Eagles Wings!

            Wait.  We’re not very good at waiting.  We seem to do a lot of it.  We wait in traffic during our daily commute.  We wait in grocery lines, for our computer to get on-line, in bank lines, and in buffet lines.  We spend countless hours waiting, and still we fuss and fume and our blood pressure rises.  Yet wait is exactly what God tells us to do.

“Yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength; they will mount up with wings as eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary.”  Isaiah 40:31

            Waiting involves sitting still.  It involves inactivity.  At its best, it’s restful.  Waiting on the Lord means staying where we are until He makes His action or His word clear.  Waiting on the Lord means bypassing ethical shortcuts to success and allowing God to provide.  It means doing things His way, in His timing.  Like Jacob, we want to manipulate circumstances to our benefit and allow the ends to justify the means.  Waiting on God necessitates knowing that, to Him, the means and methods we use are just as important, maybe more important than the ends.  Waiting on God implies listening.  Only when we wait, when we get quiet and cease our striving, can we open our spiritual ears to hear what God is saying. 

            It is interesting that the progression in this verse has us slowing down.  When we gain new strength we begin by soaring like eagles.  Often new Believers are filled with a zeal and spiritual energy that older Christians covet.  As we mature we slow down to a more sustainable, consistent run.  As we wait on Him and His direction we gain new strength by doing those tasks He has called us to rather than trying to do every good thing in our own strength.  Older Christians have often slowed to a walk.  As our bodies age we come to understand that who we are is more important to God than what we do.

            Waiting on the Lord takes enormous faith.  We must believe that He is personal enough to see us waiting, and to give us direction when His timing is right.  It’s much easier to rush off, doing whatever seems right in our own eyes, following our own understanding than to take the risk of never hearing God’s clear voice.  It can seem like too much of a gamble, too much to risk our faith on.

            We can trust God.  We can wait and know that our strength will be renewed.

 He who promised is faithful.

Joy in the midst of weeping

“The Lord’s lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail.  The are new every morning; Great is Thy faithfulness.”  Lamentations 3:21-22

The book of Lamentations is a book of five poems, thought to have been written by Jeremiah, Israel’s weeping prophet.  It is a book of intense mourning.

Jerusalem had fallen. The nation of Israel had fallen into idolatry and rebellion and so God gave her over to the Babylonians.  Jeremiah made it clear that the only reason she fell was because of the anger of the Lord, not because of the national strength of Babylon – God caused it.  Jeremiah weeps over the destruction of the city.  He mourns because of the sin of the nation that led to the anger and rejection of Israel by God. God had told them that this would happen, and that he would do whatever it took, including being exiled, to bring them to repentance.

           

Almost exactly in the middle of this sad book, Jeremiah remembers and reaffirms the love of God.  In the center of the destroyed city, Jeremiah remembers who God is, and he finds hope.

“This I recalled to my mind, therefore I have hope,” he says.  “If He causes grief, then He will have compassion, according to His lovingkindnesses.”  (3:21, 32)

Jeremiah understood something of the nature of God.  God is holy and will not tolerate sin forever, but God is also love.  He disciplines us for a season, to correct and direct us away from sin.  He loves us too much to allow us to continue in a direction away from Him.  In His compassion, in His faithfulness, He disciplines.  Because Jeremiah understood, in the midst of destruction he could say, “the Lord’s lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, His compassions never fail.  They are new every morning.  Great is Thy faithfulness.”

As we go through our lives, we will be unavoidably confronted with difficulties.  Sometimes God disciplines us.  Sometimes we go through rough times because of the sin of another.  Sometimes stuff just happens.  The only way through it is to remember the nature of God, and to allow it to give us hope.  In the midst of our weeping, we, like Jeremiah, can remember God’s compassions, His lovingkindness, and can stand firm on truth.  We can only hold on to what we know; we can only remember what we have learned. 

How well do you know God?  If you are not in His word, studying His nature and getting to know Him and in fellowship through prayer, when hard times come you will have little or nothing to stand on.  Turn off the TV, the radio, the movie – the noise.  Exchange the need to be entertained for a solid foundation of truth as revealed by the Holy Spirit to the quiet and receiving heart.  Give yourself a reason for joy in the midst of sorrow, a reason for joy now.

