But, I want … more!

Yesterday, while walking in the cemetery where Bev’s body awaits the Resurrection, I was challenged about my contentment in Christ. I find myself wishing, too often, for different circumstances, thinking that somehow I would be better ‘if only.’  Does that happen to you? Do you grow restless or lose hope because you are convinced that you need something else, that some situation in your life has to change before you can be an effective, happy Christian?  As I kept thinking about that, my prayer became a simple one:  “Christ Jesus, be enough in my heart!”   

Chris Tomlin’s song says, "All of You, is more than enough for all of me, for every thirst and every need;  You satisfy me with Your love, and all I have in You, is more than enough!"  Nice poetry, or truth?  Do we believe it or just sing it? Is He really our greatest treasure? Am I nurturing my love for Him in ways that, if everything I cherish were taken from me, I would still have enough in Christ Jesus to be satisfied deeply and fully?  

The Word says that He is ALL we need. Will we accept that? Read this inspired text slowly: "God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work." (2 Corinthians 9:8, KJV)   Another way to say it is that He has provided everything we need to be all that He desires us to be.  “Lord, increase my faith,” is my only response.  I am captivated by so many other things, convinced that I need this or that, to be here or there, before I can be a joyful Christian.

•             Do you struggle with some temptation? 
                In Christ, you are empowered to overcome it.  

•             Are you fighting fear of the future? 
                                Christ is bigger than tomorrow and is already preparing you to meet its challenges.

•             Are you dealing with a sense of futility and/or loss? 
                                In Christ, there is meaning and hope! 

He is more than Enough for everything - IF we are willing to radically put our trust and hope in Him.

I face myself and ask, “Are you willing celebrate the sufficiency of Christ?”  The only alternative to receiving from His hand is to join in the sin that eventually destroyed a generation of the people of God who rejected the daily manna in the wilderness. When they kept on whining for the food of Egypt, they cut themselves off from His Presence; faith failed, and they died outside of the Promised Land.  What a sobering lesson!

Two things are demanded of us to know the sufficiency of Christ Jesus - faith and submission.  

James says that in the middle of our trials, we need to ask God for what we need. "You do not have, because you do not ask God." (James 4:2, NIV) We do not have to beg.  We come, open hands and open hearts, and place ourselves before Him, allowing Him to change us from the inside out so that the ‘desires of our heart’ are changed causing us to want what God wants. If we want things of this world, we have no assurance that God will give them to us just because we request them of Him.  

Our submission is one of rest, confidence in His love and care that allows us to lay down. Remember the picture of the 23^rd Psalm?  "God, my shepherd! I don’t need a thing. You have bedded me down in lush meadows, you find me quiet pools to drink from. True to your word, you let me catch my breath and send me in the right direction." (Psalm 23:1-3, The Message)  Jesus, our Shepherd, is providing for us. He has given Himself for us, to the extent of setting aside all his Divine prerogatives to become our Servant.  The demonstration of this love should cause us to abandon ourselves to Him. Our prayer of submission might well be a wordless laying down in His Presence, there finding rest!

Here is a declaration of His sufficiency.  Read this word from the Word with a sacrifice of praise - regardless of your need right now.  

"When I think of all this, I fall to my knees and pray to the Father,
the Creator of everything in heaven and on earth.

I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources
he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit.

Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. 
Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong.

And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should,

how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.

May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully.
Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God." (Ephesians 3:14-19, NLT)

____________________

Enough

All of You is more than enough for all of me

For ev'ry thirst and ev'ry need

You satisfy me with Your love

And all I have in You is more than enough

You're my supply my breath of life

Still more awesome than I know

You're my reward worth living for

Still more awesome than I know

And

You're my sacrifice of greatest price

Still more awesome than I know

You're my coming King You are ev'rything

Still more awesome than I know

More than all I want more than all I need

You are more than enough for me

More than all I know more than all I can say

You are more than enough

Chris Tomlin | Louie Giglio

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Crushed

Pain brings up the most persistent questions for me; most likely for you, too. The question is age-old: “Why does a loving God let suffering happen?” No answer is perfect. For me, there is one answer that is inescapably true. C. S. Lewis wrote that “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain; it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”  When life is rich with sunshine and resources, we become self-satisfied, increasingly wrapped up in ourselves. Many develop a kind of conceit, deluded into believing that they have created their success, and all so often, so ready to accuse those in difficult circumstances of being less capable, or even lesser persons!

