All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Daily we must remind ourselves that God IS. Daily we must recall that Jesus not only died on the cross for our sins (and oh so many of them), but that Christ rose from death in the body and spirit and Christ Jesus IS. Daily we must seek relationship between our living spirit breathed into us by God with the Holy Spirit sent to us as our counselor by Jesus. The Holy Spirit of the Living God near to our soul, IS.
All of this seems well and good as we carry our Bibles into a worship service or open the Bible in the privacy of our homes. Yet once we return from worship or Bible study we encounter the woes and trials of everyday life, the challenges of everyday relationships.
Don’t we ever-so-briefly ask of our Bible verses and stories: “What do I do with this?”
“All Scripture is God-breathed” or “All Scripture is breathed out by God.” or “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God.”
“All Scripture is God-breathed” or “All Scripture is breathed out by God.” or “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God.”We know it. God said it. But what do we do with it?
Think of our everyday life as a brief journey to a place of which we have only dreamed.
How do I get there? (I don’t even truly know where I am now?)
I know God wants me in a different place today than where I failed so miserably in sin yesterday. I am lost and have no GPS. In fact, once I leave church or the security of home (though I know this place is a brief shelter for this breathing, decaying flesh of mine), I not only have not sense of God’s direction, I can not even find weak signal of God’s voice speaking direction into my daily life.
Genesis 12:
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
4 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.
Just suppose you have retired comfortably in your hometown or near to your family and making an amazing promise, GOD asks you to just pick up and move. Will you go?
I have little understanding of Abram and his lifestyle millennia ago. Yet what same application do I see to my own life when it seems everything must change from how I have always seen my life?
Everything must go forward in some new direction. How do I get there? Who will help me along the way? What will I find in this new place? I am blind to any knowledge of the challenges ahead, the place where I will go and what I will do when I get there. (And what does Abram have to do with me in this fast-paced life even two millennia after the Cross of Christ?)
Again scripture provides an answer and encourages us to apply scripture to our every day life.
Galatians 3:4-6 Did you suffer so many things in vain—if indeed it was in vain? Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith— just as Abraham “believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”?
7 Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham.
Sure, I can teach someone scripture or sit under some teaching to the church which I like; but can I apply to the lesson of my life the Voice of the Lord’s Spoken Word?
If God asks me to leave everything behind for the unseen promise of hope, will I have the faith of Abraham to hear and obey the voice of the LORD?
How many times has the LORD asked you to do something after you were in the comfortable place?
Or again, how many times have your own misguided plans brought you to your knees before the LORD asking, ‘Where did I go wrong? What do I do now… Lord? Where do I go with this? Show me the way… please… Lord?’
And ALL is silent… No answer. And again we cry out to the LORD.
And the Lord is faithful in His answer. Yet we do not like it. It is not the ‘comfort’ we expected. In fact, it makes us even more uncomfortable and will require even more faith than we believe possible – faith to ‘believe God’ and have it counted as righteousness.
What next? (Isn’t that always the question from the comfortable place or the house of desperation?) What next, Lord?
To be continued…
