What About God

09/15/2004

We’ve discussed our rebellion that resembles a teenager, but where do we go from there? If it’s not about our wants and needs as a rebellious child of God, then what is it all about?

My son, Phil, used to wear a t-shirt. It had a picture of a cross on it, and underneath the cross it said, "It’s not medicine, it’s the cure." He wore it many times to the clinic when he was receiving his chemotherapy treatments. I don’t know what he was thinking but I do think there was a method to his madness, and that it was just not a "coincidence" that he wore that t-shirt on clinic days. Perhaps it encouraged him and reminded him that the battle he was fighting was not cured by medicine but had already been won on the cross by Jesus Christ. When all else in this world failed him, he still had something to hold on to. I wish there was more time to talk with him about all of this, but we will some day... we will...

The cure to what ailed Phil was not found on earth. The medicine that had been devised by man did help Phil some, and it does cure some from the same disease, but it did not cure Phil. It more than likely prolonged his life here on earth a bit, but that was it. He needed a miracle and some would say he never found that miracle. I would have to disagree. Phil lived in that miracle each day because he had discovered something that many take a whole lifetime to discover... it wasn’t about him. He had to look beyond himself and ask himself, "What About God?"

Does God really exist? Am I just fooling myself? Am I being lied to? Is this just crazy thinking? These are not merely questions asked by a dying boy, these are questions we ask ourselves every day. Even Christians who have devoted their entire lives to the Living God will once in a while stop and question what they are doing...is there a divine purpose or are we all being duped? And why would our "religion" be the only right one? What about all the other "good people" out there? What happens to them?

I think these questions should not be avoided. In our avoidance we only become prisoners in cells of confusion. We will lash out at anyone who even attempts to confront us on these issues, and we will try to convince them just how right Jesus is, and how wrong they are in not believing in Him. If we are not completely honest with ourselves, as Christians, about our doubts and our times of unbelief, we are only fooling ourselves. Unbelievers will see right through us. What about the times when life really starts to pull us under and we can’t seem to find any relief from the God we believe in, what then? Do we defend Him with all our might, or do we cower in fear that unbelievers may discover God is not the God we always believed Him to be? How can we convince another to believe when we are failing in that area ourselves? Oh, it can get so difficult.

I have a friend right now who is having some health problems. She has been a believer for many, many years--a faithful follower of Jesus Christ and one who will share her faith easily with others. She truly has a heart for God. But right now she is hurting and she is tired. The enemy is using this opportunity to attack her with both barrels loaded. He is coming at her from all directions. The enemy will search high and low through the waters looking for a bleeding heart, and when he finds one, he will attempt to devour it. There won’t be much left when he gets done if left to his tactics. Even long-time believers can start to sink into the depths of despair that the enemy has prepared for them. The worst part is, then believers will then start to feel like a failure because their faith doesn’t seem to be holding them up above the ways of this world. All that they know, all that they have learned about God and His ways seems to disappear from sight as they are pulled further and further out into the sea of confusion and doubt. Where is God? Why can’t I find Him? Has He left me... I know He said He never would but I can’t seem to locate Him right now!

Are these thoughts new? Are they anything that each one of us, as believers, hasn’t gone through at some point in our lives? Has there been one believer on the face of this earth who has not felt alone, deserted and fearful? It’s just not humanly possible to escape never feeling this way. Does that make God a liar? Does that make all that we believe in a lie? Does that make us fools for ever believing in Him?

When we find the answers to these questions, we will have grown and all that the enemy has tried to do to destroy us will backfire because we will come out of these storms of life even more sure of all that we believe in. We are not put through trials in our lives so that they will destroy our faith and us; we are allowed to go through them because they are what make us strong. They are what show us Who actually is in control, and they are the very opportunities that help us know that God is true--that all we believe in is fact. That we are not fools for believing in the Almighty but after all is said and done, we are given wisdom way beyond what this world can comprehend because we come to know Him through the storms.

