3/18/2020……. Reflections
I have had several women come into Titus 2 who have told me that the reason they got sober was because God told them, in no uncertain terms, at a critical point in their addiction that, if they continued, they would die. While it is not unreasonable to expect that some of them would likely die if they had continued in their addiction, I believe their testimonies of hearing the voice of God warn them.. No one makes up a story about God telling them they are going to die….I’m curious if there are any people hearing God’s voice of warning in the midst of this advancing menace?? I’d be willing to say that there are some out there, if they are listening. Are we listening for who they are and how they are responding to God?
God speaks in numerous ways…. through His Word, by His Spirit, through His People, and from within the circumstances in which one finds herself. Will one’s conscience be sufficiently attentive to the wisdom of the “still small voice” or must God use a megaphone or a bullhorn’s blast and bombard us, or use a disaster or allow an enemy’s assault from the artillery of a battleship, to get our attention? How big is one’s God? Well, it depends on how big He needs to be for the particular individual’s life to work the way He intended it to… will it be the ordained intentional will of God, the disciplining permissive will of God, or the ultimately redemptive will of God that will be required in one’s life? Only God knows the extreme to which that particular one’s rebellion and stubbornness will demand that God go…but He has already proven the extent to which He is willing to go to bring each of us back into the fold….to death on the Cross…And if we will not be moved to obedience by love, will we be surrendered to the obedience of discipline? Or failing both, will we find peace, finally, with God, within ourselves, and with others through the redemptive will of God…. however long and difficult a path it takes for God to work it out? Will we cooperate with that effort? Ultimately, it appears that it doesn’t matter, as long as God gets us back. He alone is omnipotent and He will have the final word in how it will go. Do we get a “say”? Yes, we do, but His will is the one that will prevail. However, we can trust that He will have considered all things required in our lives as having been necessary and worth the effort in the end whether ordained or permitted, all things good, all things honorable and all things perfect if it brings us back to the Father…. just like the Prodigal Son was brought back by “coming to his senses” in the pigpen. We never know what God will use to awaken us to the reality of the abundant life He wants us to enjoy with him in the heart of the family and among friends at the homecoming banquet.
As fervently and broadly as prayers by Christians have been being raised for the last month or so since this menacing contagion came to our attention, the fact that our leaders have shifted into a more sober, cooperative, urgent, and broader-based spirit of seriously seeking solutions while attempting to put aggressive protective and containment measures in place suggests to me that God is, in fact, acting on our prayers. I believe God IS acting redemptively and we will see some truly amazing things begin to happen!
If suddenly we awoke tomorrow and the contagion had begun quickly disappearing and people miraculously were immediately recovering overnight, would we know that God had allowed this in order to demonstrate his Presence and Power? What if, instead of the end times “sign of Jonah” having more than just three days in darkness of the whale being like Jesus’ three days in the grave….. What if the “sign of Jonah” is the preaching of repentance Jonah did in obedience to God after that which resulted in a wholesale mass revival of the Ninevites? Could we be on the mprecipice of a worldwide mass revival that will spread worldwide faster than the contagion?? Would we turn and worship the Lord or, like Jonah would we pout and begrudge the salvation of those we’d rather see punished? Would we shake our heads in disbelief and attribute it to the miracle of science demonstrated in chloroquin or another sudden drug “cure” or to the effectiveness of a hastily developed vaccine or to the brilliant strategies of American leadership? From whence will our help come?
Stay tuned….. Only the Shadow of the Most High knows….