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2010 - HIS GLORY REIGNS
| LIFE IN JESUS-MINISTRIES |
| GOD REVEALS HIMSELF, HIS PURPOSES, AND HIS WAYS Henry & Richard Blackaby and Claude King I AM REVEALED B. Childress Apr 14 2013 For My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not My ways. (Isaiah 55:8) Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord…He will teach us about His ways so we may walk in His paths. (Micah 4:2) GOD REVEALED In a conference I was leading, I explained how Scripture reveals God as a loving Father. At a sharing time that afternoon, a woman rose and, through tears, told the group her story. As she grew up, her father never seemed satisfied with her. She could not earn high enough grades in school to please him. She could not play the piano well enough or achieve anything that satisfied him. Then when she was a teenager, her father abandoned his family and moved in with another woman. She never saw him again. Devastated, this woman constantly wondered whether he might not have turned his back on her if she had been a better daughter or had made him happier at home. Now, as a married woman with teenage children of her own, she lived in constant fear that she would lose her husband and children, too. Surely when they discovered what she was really like – someone even her own father couldn’t love – they would reject her just like he did. She had lived her entire life under this fear. She kept her family and friends at arm’ s length so they could never get too close. Her painful upbringing tainted her view of God as she had concluded God was just as judgmental, unloving, and hard to please as her earthly father had been. As I had been sharing from Scripture what God was like, however, the Holy Spirit opened her eyes to see that her heavenly Father loved her dearly. This woman had grown up going to church every Sunday and had heard countless sermons about God’s love, but not until that day – when the Spirit helped her understand what God was truly like – did she grasp all she’d been missing. That is one of the roles of the Holy Spirit – to help us know God’s nature. The Spirit also helps us understand the ways of God, for God does not act the same way people do. Finally, the Spirit helps believers understand the purposes of God. On our own, we will never discover what God intends to do. God must reveal that to us through His Holy Spirit. GOD REVEALS HIS CHARACTER When God speaks by the Holy Spirit to you, He often reveals something about Himself. Notice in the following Scriptures what God reveals about Himself:
God speaks when He wants to involve people in His work. He unveils His character to help them respond in faith. People can better respond to God’s instructions when they believe God is who He says He is and that God can do what He indicates He will do. God identified Himself to Abram by the name God Almighty. Ninety-nine-year-old Abram needed to know God was all powerful so he could believe God could give him a son in his old age. To Moses, God revealed His holy nature. Then through Moses, God told His people He was holy. God’s people had to believe He was holy so they would respond by being holy themselves. Their lives depended on it. God spoke through Malachi to Israel and reiterated that He is unchanging and forgiving. God revealed His forgiving nature so the people could believe they would be forgiven if they returned to God. Jesus called Himself “living bread” and the source of eternal life. Jesus declared He was the way to eternal life so people could believe and respond to Him and receive life. God makes Himself known to increase our faith so we will obey Him. We must pay close attention to what God reveals about Himself. When God discloses something to you about Himself:
For example, when did Abram know God as almighty? Well, perhaps he knew it in his mind as soon as God said it. But he grew to know the Lord by experience as God Almighty when God did something in his life that only God could do. When God gave Abraham (one hundred years old) and Sarah (ninety years old) a son, Abraham knew God to be almighty. GOD REVEALS HIS PURPOSES A World Missions Strategy Center Gary Hillyard was the pastor of Beverly Park Church in Seattle, Washington, when attendance averaged around one hundred on Sunday mornings. Forty church members took training to learn to pray, and eight of them subsequently committed themselves to pray daily for God to show them how He wanted to grow their church. Nineteen members began a study of Experiencing God. When immigrants from the Ukraine began attending Beverly Park, the members paid attention and asked God to reveal why He was bringing these international people to their church. One day, one of the new Ukrainian families asked Gary if the church would like to have his father’s house in Lugansk, a city of 650,000 in the Ukraine. Gary called me to ask how I thought his church should respond to such an unusual offer. I responded that this sounded like God’s invitation for the church to become involved in missions. Though behind in its budget, Beverly Park voted to accept the house, and the members continued praying. Within weeks, Don English, a friend of Gary’s, called. “Do you remember our prayer time seven years ago [before the fall of communism] when I sensed God would one day call me as a missionary to the former Soviet Union? Well, God has told me that now is the time to go. Gary replied, “I have good news for you. We have your house, and it’s in Lugansk, Ukraine.” Beverly Park voted to sponsor Don and his family as its missionaries. Gary called me again and said the church only had $21.00 in the bank. “Now what do we do?” he asked. I suggested they clarify that this was indeed the Lord’s leading. Then they needed to trust the Lord to provide