I have done my share of questioning in my life. How could I not? My young son died! What kind of a God would allow something like that to happen in my life? How can I believe in a God who would allow such tragedy, let alone love a God like that? "Okay, I might believe in His existence, but I surely can’t love Him after what has happened. You can’t make me... so there!" Wrong! It’s in times of loss and devastation and tragedy that we not only need to know we are loved by our Father, but we need to love Him back with all our heart. When the enemy lies to us and tells us we should not be loving God, it’s only because he knows that if we do, and if we continue to, we will be healed. We will find our only hope is in Him, and the enemy will be defeated. Satan will have perhaps given it his best shot, as I think he did when taking my son from me, but he will have failed!

Do I believe in God more than ever before! You bet I do! Has it been easy? No, it has not! I questioned, I doubted, I was tempted to turn and run away from a God that would allow such hurt and pain in my life, but I did not. I kept at it, knowing that by keeping at it (trusting and searching for God in the storm) I would either discover God to be everything He promises He is, or I would discover Him to be the biggest lie ever and I would tell everyone!! I would not be played for a fool just because of fine sounding arguments! I was out to discover the truth for myself.

I love reading Oswald Chamber’s daily devotional, "My Utmost for His Highest." Chambers does not pull any punches. I don’t know how he was received by the people of his day, since he died in the early 1900’s but I can imagine how some would receive him today. He is straightforward, not mincing words. This is the way it is, take it or leave it. Because of that, there are times when I’m reading his devotional that I just go, "Wow!" What he says is so true, but so many people, including myself sometimes, would never go there in our thinking. We would stop long before we got to such a point of decision, or elimination or whatever you might want to call it. I think we live in a society of people who live in a gray area. I’m not saying it is dismal and gray, I’m saying we don’t want to claim that things can really be black and white. We don’t want to offend anyone. We must be more forgiving than that, more accepting of all, less judgmental and more willing to go along with the crowd--or should we?

Is that what God is calling us to? Is that what Jesus did? Did Jesus go along with the crowds or did He go against the whole known system and do His Father’s will? I think we all know the answer to that question. And what did the crowds do in response? Some turned and ran as far away from Him as they could get. They totally disagreed with His ways. But some followed Him, sought Him out, and understood that there was something totally different and special about this Man. They didn’t know if He was merely a great prophet or really the Son of God, but they knew something was up and they wanted to find out what that was. When they did, many became very devoted to Him because the closer they got to Him, the more they felt His love and His care for them--and who doesn’t want that?

But back to the "Wow" day I had with Oswald Chambers on his August 30th devotional page. He writes, "The tendency today is to put the emphasis on service. Beware of the people who make usefulness their ground of appeal. If you make usefulness the test, then Jesus Christ was the greatest failure that ever lived."

I love black and white statements like that. There is no gray area there. Either Jesus Christ was who He claimed to be, either He is the beginning and the end to each day we live, or He is the greatest failure that ever lived.

Jesus claimed that He came to heal the sick, give sight to the blind, and set the lame on their feet again. He claimed that He was the Son of God, that He was sent to earth to set the captives free, release the prisoners from bondage, and comfort the brokenhearted. (Isaiah 61:1) He told His disciple Peter to "get behind me Satan" (Matthew 16:23) when Peter didn’t want to allow Jesus to be taken captive and be put to death on the cross. Jesus knew what He came to earth to do, and He would not allow any force of evil to stop it. He knew how lost we would be without His saving grace, and He loves us too much to leave us to our own devices. We need a Savior, and He is that Savior.

Now, if we don’t rely on all that He has provided for us, we miss out on all that He died to give us. He rose on the third day for a reason... because otherwise death would be our greatest enemy. It still seems that way because it is still what many of us fear, but at least if we are honest with ourselves as believers, we know we shouldn’t fear it. We just need to get what we know in our heads down into our hearts, so we can be at peace. That’s the hard part!

