Outside the Box

Monday, April 21, 2008

Outside the Box

God delivered His people from Egypt into and extensive and intense training program into the desert to show them the way back to Holiness. Everything that they formally knew had to be wiped clean so that God could restore His group back to Himself. He surely was the God of great signs and wonders at that time, creating an extremely intimate relationship with His loved ones. His goal for the Hebrews was the Promised Land…

God was trying to re-establish His people back to faith, in the same way their Father Abraham was credited as righteous through his faith. God wanted His people to trust in Him and His provision alone, leading them away from every false idol. He provided their food, water, and every means of survival, yet still they grumbled because their desperately wicked hearts longed for the old days, back in Egypt, where faith was not needed and a sense of false security was their comfort. God saw their dark, enslaved, desperate condition, and heard their cries for help, so He delivered them, but they lacked the faith needed for personal, intimate relationship with God. They longed for a God in a box, one they could predict and worship based on their knowledge of who He was, giving them the power for righteousness by works instead of trusting in the God that it takes humbleness to fellowship with. Trust and faith in the unknown goes against the human heart, which longs to know all and be empowered through that knowledge. One can only have faith in a humble position, only knowing one thing for certain – that they don't know anything – nothing about the ways of God, allowing us to open up to all possibilities in God so that He can be everything that He is to the core of His being without restrictions or limitations. Jesus says, "According to your faith, be it unto you." If we put God in a box and make Him predictable, we close ourselves from everything else that He is outside that box that we have created, causing us to miss out on a very intimate relationship with Him. He wants to take us on a journey showing us who He is and all His ways, but we limit ourselves from that journey when we proclaim we already have full knowledge of what that journey is. He wants to wow you and surprise you and love you and speak to you, but we tend to see Him as more of a person of authority and power than a loving father who seeks an intimate, loving relationship. Oh He is so loving, so merciful, so kind, and so gentile with us. He loves us so much that He is jealous of our affections elsewhere because He longs for us to only have eyes for Him – not for money, wealth, power, human wisdom, unhealthy human relationship and every other false idol out there. He actually gets jealous when we look to those things before Him. That means He is so invested in relationship with us that the Almighty God gets JEALOUS! How is that possible!? Over-obsessed lovers get jealous for us, not God, right!? Wow! He is so in love with us, but instead we don't count that as a possibility and instead put Him in the box of judge… How SAD!

I see too many Christians who have stopped at salvation, or deliverance from Egypt. So many go to church for their Sunday tradition, or to get fueled-up with God's presence before their next hard week to come. Christians should be running to church on Sunday with energy, strength and love to worship and commune with fellow believers, and in order to encourage and lift-up non-believers! We are called to live in an EVERY SINGLE DAY relationship with the Lord! Jesus want s to be Lord of our everyday lives, Number One in every decision we make. We all fall way short of that ability, choosing to slander and gossip instead of edifying one another, for example. Jesus wants us to walk in faith every day, faith in God's provision and in His Lordship. He wants us to come to the realization that we know nothing, so that we give Him the freedom to live outside the box in our every-day lives. He wants to love you, and then show us how to love others. His love for you can so fill your heart every day, so that joy will overflow from our hearts and affect the lives of everyone around us. That is how we change the world – by allowing Him to love us enough that it overflows into amazing love and generosity for mankind. His heart becomes our heart, His eyes become our eyes, His ears become our ears, and His longing becomes our longings. Jesus is alive today, alive in His spirit that lives in us. He is alive in you and me. God brought the Kingdom of Heaven down through Jesus, and Jesus is in turn is bringing it down through you and me (His church) in order to restore this broken world back to God. The question is, are we willing to be humble enough to let God be God, free of our precepts, and do we have faith enough to let Jesus be the lord of our ever day lives? The only way that we can bless others is if we are first blessed. I think far too often we try to love others on our own strength alone. I've heard it said that we can only love others to the same measure that we know God loves us. We have to know love before we can love; we have to experience love before others can experience love from us. God wants to bless us first, so that in turn we bless others. Amazing…

The Hebrew's lacked faith, and that is why they turned from God and worshiped a false idol. They longed for a God in a box – one they could see, touch, smell, comprehend, and logically understand. They made God everything He wasn't in the very essence of His being, so God in return gave them law, and I'm sure He did so with a grieved heart. They only reflected who we are in our very human condition which is why we so desperately need a Savior, because man alone is too weak with hearts that are desperately wicked.

Do you have faith enough to let God be God? Are you willing to get rid of who you think He is and let Him show you personally who He is?? Can you humble yourself enough to admit that you don't know the ways of God and ask Him to show you Himself? Can you trust in the Lordship of Jesus Christ in every decision you make? And last but not least, can you fully let down your defenses to let Jesus come in and love on you right where you are?

God is so AWESOME!

I love you guys!!

Kellie


(PS Every word that I write, I write to myself as well, but I can promise you that I really give the Lord my all! :)