for what He called them to do. They spent their Sunday evening service in prayer for God’s provision. By the end of the week, they had $4,000 to send to Don and his family in Lugansk. Once there, Don received invitations to lead Bible studies in homes, in the elementary and high schools, for university faculty, and even for five hundred people at a medical center. When the government heard about Don, they invited him to participate in a ceremony to thank America for their city library, which had been partially funded by the Marshall Plan following World War II. Don agreed. The national television station that broadcast the ceremony asked Don to say a few words. Less than two months into his work, Don was on national television telling the Ukraine about Jesus! Later, he was also invited to speak to the parliament. Don worked with the local churches to hold evangelistic meetings, and almost five hundred people were converted in a week. They wanted to distribute Bibles in the Lugansk region, so Don called Beverly Park to request prayer. One hour after Beverly Park’s prayer meeting, a church in Texas called and said they wanted to buy Bibles for the Ukraine. The Ukrainian government asked for food and medical supplies for the elderly, handicapped, and children in the city. Again, Don called Beverly Park. The next day, Bob Dixon called from a Christian men’s organization in Texas. They had been asked by the state department to oversee the distribution of food in the former Soviet republics. He had three forty-foot shipping containers of food that could be sent immediately. Workers also started a Bible college, provided medical equipment, planted churches, and cared for orphans. Gary wept as he shared with me how his church, which once struggled to pay its electric bill, was now being used by God to touch the world. God always has far more on His heart to accomplish through our lives and churches than we could possibly imagine. How tragic for us to become so preoccupied with our plans and strategies that we do not even take time to hear what God intends to do. The Bible is full of examples of people who willingly set aside their plans to follow God’s. Mary and Paul are two of the most fascinating. When God came to Mary, He did not ask her to tell Him her life goals or how she intended to glorify God. The angel of the Lord exclaimed, “Rejoice, favored woman! The Lord is with you!” (Luke 1:28). Then the angel told Mary the incredible news of how God was going to use her to give birth to the Savior of the world. Truly, God’s plans dwarfed anything Mary might have planned for herself. Saul of Tarsus had specific plans he intended to accomplish for God. He was going to hunt down and arrest any Jewish people who had embraced Christianity. But then the risen Christ intercepted him and revealed what God’s plans were. God was going to use his life to carry the good news of the gospel to the Gentiles around the known world. Saul would share the gospel before some of the most powerful people in the Roman Empire. To this day, the world feels the impact of what God did through Saul. God’s plans were far superior to anything Saul could have set out to accomplish. This sequence is seen throughout the Bible: patriarchs, judges, David, prophets, and the disciples. When God was about to do something, He took the initiative to involve His servants: “Indeed, the Lord GOD does nothing without revealing His counsel to His servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7). He spoke in order to reveal His purposes and plans. Then God invited those people to become involved so He could carry out His eternal purposes through them. GOD’S PURPOSES VERSUS OUR PLANS We often dream our dreams of what we want to do for God. We formulate plans based on our priorities. Then we pray and ask God to bless our efforts and to help us accomplish our goals. (After all, we’re doing it for Him!) We mobilize fellow believers to make our schemes successful. What is really important, however, is what God plans to do where we are and how He wants to accomplish His purposes through us. Here is what the Scriptures say about our plans and purposes: “The LORD frustrates the counsel of the nations; He thwarts the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of His heart from generation to generation” (Psalm 33:10-11). “Many plans are in a man’ s heart, but the LORD’S decree will prevail” (Proverbs 19:21). If your agenda is not the same as God’s, you will not experience God working through you. God reveals His purposes so you will know what He plans to do. Then you can join Him. His plans and purposes will not be thwarted. They will succeed. The Lord foils the worldly plans of the nations, but His plans come to pass. Planning is a valuable exercise, but it can never become a substitute for hearing from God. Your plans only have merit when they are based on what God has told you He intends to do. Your relationship with God is far more important to Him than any scheming you can do. The biggest problem with planning is when we try to carry out in our own wisdom what only God has a right to determine. We cannot know the when or where or how of God’s will until He tells us. God intends that we follow Him. He expects us to get our directives from Him, and He wants to equip us to do the assignment He gives. If we try to spell out all the details of His will in a planning session, we’ll have a tendency to forget the need for a daily, intimate relationship with God. We may accomplish our objectives but forgo the relationship. It is possible to achieve all of our goals and yet be outside God’s will. God created us for an eternal love relationship. Life is our opportunity to experience Him at work in us and in our world. Planning is not wrong. Just be careful not to plan more