Category: Patience

Keep Growing and Growing and Growing…

Posted on by Dorci

“Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatever a man sows, that shall he also reap. For he that sows to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that sows to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting. 

And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. 

As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good to all men, especially to them who are of the household of faith.”
Galatians 6:7-10  AKJV


It is a long and tedious process to produce the perfect grape. It is three years from seed to harvest and involves soil cultivating – different soils for different grapes, perfect planting, temperature and wind control, proper sunlight, protection from pests and disease, watering, and pruning.  Oh, the pruning.  Pruning is so important that pruning contests are held to reward the best pruners. It takes a lot work to produce a fully mature, sweet crop of grapes.

Jesus said “I am the vine; you are the branches.” John 15:5a

The branches on grapevines can’t get tired, but we can. And as we endure years of tending and watering and pruning and waiting and not yet seeing the fully mature faith we desire, we might be tempted to give up. And right about the time when it looks like nothing is happening, it’s time to prune. Pruning is painful and sometimes all we see is that something is gone.

What we don’t see is what’s happening underground. Beneath the surface the roots are growing deep and strong, feeding on the nutrients in that perfectly fertilized and watered soil. And the stronger the roots, the stronger the grapevine will be.

So, let us not be weary in well doing…”

That word “doing” is a prolonged form of the word to do. To keep doing for an extended period of time.  It also means to abide.

Keep going, keep growing, keep doing well, keep holding onto Jesus, the Vine, until harvest time.  Yes, it’s hard, yes, it can be exhausting, yes it might look like nothing is happening except that so much has been taken away, but good things are coming if we don’t give up. We’ll see some fruit in this life, but the full harvest comes in the next. One day we’ll stand before our Heavenly Gardener and reap what we’ve sown.

So whatever season we’re in, let’s keep doing good to others – sowing to the Spirit – as God gives us opportunity, producing the fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, and eventually the harvest of a sweet, fully mature faith.

Do Not Worry

Posted on by Dorci

 

“Therefore I tell you, do not
worry about your life, what
you will eat or drink; or about
your body, what you will wear.
Is not life more than food, and
the body more than clothes?

Look at the birds of the air;
they do not sow or reap or store
away in barns, and yet your
heavenly Father feeds them.
Are you not much more valuable
than they?”
Matthew 6:25, 26

Sound Doctrine

Posted on by Dorci

“In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of His appearing and His kingdom, I give you this charge: Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.”
2 Timothy 4:1-5

The Binding of Our Spirits

Posted on by Dorci

Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.
Psalm 27:14

Moses did it for 40 years, and then again for another 40.  Joseph did it for 13 years. David did it for 8 years. Jonah did it for 3 days. The Hebrews did it for 430 years.  And who knows how long Job did it.

I’ve been doing it for almost 12 years.  Maybe you’ve been doing it, too.

All of us have either just gotten through, or we’re going through, or we will soon go through a waiting period.  The question is, though, what or whom are we waiting on?

In my particular case, I can easily wait on the right doctor, the right blood test, the right scan, the right procedure, the right medication, and on and on.  And I do believe that God uses doctors and medicine to achieve His purposes.  But only in His timing.

He is the One I wait on.  My healing will come in His way, and in His time.  And that healing may not come until I see my Savior face to face, but it will come.

He is my glory, my portion, my all in all.

Moses may well have thought his life in the desert herding sheep would be all the life he’d ever see.  But God was preparing him to lead God’s people across the desert.

God was preparing Joseph to lead Egypt, David to be King, and the Hebrews to trust and follow Him into the Promised Land.  And God was bringing Job into a deeper, far more intimate relationship with Him than he ever imagined.  And I believe God used Job as a witness to his friends and to the people of the town that a righteous man is one who lives by faith in God, not just by the rules he follows. (I would love to know how many people put their faith in God through Job’s amazing testimony.)

The word wait in Psalm 27:14 is qâvâh – to bind together (perhaps by twisting), to collect, to expect, to gather together.

cord
 

Our wait in the Lord in not sitting and doing nothing.  Through it we learn to let go of the world, strand by strand, and bind our spirits to His. We become one with our Savior, and His heart becomes our heart; His will, our will.

As our spirit becomes more and more bound with His, we confidently watch, expectantly look to Him for our salvation in all things. We know that God sees our heart and hears our prayers.  We understand that His wait has a purpose.  He is preparing us, teaching us, maturing us, and best of all, loving us.  Never think that the lack of an immediate answer means God doesn’t love you.  Remember Moses and Joseph and David and Jonah and Job and His beloved people who waited in Egypt.

Whatever we wait for on this earth, whether it’s health or relationships or jobs, or for our brothers and sisters in certain parts of world who wait for their release from unjust imprisonment, whether that’s a jail cell or the evil hands of their abusers, or a million other things, all of us who love and follow the Lord Jesus Christ wait on Him for our ultimate rescue.

“For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
Romans 8:19, 22-25

Even the creation groans for the time when sin is a thing of the past and God brings us all into the presence of His glory.  We wait, too, but we wait expectantly, patiently, hopefully, knowing that our rescue is near.

And while we wait, while we groan inwardly with creation for all things to be made new and perfect and beautiful, we must hold onto the hope that our waiting here prepares us for our life there.  Our wait, and all we’ve gone through, will be worth it as we stand before Jesus and the purpose for it all is suddenly clear, and we share our reward with the Rescuer of our souls.

