around me as something for my enjoyment, for my nourishment, for my good. I think this is what Paul is so up in arms about...if we see God as evil, then we are without excuse, for He has never revealed Himself that way. If we see Him that way, it's because we are projecting our fallen nature onto Him. We must stop doing that and trust Him at His Word!
1:21 "For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened."
This is in keeping with I wrote in the last paragraph, but it brings freshly to mind a scene in The Magician's Nephew, by CS Lewis. I hope you've read it. If you haven't, I highly recommend it. It's one of the Narnia books, and the scene I'm thinking of is when Uncle Andrew (a greedy, low-minded man) is surrounded by the talking beasts of Narnia, but he can't hear their words. He can only hear growls, and he interprets them all as having ill-intent. He trusts none of them, and even Aslan's song is just noise to him...frightening. Because of his "darkened understanding," he interprets the whole beautiful scene as threatening and evil. In fact, he has just projected his own evil heart upon the creation of a brand new world. He's missed the beauty, and because of it he will succumb to his fear and possibly die.
1:22-23 "Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal men and birds and animals and reptiles."
I recently heard someone teach on this verse. He said that we become what we gaze upon. In other passages, Paul says that we become like our idols...not seeing or hearing. This man who was teaching said that the glory we were given by God was like His glory and was meant to ensure that we would have intimacy with Him. This is what allowed Jesus to tell His disciples that they were not mere slaves, but actually friends of God. And later, when His Spirit fell upon all flesh, the ability to receive the mind of Christ was given to all mankind. However, we are given the choice as to what we gaze upon, what we worship, what we meditate (worry) over. When we are in idolatry, we exchange our God-given glory for the glory of nature. And throughout the Bible, all of nature is in subjection to God...nature is subservient to God...lower than what we were made for. Even the angels do not share in the kind of intimacy that God reserves for human beings...we are meant to colabor, to coreign on the earth. We are not meant to have a slave relationship with God, but rather a partnership. Moses had this, Abraham had this. David had this. And that was in the Old Testament. They managed to tap into the truth of man's glory before His glory was revealed to all mankind through Jesus. The time when Moses interceded on behalf of the Israelites, and God heard his pleas and spared their lives. The time when Abraham was given power over the fate of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is a grave mistake to be like Esau...to give our birthright away for momentary peace, for momentary satisfaction. Rather, we are to be like Jacob, understanding the power that lies within and not settling for anything less than all we were meant to become.
I pray we will both grow in our understanding of the glory reserved for us, and that we would both grow in wisdom and stature, so that we can carry that glory in such a way as to honor the One who gave it to us.
Bless you, my dear friend.
~Angela
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