You. Yeah, You!

Every Wednesday we’ll post something to do with Doctrine and Recovery. Hope it helps.

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You. Yeah, You!

Beloved, if our heart condemns us God is greater than our heart and knows all things. – I John 3:20

With no effort at all I can give you five hundred reasons why I should be fired. Easy. And I don’t mean fired from my job (I work for myself so that’s out) but rather, fired from my life – my marriage, fatherhood, ministry/career, everything. Given the chance to inspect my day to day routine, the most casual observer would agree with me on this point and, in a Trump-like grand manner, pronounce You’re Fired. Clearly my heart, as John noted in his epistle, condemns me.

Yet the blessings continue, the provisions come, the ministry opportunities don’t dry up, and God’s presence and power are still amazingly manifest in all areas of life. Between me and God, one of us is ready to throw in the towel, while the other is shouting Go for it! My heart condemns me, logically I suppose, because it views my failures, sins, weaknesses, you name it. But God (and hey, don’t you love the phrase But God?) is greater than my heart and knows all things, such as His plans for me, His calling, and His ability to glorify himself in the weakest of vessels.

I should have learned all of this long ago, it’s so Christianity 101. And really, I’ve seen the principle play itself out from early in life.

My dear Dad, for reasons only he could fathom, handed me the keys to a V-8 1971 Camaro in, you guessed it, 1971 – brand new, forest green, eye-popping awesome. In that baby I could shoot from 0 to 60 in mere seconds, a maniacal 16 year old Parnelli Jones charging across the Southern California freeways blasting Jimi Hendrix from the 8-track and crowing up a storm. Not for a minute did I think I myself could do 0-60; the thought never crossed my pimply faced head. Nor did I let the fact that I wasn’t so quick on my feet keep me from accelerating; why should it have? The power and speed lay not in what I was, but in what I‘d been given.

It wasn’t about me. It was about the privilege and authority I’d been commissioned.

Which is way Abraham didn’t consider his age and impotency, nor Sarah her barrenness. Nor, for that matter, did Moses let his speech pathology keep him from speaking; nor Jeremiah his youth from prophesying; nor the Samaritan woman her past from preaching. Brazen, these people of faith, stepping out of their “place” to move mountains, relying on promises and power light years beyond their own. You, yeah You! God said to each, and move mountains they did.

The God of the Bible loves the audacity of faith, the raw, bold, tenacious You Said It So Be It kind; the kind that focuses on the Promise and the Promisor rather than the promised one. Because when that kind of faith is exercised the Promisor justly gets the credit, the promised one gets the blessing, and the world is changed.

Let’s you (yeah, You!) and I be part of that change today.