Since ancient times no one has heard,
no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you,
who acts on behalf of those who wait for Him.
Isaiah 64:4

The End of the Age

Posted on by Dorci

“As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. ‘Tell us,’ they said, ‘when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?’
Matthew 24:3

Zombies, desert wastelands, hoarding of water, dilapidated and cobwebbed dwellings, eating anything…or anyone, unspeakable evil, violence upon violence, death upon death, and some guy named Max, who is either very angry or half insane. Maybe a little bit of both.

apocalypse 2
 

Our culture is mesmerized by thoughts of straining to survive a post-apocalyptic age. It is enamored by the fight to withstand a revolution led by the most heinous of us, worlds overtaken by flesh-eating undead, by inhabitants of another world hell-bent on our destruction.  It is just this side of obsessed with all things ungodly and other worldly, as long as that other world is the one that breathes fire and sulfur.

It’s been made so fascinating, so entertaining, that scarcely anyone would think there could be, somewhere in the fray, some truth, and that the actual truth it mimics could be much more real and more frightening than fiction.

So why all the allure about the end of the world?

Could it be that our Creator has built into us, somewhere in the recesses of our souls, inside our DNA, an awareness of this truth?  Just as we have an awareness of something, or in reality Someone, greater than ourselves – someone who created us, someone who’s responsible for the existence of this world we live in, for the intricacy of atoms and the ginormousness of billions and billions of galaxies, and for the vacuum inside us that we all search to fill until we fill it with Him – is an awareness, and a question about our future.

And could it be that like all superheroes, God has an adversary, and that adversary will use our craving to fill the void inside us, and our fascination for the dark side of truth, to create a world so fantastical that we couldn’t possibly believe there is any actual truth to it? Where he himself is only a guy in a red suit with fluff-filled horns and a plastic pitchfork, and no one could really believe in the existence of someone like that, could they?  It’s all just too preposterous.

Only it isn’t.

God does have an adversary, many of them, in fact, but chief among them is satan, who isn’t red and I highly doubt carries a pitchfork, but was a created angel who rebelled against God and was banished from heaven. One-third of the angels rebelled with him, and his goal is to incite as many souls as possible to rebel against God, too.  satan’s tactics have always been subtle – to mimic God by taking a grain of truth and building around it so many tantalizing lies that we’d rather believe and act on the lies rather than the truth. 

He did it in the garden with Eve, and he even tried it in the wilderness with the Son of God.  His war against God won’t end until God ends it, and if we’re not careful, we can find ourselves on the wrong side of the battle line.

Just like the disciples, we have a curiosity about the end of the world as we know it because God wants to speak to our hearts through it, and the last thing satan wants for us to do is listen. Will the end include zombies and evil aliens? No. But the Bible has a lot to say about the end of all things and the time when Christ returns.

Jesus’ response to the disciples’ question was to warn them, and us, to be on the lookout for false prophets, false messiahs (mimics of the truth), wars and rumors of wars, nation rising against nation, famines and earthquakes, increased wickedness, many turning away from the faith, betraying and hating each other.

“Immediately,” Jesus said, “after the distress of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’ Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven. And then all the peoples of the earth will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.”  Matthew 24:29-31

Paul tells us:

“For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.”  1 Thessalonians 4:16-17

Could it be that satan has hijacked that glorious truth by mimicking God once again, and masterminded a theater of lies where he, instead, “resurrects” hoards to a state of hideous undead, so satisfying to the flesh that the world eats it up?  Has entertainment been used by satan like a blaring horn in the distance to draw the world away from the actual truth that one day they will face God for judgment of their sins if they haven’t believed in Jesus Christ?

I don’t put it past him.

Paul told the church in Thessalonica, and the Word tells us, that no one knows the day or the hour but that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, ‘Peace and safety,’ destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.” 1 Thessalonians 5:1-3

The book of Revelation gives us a glimpse into the real apocalyptic time when God’s judgment rains down upon the earth. It is teeming with visions of stars falling to the earth, warring angels, dragons, the seal of God on the foreheads of His servants, and of course, satan, once again mimicking God’s actions through the anti-Christ by forcing people to wear his number instead.

The enemy of God knows he’s living on borrowed time, and he appeals to the dark side of our nature, the attraction we all have toward sin and darkness, and bit by bit, tiny victory after tiny victory, if we don’t choose our steps carefully, we can follow him down the wide road as he robs us of our joy and peace and the life God wants to give us.

Through Paul, God reminds us that “you, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness so that this day should surprise you like a thief. You are all children of the light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness. So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be awake and sober (watchful). For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober (watchful), putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet.” 1 Thessalonians 5:4-8

We may not see the destruction of all things in our lifetime, but we will all see the end of our mortal bodies, and Paul goes on to remind us how we’re to live until then: “acknowledge those who work hard among you, who care for you in the Lord and who admonish you. Hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work. Live in peace with each other. And we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone. Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always strive to do what is good for each other and for everyone else. Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil.  1 Thessalonians 5:12-22

And what will be the afterlife for us then? 

For those who die in rebellion to God, those wishes will be granted and they will not see the Light of God for the rest of eternity. Those souls will be banished from the presence and love of God to eternal destruction and torment.

But for those who die believing in Jesus Christ, those will be raised to everlasting life, and the ones who are yet alive and are believing when Christ comes again will join them all to ride to victory.

 

Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
Psalm 139:23-24