Prayer

“Call to Me and I will answer you,

and I will tell you great and mighty things which you do not know.”  Jeremiah 33:3

            For many of us, prayer is a mystery.  It’s hard to talk to someone you cannot see, and yet God tells us to bring all things to Him.  We don’t understand it, yet we are better because of it. 

            As we look into His word, God shows us reasons to pray:

            First, we need it.  We need to bring our concerns, our burdens and needs before the throne of Jesus and leave them there.  Only by giving them to Him, by acknowledging our need for Him and His sovereignty in our lives can we experience His peace.  By coming to Him in petition and in worship we express to Him and to ourselves our trust in Him and His dealings in our lives.  He works through prayer.

            Second, because He asks us to.  For some reason almost beyond our comprehension, God desires a relationship with us.  He longs for fellowship with us.  He wants us to make our concerns known to Him and delights in answering them.  We can begin to understand this as we look at our own children.  Even when they are very little we desire a relationship with them.  We talk about their day, about what has happened while we were apart.  We delight in hearing them tell us what they are learning.  It wasn’t anything new to us; we mastered the alphabet years before!  Yet still we want to hear about it.  Their personality shines through, and often we end up laughing or crying together over events in their day.  As they grow and mature we continue to enjoy our conversations on topics of politics, current fashions, their love lives, and spiritual issues.  We are touched by how they deal with life.

            I imagine God feels the same about us.  He seems to want to be included in our lives and to delight in the ways we are maturing.  He wants a friendship with us, a cool-of-the-day kind of easy conversation that comes between people who are close.

            Non-Christians would say that the only power in prayer is psychological.  They are wrong.  We do not understand the power of prayer, but we do know that it holds power.  God works through the prayers of His people.

            Call out to God.  He is waiting.  He has great and mighty things to share.

Listening

          The picture of the Church as the body of Christ is a common one in the New Testament.  Christ Himself takes on the role of the head, and we are the individual parts, perhaps down to the individual cells that make up the rest of His body.  This analogy hints at a fundamental choice God has made in interacting with our world and with us: the choice of self-limitation.  He limited Himself by taking on human flesh.  Then He died and rose, and limited Himself to the position of Head.  As Head, He establishes His presence in the world through us.  He doesn’t need us to work out His will in the world, but He has chosen to work through us. 

            Like a physical body, the body of Christ must follow certain laws to function properly.  Just as our nerves need to stay connected to our brain to properly function and communicate to the rest of the parts, we need to stay connected to the Head to truly function as His body.

“Let no one keep defrauding you of your prize by…not holding fast to the head, from whom the entire body, being supplied and held together by the joints and ligaments, grows with a growth which is from God.”  Colossians 2:18-19

           

Dr. Paul Brand tells us that if you take a frog and remove it’s brain, it will continue to swim easily across its pond.  You could get the impression that the injury was inconsequential until you look more closely.  The frog is swimming randomly, kicking its legs in reflexive patterns.  Without it’s brain, it has no purpose. Without its brain, it cannot choose to eat, or to swim faster to get out of harm’s way. 

Likewise, when we choose to separate ourselves from the Head, we can continue to go through the motions of Christian life, attending church and living basically moral lives, but our purpose, our connectedness to the rest of the body, and any hope for growth, is gone.  Apart from the head, we revert back to fleshly instincts, defrauded of the prize of our liberty in Christ. 

            Often the Body of Christ has functioned like a quadriplegic.  The head is intact and functioning perfectly, but the body remains motionless, paralyzed by sin or fear.  The Head is sending out messages and directing movement, but the body is not receiving those messages and isn’t sending any sensory information back to the head.  Only as we stay connected to the Head, obeying it’s every command, can we function properly as the Body of Christ in this world.  Only as we live in obedience can we effectively communicate God’s love and will to the world around us. 

            We are the Body of Christ.  Whether or not we choose to live as an effective, well-connected body is up to us.  Each of us must do our part to listen to and obey the Head, or the rest of the body suffers. 

            What is the Head saying to you, as a part of his body? Are you responding in obedience born of love? Each part of the body was designed to play a specific part. What part are you? Are you serving in the area he created you for? Are you listening?