"Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith. Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?" 1 John 5:1-5
Life is real and life is good. It just so happens that there are times when the lives we live are met with challenges .. challenges that have the potential to either stifle us or strengthen us .. and what we will become, what we will appear to be on the backside of all of the challenges that come our way is ours to decide. We can choose to let the challenges develop us. Or we can choose to let the challenges destroy us. We can cower behind our own erected shields and walls and allow the challenges and the challenger to defeat us or we can courageously plunge headlong into the face of all the challenges and oppositions in life and come out victoriously on the other side more developed and more equipped.
I want to encourage you. Yes. We are all faced with some challenges. We are all faced with change. I think change is the biggest challenge that any of us will ever face and often the challenge that we stand against and resist the hardest of all. But change is inevitable. It's part of life. And life as we know it in the world today is changing faster than most of us can keep up with. I'm not talking about change for the worse. I'm talking about change for the better and often it's hard to see the direction of the better when all that strikes the natural eye, all that touches the senses, seems to appear to nothing but chaos.
How do we get through it? How do we come out on the other side developed and not destroyed?
Here's three thoughts for you that will take you through all the challenges of life .. three thoughts that will firm up a foundation under your feet when you feel like you're standing on quick sand .. three thoughts that will take the ravages of despair and discouragement and put them in their proper place.
I have to remind myself often of what Jesus said at the conclusion of Matthew 28. He said, "And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age." Has time ended? No. Has the end of the age come? No. Times may be changing and people may be predicting the end but time has not ended and the end is yet in the future.
Each of us yet have lives to live. Each of us yet have destinies to fulfill. Each of us are yet in the developmental process.
And God is with us. Not only with us but in us. Not only with us and in us but also for us. And when we look and see chaos surrounding us, when we are faced with challenges that seem to defy our ability to cope, when life gets hard and demands are exacting, we yet have all that we need to go through the turbulence, go through the waves that wash over us and come out safe and secure on the other side changed for the better and more equipped to encourage others who are facing their own storms and challenges.
It's so easy to allow a seed of bitterness to settle into the soil of our hearts. Especially when people do things or say things that hurt us. And when that little tiny seed of bitterness sprouts it grows into a massive thing with a gnarly root system that sucks the life right out of us and we really need to keep a proper perspective of what's taking place in our developmental processes.
And when people or situations or circumstances come against us to create chaos in our lives, rather than viewing them as enemies, we need to view them in a more realistic light.
Why do some get bitter and some get better? It's all a matter of perspective. It's all in the way we look at life and look at people. And when we simply realize that people are just people, sinner and saint alike, fallible, faulty, foolish people and each one in the developmental process .. some becoming more beautiful and glossy .. some becoming dimmer and darker, and all creations of God facing their own challenges, we have a different outlook, a different view and we can love in spite of faults. And this is the example that God set.
It's so easy to get side tracked. It's so easy to look for our identity in the things that surround us .. things that last for a moment .. ideas and opinions that rise and fall, come and go like winds and waves. It's easy to look for things to cling to that have some kind of mystical way of exciting our emotions and driving us while we are trying to satisfy our inner needs that often we don't understand.
Jesus took everything contained in this book and reduced it down to a few words in a few simple lines to make it easy to understand, to make it workable in a world of change, to make it touchable and reliable in a world of chaos.
He simply said, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." (Matthew 22:37-40)
There's no disappointment in the simple truth. The simple truth will never fail us. The simple truth will never change with all the ebb and flow, all the coming and going, of theories and opinions, of winds and waves of doctrines, of things that divide and discourage, of all the vain futility and foolishness of humankind. The simple truth will never let us down even in the midst of challenge and chaos.
Let change come. Let the things that appear to our natural eye as chaos come. And, in the center of it all, allow the developmental process to continue the finishing process in our lives to make us into more beautiful images of God .. created in His image .. refined more purely into His image.
©David Kralik Ministries, Inc. 2002
Email: matthewfivesix@hotmail.com |
