Postings

8-31-08 Thoughts in the office

If there is anything in the universe that is good, then God made it. Pleasure is created by God. Happiness is created by God. Laughter is created by God. Contentment and peace are created by God. Then I think of the verse, "Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you." So if I want these good things then I need to seek first God's kingdom and His righteousness. Seeking the kingdom is seeking God's plan and place for me. There are three phases of this. The first is the actual birthing into the kingdom. The second is where I learn how to walk in the kingdom. The third is where I begin to live abundantly in the kingdom.

All of my life I have had the following "stinky thinky": God allowed Jesus to suffer on the cross so why wouldn't He allow us to suffer? What makes us think we are above pain and suffering if God allowed it to happen to His own son? That sounds real good on the surface, but below the surface it states that God made pain in His kingdom. Therefore pain is "very good" because God proclaimed it to be. That is garbage. Read Isaiah 53. It is NOT God's will that we should suffer and be sick and be afflicted and bound. It was His will that Jesus would take all of this on Himself and that all of that would DIE on the cross. When Jesus rose from the dead, that stuff was conquered. It was DEAD. It was God's will that Jesus would suffer so we wouldn't have to. Jesus took the pain and the suffering, the illness and the punishment, the guilt and the condemnation and even the mindsets that lead to those and KILLED IT. In other words EVERYTHING that is holding us back from the kingdom of God is DEAD.

Now the next typical thought is "how does something that is dead hold us back?" In other words the pain and suffering don't LOOK dead! They look very alive and "well." God then states that we walk by faith and not by sight. The enemy is the great deceiver and the great pretender. In God's kingdom there is no cancer, there is no disease, there is no suffering and there is no death. WE must see things as they REALLY are, NOT as they SEEM. We must speak out the truth and live the truth and allow the Truth to live through us. There are root issues that God is looking to rip up so that we can truly live, but we must be willing to know that He is always good and always love and He is NEVER the maker of evil.

Now everything in my "logical" mind is going, "Now wait a minute. It can't be that straightforward. And how do you say something 'is' when you can't even see it or even worse you see its very opposite before you? How can you say suffering is dead when you can go next door to your neighbor's house and find a person with cancer?" Because Jesus has proclaimed that His kingdom is here. Declarations go out before actions. It is time to declare and believe and then the actions will come forth. My logical mind can stick it, anyway, because it cannot understand what God is up to and I am getting to the point that I don't want to understand; I want to SEE.