Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 ESV
Rejoicing, praying, and giving thanks put the circumstances of our lives, both good and bad into God’s hands and help us see them through His eyes. Last night our beloved daughter-in-law Melinda slipped from this world into the presence of Jesus. And while we are overwhelmed with grief and shock, these words are promises to which we cling. Melinda has finished her race. Her battle with cancer is finished. And while that pernicious disease claimed her physical life, it could not touch her soul. That remained fully and exclusively in the hands of Jesus with whom she now lives. Nancy and I didn’t know how to process the news that came in three words. “She is gone.” Yet as sadness rolls over my heart I sense the message echo back from Heaven, ” She has arrived!”
“Don’t you like the window that we just installed?” He asked when he saw that she wasn’t enthralled “But Gramma the level was perfect” he said But she was certain still shaking her head
“It’s the eye of the artist,” she replied with a grin So he went to the window to check it again Then sure as the sun sets each day in the West His level confirmed it was low on the left
Now, twenty years later I recall with a smile That the work that we did was still off by a mile We just didn’t notice the sag of the sash But the eye of the artist saw all in a flash
And the Artist of Heaven, left His throne room above To come to my window and fix it with love For the eye of the artist sees beyond who I am Then He lifts me up by the blood of the Lamb
For the Son of man came to seek and save the lost. Luke 19:10 NLT
There is no one like the God of Israel. He rides across the heavens to help you, across the skies in majestic splendor. The eternal God is your refuge, and his everlastingarms are under you. Deuteronomy 33:26-27a NLT
When our grandchildren were small, we used to bring them to church. Often, my wife would be up front with the worship team, which left me (Poppy) alone in the pew with a two-year old and a four-year old. Now the older boy was quite content to sit quietly during the song service, but the younger one wanted to see what was going on, especially since Nana was up on the altar singing with other people. So that meant Poppy had to pick him and hold him so that he could look over the adults’ heads. While rocking him back and forth in time to the music was kind of cute for the first song, by the second number that little tyke felt like he weighed a hundred pounds! What a blessing it was when one of the ladies sitting nearby would offer to hold onto him for a while! Whenever I sing this little chorus about God’s everlasting arms, I think back to those times. God offers to pick us up, to carry us and to hold us close. He never gets tired or hopes to pawn us off on somebody else. God has promised, that if we trust in Him, then He will carry us keep us forever in His arms!
Count it all joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. James 1:2-3 NIV
Who doesn’t want joy? From a thousand book titles to the theme of a million Christmas cards, the word joy beckons us towards this seemingly elusive feeling. But the Bible’s concept of joy, is not a feeling that comes and goes in our lives, but a command to embrace just as we embrace our children, on both their good days and bad. But the Bible doesn’t ask us to blindly jump up and down when things go awry. Today’s verse gives us tells us that we can rejoice because trial teach us perseverance. I am reminded of when, as a teenager, I worked in a factory that producing copper tubing. When the tubing first arrived, it came in 5-inch diameter, thick-walled tubes, each one being almost 20 feet in length. Our job was to take those rough tubes and extrude them into much smaller precisely manufactured pieces. But first, the copper had to be annealed. Annealing is a process of rapidly heating the copper in a furnace and then immersing it in cold water. Without annealing, the copper remained hard and impossible for us to work with. But once the annealing was completed, the tubes were softened, so we could they could be extruded into the various sizes our customers needed.
Trials are what God uses to anneal our character. Before facing trials, most of us are too overconfident and proud of our own abilities for God to use us to serve others. But I have found that He is an expert at using circumstances to heat up my world, and then just as things seem unbearably hot, He turns things around plunges me into cold water. When the shock of these changes wears off and I turn to God for help, I discover that though my situation has not altered, somehow, miraculously, God has changed my own heart. The desires, dreams and goals I held so tightly to earlier now have been replaced by His and a peace, greater than I can understand. Then I realize that God has got me right where I belong, and a joy, that no one can take away settles in my soul.
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