Levi Lusko is a young pastor from Montana, a man of many gifts and abilities. In a book he titled, Through the Eyes of a Lion, he tells the story of his daughter’s death. Lenya went to visit her Grandparents for dinner and a few hours later, her life here on earth came to an abrupt close during a severe asthma attack. Told without self-pity, the story urges us to grab onto God’s promise of eternal life and the Resurrection.  Levi does not gloss over the grief, nor does he diminish the real struggle that accompanies loss. This is no simplistic tract of triumphalism!  He offers, instead, a template for applying the Word of God to life, signposts to the path of faith that will protect us from despair.

In one chapter, he talks about the new facets to his life that emerged after Lenya’s death. I could identify with his realization that his pain had broken up hard places in his life and made him much more tender. It has happened to me, too. Once a man who resisted tears, who was too often brusque (I have a ways to go on this), I am now touched easily by pain, much more empathetic than I once was. Yes, God used pain, awful loss, to break my heart, in a good way.

But, even more important, Lenya’s dad speaks of a new ‘anointing’ that flowed into his life.  In a section sub-titled, Crushed Like An Olive, he explains. In the Bible priests and kings were ‘anointed’ in a ritual that involved having olive oil poured over their heads. Here’s a reference - “…the anointing oil that was poured over Aaron’s head, that ran down his beard and onto the border of his robe.” Psalm 133:2 (NLT) This olive oil that marked that person as God’s own, as one prepared for service, as one empowered by the Spirit was the product of a crushing.  A press applied great pressure to the olives and it produced the oil that was used for anointing.  Now it gets good. “Jesus, who is both King and Priest forever, when to Calvary, but first he went to the Garden of Gethsemane. Gethsemane means ‘olive press.’ …. Beyond the ceremonial oil, there in the Garden, Jesus knelt down and was in such agony (of spirit), under such great pressure that He sweat drops of blood. There He was crushed before He went to the cross. … You cannot get to Calvary without going through Gethsemane.”  (Lusko)

My greatest desire is to be used by God to do His work. More than money, fame, or fun times I want to know Him and make Him known. But, I cannot do that without an anointing of the Spirit. Nor, can you. The cost of that anointing is crushing! Isaiah said that the Redeemer would be "despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not." (Isaiah 53:3, NIV)  And, Jesus was that! But, from His crushing and anointing flows the Life for me, for you, for the world. Do you desire to be an intimate of God, ‘anointed’ for service? Pain is part of the process! A. W. Tozer writes that “It is doubtful whether God could ever bless a person greatly until He has hurt him deeply.”  You may have to think about that for a while before you add your agreement.

If you are walking in a hard situation, if you are wrestling with pain, grief, rejection, loss, temptation – whatever is actually so common to the human experience – offer it to God for His purpose. Ask Him to make you tender, to sharpen your spiritual hearing, and to release the sweet fragrance of His anointing in your crushing. No, I am not making it a poetic, romantic notion. It is simply the reality of spiritual endeavor.  Here is a word from the Word, Jesus’ own invitation. “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?”   (Matthew 16:24-26)

A slave of expectations?

The world we live in puts pressure on all us to do many things. It is a complex life demanding competency of us in multiple ways - operating a car, using high tech gadgets, maintaining a home, navigating our job, tending relationships – it’s a long list! Sometimes we are exhausted, aren’t we? We have a love/hate with the complexity of it all. Very few of us want to give it up and live in an Amish kind of world, even though we know that the pace at which we live is beating us up every day.  God invites us to a different way where we learn to do what He calls us to do. In that place, we give it all, but find renewal and rest.  “Really,” you ask, “how is that possible?”

