I started to feel lost and alone tonight and then I started to have doubts dropped into my head about the things I am believing God for. Things like the physical realities of the world we live in and the feeling of standing alone in my faith and I realized that I was being attacked. It could not be God sending these doubts, because God doesn’t need to make me doubt, all He has to do is tell me no. No explanation needed, just a clear and Godly no. He wouldn’t try to overwhelm me by telling me that it was impossible, because to Him, nothing is impossible.
I have always been consumed with doubt and depression and I have always used the metaphor for why I could not have faith in anything because my doubts were a Gordian Knot (many individual strings that are tied and bound and wrapped around each other in such a way as to be a solid ball created by being intertwined and knotted together). There was no one doubt that stood alone, each one was tied and connected to several other doubts, like the individual strings are tied to each other so that you cannot unravel one without unraveling another which is tied to another and so forth in such a way that no individual string (doubt) could be unraveled unless the entire knot was unraveled. You couldn’t change one piece unless you changed it all. Well, in my midnight session with God, he didn’t bother to unravel the knot; he just removed it (cut it into without trying to unravel it) from the picture supernaturally.
So, I told you that to tell you this…
Faith is also a Gordian knot. When you just believe, you realize that to believe for one thing you have to believe another thing and that belief is tied to something else. Just as the Gordian knot of doubt kept me in bondage, the Gordian knot of belief provides strength to those individual strings (beliefs) that are harder to believe for because they are tied and irrevocably bound to a hundred other strings (beliefs) that I find easy to believe in. My faith is not one issue or another; it is all tied together in an unbreakable knot. (Unbreakable only because God powers it) I found that if I started to state the “little” things that I believe in they were tied into the bigger things and the bigger things suddenly became easier to believe in.
I hope this makes some sort of sense because it really is an amazing thing, but I realize that my brain is a little “different” J I also thought of a lesson our preacher once taught about the Israelites complaining about the manna in the desert. The Israelites were being reminded by outsiders (the Egyptians that came with them) of all the different and wonderful kinds of food they had in Egypt and how all they had to eat now was the same old bread day in and day out. It really becomes strange when you remember that the Israelites had been slaves and not well treated slaves in Egypt. They very likely did not have the rich foods that the Egyptians had, because they were mistreated and abused. So their complaints about the melons were lies to God Himself. They were wining and complaining about the blessings that God were providing them to live, because they were tired of His Blessing, (the manna), and wanted something else. They thought they deserved something better and tried to manipulate God. Had they truly wanted to go back to Egypt they would have just turned around and gone, but they were trying to manipulate (shame?) God into giving them more. Note that they never once asked him to give them something else, they just started complaining.
Sometimes we complain about the manna in our lives. We get so caught up in what we want or think we need that we totally dis the blessings that God pours out on us because they are not the blessings that “matter” to us. I know in my life I want to make sure that I am not wining to God about wanting something richer in my life, when I haven’t even stopped to thank Him for the things He has provided. It is easy sometimes to discount when God blesses us, because it is not the answer we were asking for or the answer we think we have to have, therefore we give it a quick “thank you God” and go on complaining and wining for the most current “need” that has come up.
Next post – More about the Manna :)
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