Day 24 Thanksgiving items: Spiritual Insights IV I believe you should expect just one more day (after today) in this series of “Spiritual Insights I-V”. After that I will move on and finish out this month of daily Thanksgivings. Because the special post on “Hard Lessons” was so long, I will really try to be sharter with today’s Thanksgivings post. The Lord will understand the fuller details. So I’ll just jump into today’s insights without any overview commentary. Duty Over Deliverance: This is a lesson to be thankful for which many will never understand. When you first fall into a pit of anguish, all you want is to be delivered. Your prayers and pleas are focused on finding an escape from your pain and misery. But as you begin to see and accept that this season has a purpose, you also begin to “flesh out” your prayers with more mature “meat”. Over time the Lord will guide you to the things He wants you to spend your focus on. Once you can accept the fact that there is value and benefits to be gained in the midst of your pain and suffering, you find yourself more and more focused on the duties of self-discipline so you can be enriched by God’s sustaining graces, rather than demanding His delivering graces. This does not mean you are not ready or willing (even anxious) to be delivered. But it does mean that you realize that you can get to a place of abiding contentment in the midst of the storm! Resigning yourself to these duties, not trying to earn God’s favor, but because you come to desire to learn and grow as much as possible while you have the opportunity and before the storm passes, bears spiritual fruit that can only grow in the soil of suffering. Out of these kinds of benefits you find that you can be thankful for things you never before imagined. And the lists of your Thanksgivings begin to lengthen. (Or you can just get angry or in some other way close your heart – and reap the bitterness that follows.) Worthy!: Once again this is very hard to understand until you have been here yourself. The Lord has His ways of demonstrating His love for us. And while we all desire the expressions of love we can easily relate to, we sometimes have to expand our understanding to broader expressions. It’s like looking back on your childhood or teen years and being mature enough to truly appreciate that your parents disciplined you out of love, even though it seemed so unfair and harsh at the time. Getting a grip on how the Lord loves us by using suffering to open us up to a deeper relationship becomes a praise that we find stirring in our hearts. If you abide in the Lord, allowing Him to carry you through the pains and anguish of your trial – you discover how His comforts, graces, and tender mercies could have never enhanced your fellowship with Him if it were not for the suffering! Once you realize down deep in your soul that these blessings are deliberate and intended for your enjoyment, you begin to wonder. You wonder why should I be so loved? Why should I be so blessed? Why should I be counted so worthy as to have the Holy God of heaven so attentive to ‘me’? Thus you come to a point of counting it a special blessing to be counted worthy of such suffering! (If your suffering is of your own making through rebellion and sin, as opposed to a sifting or refining trial, being counted as worthy should take on an even deeper meaning!) (In either case you still desire deliverance, but you can “wait” on the Lord and “rest” in your growing confidence in Him. But you grow in your understanding that He considers ‘you’ worthy of this calling!) “Needs” verses “Wants”: Ma and I have praised the Lord many many times through the years over this spiritual insight. Through many years of struggles we have time and again been faced with redefining the difference between our perceived “needs” and our “wants”. It’s because the Lord usually grows us and our understanding of His promises through a rather slow process of time. He knows we are too fragile to become some kind of “super-saints” overnight. So once again I find myself in a season of refinement and more of what I “need” has to be transferred over to the “want” list. However, the kinds of things this season has boiled to the top are not the physical or tangible things so common to past experiences. These things are those which reside in the mind and heart, not on the table or in the checking account. (And because many of the items I am personally dealing with are so directly related to my Bride, I do not feel the need to be any more transparent, other than to say the list is longer than you would think and has little to do with what you may first think I mean.) I am so thankful that I already understood the principles of redefining “needs” and “wants”. It makes applying those principles to the esoteric issues of life easier and helps me to be thankful for the results. Yet most “normal” folks probably face suffering with a broader range of “needs” being paired down and moved over to the “wants” side. But again, the end results is a Thanksgiving for the contentment which follows such revelations. Redemption of our Time: Seasons of grief are normally associated with a degree of seclusion and/or relief from the normal time consuming details of daily life. Either you are restricted by force, physical impairments, emotional handicaps, or social graces are extended to lessen your otherwise busy days – trials are often accompanied by uninterrupted time for additional communion with the Lord. At first you do not realize the blessings of this part of the season. But as the days pass and you realize the sustaining graces of the Lord, you begin to understand the value of the opportunities to redeem your limited time now applied to a deeper spiritual life. You spend more time focused on the Lord, His Word, His Work, and His blessings. It does not take long to realize and begin to offer prayers of Thanksgivings for this redemption of your time! So here are my Day 24 Thanksgivings: I am Thankful – for the contentment that has developed towards focusing on my duties. It is an odd relief to not be consumed with the additional ‘self-induced’ anguish of obsessing over “deliverance” from trials. The Lord understands and continues to hear my cries for deliverance, but we both know even that heart-cry needs to be balanced with contentment towards the duties associated with the season. I am thankful that the Lord has shown me not to waste the opportunities of this season, but to be diligent and dutiful to grow in the midst of it. And I can honestly say I count the Thanksgiving of the many blessing that come out of knowing that the Lord sees me as being worthy to suffer the pains and anguish of this trial! I am Thankful – that the Lord continues to help me clarify the difference between my “needs” and my “wants”. Even though Lynn and I have gone through so many unusual experiences through the years which have challenged us on this point. Because every time we reorder our understanding of the difference between these perceptions, we gain more and more blessings that are sustainable rather than temporary. And I count it a Thanksgiving to find myself led to redeem the times previously wasted on unnecessary entertainments and frivolous pursuits. By redeeming the days of this trial I get to add numerous Thanksgivings from the spiritual fruits born out of the quality time devoted to prayer, self-evaluation, and study of God’s Word. Dear Father: With these Thanksgivings I offer You many additional praises. Thank You for growing my desire to tend to the duties of this season and helping me to keep the desire for deliverance in proper perspective with my responsibilities. And I praise You dear Lord for counting me worthy of this trial and its associated pains and anguish! Now as You continue to help me sort through and understand the differences between my “needs” and my “wants”, help me to further redeem the time so I can find even greater joys in You while the opportunity avails itself. And at the end of each day, may I be able to raise my voice in praise and worship for all You do and provide even in the midst of these darkest of days! May I, and others around me, be able to unashamedly proclaim – All Glory to God!
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 11:00:01 +0000
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