A fable fits my thoughts today.
Once upon a time, the animals decided they should do something meaningful to meet the problems of the new world. So they organized a school. They adopted an activity curriculum of running, climbing, swimming, and flying. To make it easier to administer the curriculum, all the animals took all of the subjects.  Now, the duck, she was excellent in swimming. In fact, she was better than her instructor. But she made only passing grades in flying and she flunked running altogether. She was so bad at running, her instructors made her drop swimming and stay after school to practice running. This caused her web feet to be badly worn, so that she became only average in swimming. But average was quite acceptable, so nobody worried about that - except, of course, the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of his running class, but he developed a nervous twitch in his leg muscles because of so much make-up work in swimming. The squirrel was excellent in climbing, but she encountered constant frustration in flying class because her teacher made her start from the ground up instead of from the treetop down. She developed charley horses from overexertion, and so she only got a C in climbing and a D in running. Now the eagle was a real problem child. He was constantly being disciplined for being a nonconformist. In climbing class, he beat all the others to the top of the tree, but he insisted on using his own way to get there.  (I first heard this from Pastor Chuck Swindoll)

The Bible says it this way. “You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything.” (1 Corinthians 12:12-13)

Are you living outside of the purpose for your life that God intends?
Are you doing things for which you are not equipped, only deepening your frustration and sense of meaningless?
Or have you found contentment in Him, being no more and no less than He purposes, obedient to His calling?

Those are NOT easy questions to answer.

We are told to be and to do many things by our sense of obligation and by the people around us. Our parents pressured us into a career not because of any real love for the work but because ‘it will be secure.’  Necessity demands we hang onto a job we hate, that mortgage payment comes on the first of the month and must be paid. We keep doing things for which we have no desire somehow driven by a dutiful sense that God wants us there even though we have lost our vision and/or delight in the call! Responsibility is admirable. However, there is a time to ask God, “why did you make me?” And, seek to answer that question, the Spirit guiding, before you come to the end of life with the same kind of emptiness that fills up the lament of Solomon – “Meaningless! Meaningless!”  says the Teacher.  “Utterly meaningless!  Everything is meaningless.”  (Ecclesiastes 1:2)

One of Satan's effective conspiracies to keep us from joy is to keep us from living on purpose!

Has God called you to a quiet life of prayer?
                Then you will be miserable and ineffective if you attempt to become a director of a large ministry.
 Has God gifted you with compassion, causing you to desire to serve those who are needy and the oppressed?

                Then why are you trying to lead a Bible class?
Has the Spirit given you insight into the Word so that you can help others understand His will?

                Then why are you focusing your time and energy on a ministry focused on raising funds for a missions outreach?

God has shaped us for service where we will 'fit' and where we can find deep satisfaction in serving Him obediently. One of the reasons there are so many unhappy, unfulfilled, critical, and ineffective disciples is that they are serving in places to which they are not called, for which they are not equipped, while wearing a yoke that chafes and binds them. It takes a lot of courage to admit that to ourselves and others. If we begin to extricate ourselves from some service because we have come to realize that God has not called us to it, we will be criticized by others, perhaps even judged as unfaithful.

A caution is in order here … to think deeply about. Never confuse `easy,' with `called.' “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God,” the apostles taught the early Christians. (Acts 14:22) There is a reason that Jesus invites us to put on the yoke! There is a devil who does his best to frustrate God's purposes. When we take the ‘call’ of God, we invite the opposition of His enemy.  We are kept by Jesus’ promise of the Holy Spirit Who is not ‘only with you, He will be in you.’

Are you where God wants you to be, but attempting to live without relying on Him and the empowering Spirit? Living 'on purpose' requires that we know the calling of God and that we remain reliant on Him.

Take this word from Jesus with you today and meditate on it:
"Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me.
Get away with me and you'll recover your life.
I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me--watch how I do it.
Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill- fitting on you.
Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly." Matthew 11:28-30 The Message
____________________

Jesus shall reign wherever the sun
Does its successive journeys run;
His kingdom spread from shore to shore,
'Til moons shall wax and wane no more.

Blessings abound wherever He reigns,
The prisoner leaps to loose His chains;
The weary come home and find their rest,
And all the sons of want are blessed.

People and realms from every tongue
Dwell on His love with sweetest song;
Voices of children shall proclaim
Their early blessings on His name.

Let every creature rise and bring
Honor and praises to our King;
Angels descend with songs again,
And earth repeats a loud "Amen."

Jesus Shall Reign
Isaac Watts – public domain