than God intends for you to. Let God interrupt or redirect your plans anytime He wants to. Remain in a close relationship with Him so you can always hear His voice when He speaks to you. I have found that the best planning meetings are prayer meetings where we spend time with our Father finding out what He is up to. If churches are really serious about doing God’s will, they will spend more time seeking God’s will and less time arguing and debating about what each member thinks the church ought to be doing. WHICH METHOD? My son, Richard, and I were speaking at a conference based on our book Spiritual Leadership. I talked about how people and churches must seek to be on God’s agenda in all they do. During a break, a pastor hurried up to me to say that he was seeking to move his church forward and that he had been looking at two different church growth models. He mentioned both models and then asked me which one I thought he should use. I told him I thought he should pray and ask God to tell him how to grow his church. The man paused, and then as if he had not even heard me, he went on to explain the merits and drawbacks of each model and then again asked me which model I thought he should follow. Again, I told him he should have his whole congregation cry out to God and ask how He wanted to grow His church in their community. The pastor never did understand what I was saying. He had been trained that, as a leader, it was up to him to grow his church through the vision he cast and the leadership principles he practiced. Yet Scripture repeatedly tells us that God is always at work to accomplish His purposes among His people. Christ said He would build His church (see Matthew 16: 18). The reason there are so many divided and splintered churches today is that church leaders have sought to impose their plans on God’s people rather than seeking what God intends to do through them by His amazing power. GOD REVEALS HIS WAYS Even the casual or uninformed reader of the Bible can see that God’s ways and plans are different from those of people. God uses kingdom principles to accomplish kingdom purposes. God’s ways are redemptive, loving, and compassionate. His ways bring cleansing and forgiveness and build people up. His ways bring humility. His way is the way of service and love. God does not simply wait to help us achieve our goals for Him. He desires to accomplish His own purposes through us – and in His own way. God said, “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not My ways” (Isaiah 55:8). We will not carry out God’s plan with our methods. This is one of the basic sin problems people face: “We all went astray like sheep; we all have turned to our own way” (Isaiah 53:6). It is foolish to think we can accomplish God’s work by using the world’s methodology and values. Our ways may seem good to us. We may even enjoy some moderate successes. If we measure our success strictly by whether our numbers are growing or if we have built an impressive building, we can easily assume we have been successful. But of course, many secular organizations and non-Christian religions are growing in numbers, building, and wealth, though they are not pleasing to God. The world says you should never commit to do anything you cannot afford. Yet God says without faith, it is impossible to please Him (Hebrews 11:6). The world values hierarchy and a chain of command. God seeks to give His people one heart and mind. The world upholds the powerful; God said, “Blessed are the meek.” The world claims results are important; God values people. When we do the work of God in our own strength and wisdom, we will never see the power of God in what we do. We will only see what we can do through our own creativity and hard work. God reveals His way to us because that is the only means to accomplish His purposes. When God achieves His purposes in His ways through us, people will recognize that what has happened can be explained only by God. He alone will receive the glory! Jesus asked His disciples to feed the multitude. Their response was, “Send them home!” (Luke 9:10-17). But Jesus, using kingdom principles, sat the people down, fed them, and had twelve baskets full of leftovers. The people witnessed the Father work a miracle. What a contrast! The disciples would have sent the people home empty and hungry whereas God displayed to a watching world His love, His nature, and His power. The disciples witnessed this kind of mighty work many times while they walked with Jesus. They had to learn to function according to kingdom principles to accomplish kingdom work. If the disciples had ministered to the multitude in their way and with their plans, the people would have gone away wanting. Every time we minister to people in our strength rather than in God’s power, people lose out. When I was first learning to walk with God, I depended too much on other people. Every time God began leading me in a direction, I would run to other people and ask, “Do you think this is really God? Here is what I think. What do you think?” I would unconsciously – or consciously – depend on them rather than on my relationship with God. Finally, I had to say, “I’m going to go to the Lord and clarify what I think He is saying to me. Then I am going to proceed and watch God confirm His word to me.” I began that process over a period of time in many areas of my life. My love relationship with God became all-important. I began to discover a clear, personal way in which God made His ways known to me. In the next chapter, we’ll look at how God speaks through His Word. In later chapters, we’ll look at how God speaks through prayer, circumstances, and the church to confirm His will to us. Source: EXPERIENCING GOD, by Henry & Richard Blackaby and Claude King, Copyright 2008, B&H Publishing Group. |