One of Kenton's sermon at Mariners is called "Uncontrollable Grace."
He says, "All of us struggle with trying to control things; our spouse, our family, our business, oursevles....."
"It's natural for us to think, 'How do I control God? I try to control everthing else. What's the formula to get him on my side? To release his power in my life? Do I give a certain amount? Do I pray?"
Yes we have all asked these questions. Prayer is the trickiest thing because there are passages that say do not doubt and believe you have received it and you will. But ultimately we cannot tell God what to do in our lives. He will accomplish in our lives what He wants to accomplish. God is God and we are not.
God says, "Not only am I uncontrollable. I want you to trust me with your whole life; the most uncontrollable response."
How many of us really give God full control over our lives? It is hard to fully do so sometimes because we cannot SEE Him. That makes things harder sometimes. But that is when we need faith. "Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see." God does LOVE us. We can know that for sure. And He does have good plans for our life. Beyond that we just have to trust Him.
My favorite song in relation to this is "Jesus Take the Wheel." When we hit rock bottom, we are finally willing to give Jesus the steering wheel of our lives. When we finally realize that we cannot do life by ourselves, we learn to lean on Him.
God uses tragedy in our lives to bring us to the end of oursevles. He uses them to show us how fagile life is. He wants to show us not to depend on anything in this life, other people and ourselves. God alone can be depended on.
I love the quote, "Bend the knee or have it broken. Either way, you're going down." If we do not of our own will submit to God, He sometimes will make us. He punishes those He loves as a father does with his child. He knows that sometimes he must hurt us in order to make us better, in order to help us grow.
Like a tree being pruned, sometimes he must cut things out of our lives or off of us such as pride or an idol. The cutting process can hurt, but it will make us so much more beautiful! :)
God says that He is a jealous God. If we put anything in His place, he just might take it away, so be careful, including ourselves. Many people put themselves in God's place, thinking they can achieve and be self-sufficient on their own. Other people put other people in God's place. In either case, God has a way of making us depend on Him again. Unless we do, our lives will have more and more self-induced trials. The trials could be God trying to get our attention. It could be Him trying to tell us we're not doing things as He wanted us to be doing things.
So think about that next time something hard happens in your life. Is God trying to get your attention? Was there something that you were doing wrong possibly?
Sometimes trials are unrelated to our own failings, as we know Job went through hell but he was blameless before God.
But sometimes it IS God trying to get us to see something that we were not seeing before.
I am coming to see more and more that the death of my late husband could have been God trying to help me appreciate what He gave me in giving me Roger more. I think while my late husband was alive I did not appreciate him as much as I could have. It also could have been that I was eclipsing God with Roger. Both are possibilities, but I will not know for sure why God did that until I get to heaven.
Regardless, God must always stay at the center of our lives and we need to love everyone we can in our lives as much as it is in our power to love them. Amen?
May God give us all eyes to see Him more clearly in everything. Amen! :)
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