The pride of life...

There is the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life. ( 1 John 2:16) My pastor in his sermon last Sunday mentioned this verse, and then ask us which one did we struggle with? I have thought about that all week, and my heart was definately convicted about the pride of life! The pride of life involves self-sufficiency. There has been a time in my life as recently as a couple of years ago that my self-suffiency and my accomplishments all of a sudden looked like they nothing! Everything that I based my life upon being good at, such as being a wife and mother seem to be fleeting. That sounds a bit odd because my marriage is still healthy and intact, I am still a mother guiding and rearing my children, so what is it that seemed fleeting? It was the bases of my identity.

I was reading a commentary about the 1 John passage and it said, " either we can trust in ourselves and our accomplishments or we can derive our values, assurance and life from God." Thus self suffiency = worldliness. He went on to say something really profound to me, "People who live their life like this are dedicating it to things that are short lived" Wait a minute, being a wife and mother is not something that is short lived! Yes that's right, but when you base your identity on those accomplishments and not on your Savior you will get burned! Why? Because life is about change, your children grow up and leave, your relationship with your husband changes and everything you thought you were a pro at is jerked out from underneath you. In my life the climax of the lesson came in this set of circumstances: my husband's job changed, he was gone the majority of the week and finishing his degree when he was home he had to concentrate on homework. This was a difficult time for him also, he by no means enjoyed being away from his family. But for me my role in caring for him had to change and I didn't like it at all! My children were all at different stages, I had one in college away from home and after having homeschooled my children for ten years and loving it, the other two were put in public school each for different reasons. Now that same year I turned 40 and it was like a pie in the face of everything I had accomplished. I now know that God was taking me through repenting of making my family my idol and lovingly helping me understand that even though life changes, He will never and my identity as His child is a constant!

So I struggle still today with the pride of life, because like many of us we self-exalt and that will lead to self destruction. My heart is so moved now, by all that I know that God has given me to do in this life, including my precious role as wife and mother, but I now cling to my relationship with the Eternal One more than my relationship with those here below. I hope you understand my heart on this one and I hope you think about it...

Unbelieveable!

You know I can't believe sometimes how long it has taken me to learn things. Sometimes I think I've learned them and then I guess I forget and have to learn them all over again! I know that I am no different than you, to say that I am puts to much emphasis on me, makes me the center of my universe. I know that all of us go through the same kinds of things, maybe the circumstances different, but the struggles the same. I want to come back to the thought of what reality is, you see God is working in my thoughts and my heart so that I may comprehend more of His greatness. I have been thinking this week through the prompting of scripture and through the teaching in; In Search of a confident Faith of how I am in need of a paradigm shift, ( I don't really use big words like that on my own, so I borrow them!). In my life I get bogged down with the practical stuff and I forget how big God is. If you try to deal with all the daily stuff without the remembrance of your awesome Lord you will get bogged down. You know that He is so big and so different than anything that is, all of creation cannot hold Him, (Psa. 139:7-12) and yet I don't live my life in such a way that people know how big He is through me. How sad. So I have to step back and ask myself what is it that I believe about Him. Look at Luke 24:4-11. What did the disciples believe about Him before His crucifixion? Did they believe every word He spoke, and if so look at their response, they were just like you and me. They thought the women's words were "nonsense". It did not seem plausible to them that He would be alive, it was beyond their realm of possibility. Praise God that He doesn't work in our realm of anything! Yet when we continue to look at the passage it looks like Peter and John (John 20:8-9) went ahead to the tomb, maybe the words of Jesus, that they did not fully understand began to reverberate through their minds. When they got there, their confidence began to swell, their paradigm began to shift! It was plausible, in fact it was then factual He had risen! The more I walk with God, (my santification) the more I see Him work in my life the more my faith swells also! My friend Lisa and I have been studying the book of James, how powerful! We have in our lives been caught kicking and screaming through trials that God intended to use to grow us in our faith! We cannot now and will never grow fully without them!!! They are the instuments of God's hand that shakes up our patterns of life, our paradigm of the way we see reality. What if, just what if we approached life through the eyes of faith (true reality), what if when suffering happens, when trials come we smiled at the Father, the "giver of all good things" and allowed Him to build us up, teach us to become more of the image of Christ? Wow, thinking about that right now causes my heart to rise with awe for my precious Father! How small minded of me to forget that. In saying that though, we have to realize it is apart of our growing to allow the Spirit of God to identify areas and then agree with God on them and allow Him to shift our paradigm. What other things have I made bigger than God? What things are just not possible? NOTHING! I could ramble on about this, as a matter of a fact let me challenge you to look at the story of Peter walking on the water. (Matt. 14:24-33) You know the story, he saw Jesus, apparently they all did, and he ask to come to Him, and of course the Lord always allows us to come to Him. Peter then stepped out, trancending all physical matter, walked on the water out to Jesus....lost sight of the who he was walking toward and then needed to be rescued by the Savior. The thing that never dawned on me was what happened after that, hand in hand with the Savior they had to go back, walking on the water. That is the why to my needed paradigm shift, to believe that the impossible is possible and then to walk with my Father in the truth of that no matter what the trial. I know that I really sound like I am aimlessly ranting about all of this, but my mind is being taught so much that I find it hard to express it all in intelligible writing, but my heart really wants to say it with a challenge to think about what we consider is possible, then what we believe about God and how the two meet! Think about it...