And, if we think that happens by us conquering our fear on our own, we are wrong! Jesus doesn’t expect that of us either, if He did, He would be the greatest failure that ever lived because He told us He would never leave us, that He would always be with us, and that His living water would flow through us. We get caught up into thinking we have to brave things out and be strong before we can receive what He is offering to us as help. What we miss is that He wants to be our strength; it is the only way we will survive and be victorious. It seems sometimes that He has gone missing when we need Him most. What’s really gone missing is our belief that He is with us. The enemy tries to pull the blinders over our eyes at the most opportune moments, and many times he succeeds. Then Jesus turns up missing because we can’t see Him. That doesn’t mean He is not there!

When we start to doubt and question and think Jesus has abandoned us we need to remember one thing, Jesus has not changed, we have. He has not left us, we have turned away. He has not broken His promises to us, we have started to believe the lies instead of the truth! We change, Jesus does not!

After all David shared with us in the Psalms, all the times that his heart cried out to God in his despair and all the times God restored him and set him on his feet again, it seems that David finally "got it" in 2 Samuel 23:5, "It is my family God has chosen! Yes, he has made an everlasting covenant with me. His agreement is eternal, final, sealed."

There are so many things we will have to go through in this life and we may whine and complain and cry through a lot of it but if in the end we are confident that God’s agreement with us is "eternal, final, sealed," it will have all been worth it. Jesus promised that He would be back for us. He has not left us forever, and He has provided the Holy Spirit to see us through each day. Jesus, in the form of the Holy Spirit, lives inside each believer. We might wonder how it is possible that we will ever doubt again with Jesus living right inside of us, but we still do. We still struggle and we still have fear, because we still live inside our flesh along with Jesus. We’re in this together, but sometimes we get so tired and so scared we can’t see straight! That’s when we need fellowship as never before. That’s when we need others who are not struggling at the moment to remind us it is okay, everything’s going to be all right. Remember, Jesus walked on water, so what do we have to fear when our Savior can do that?

My brother and I are working on another song. This, I believe, will be ongoing, and it is such a great blessing. The words that are written, the music that is put with them start to incorporate itself into our daily lives. God uses the songs to impress His truths even deeper upon our hearts. As my brother says, the lines to the songs start coming out in his prayers, and in his conversations with others. This latest song is called, "Walking on the Sea." Part of it goes like this:

Matters not if it’s land or sea, He sends His Son walking by
Says focus on Me, not on the devil’s vicious lies
We can lay our burdens on Him, all the chaos in our lives
And know that everything will be all right

Cuz His desire for me, is that I can see, my Saviour walking on the sea
And everything’s all right, because I see, Him walking on the sea
And He’s walking on the storms of my life

Further on down it says:

If we could walk on water, would we fear the ocean depths
If we trusted in God alone, would we question every step

(I hope you all get to hear these songs one day on a CD. My brother is working on getting that done as God leads Him to the people who can help in the process. It’s so much fun for the two of us to work on these songs, even if it is via-email and over our cell phones!) {You can purchase a CD from the Journey Through Ministries Store.)

The point of this song is, if we fully realize that Jesus can walk on the sea, that He was not limited by this world and the law of gravity, then He truly can walk on the storms and the chaos in our lives and calm those waves and bring us safely to shore. Everything will be all right!! Even if He seems far removed, up on a mountain praying, He will be with us when we need Him. He won’t let us "drown." Never, ever.

How can I say that? My son died? Didn’t He drown? No, he didn’t. He was never left alone in his struggles. We as a family were never left alone in ours either. We cried, we felt great sorrow, we had to deal with our fears, but when we focused on the Fact that Jesus could walk on water, we knew that everything would be all right. It may not be the way we’d design it here, but we live in the hope of all that will be when these earthly struggles are over. In the meantime, we need not question every step.

Doubts? Fears? Yes! But they only cause us to believe more, fear less in future circumstances and start to treat all the stormy seas in our lives as solid ground. What would our faith be without difficulty? What would my faith be today without the loss of my son? I shudder to think of what I would have missed out on if not for Phil’s life and Phil’s death. Oh how I hate that he had to leave this earth before me, but my heart will be eternally grateful for the impact his life/death had on my remaining days on this earth.

As Phil’s t-shirt said, "It’s not medicine, it’s the cure." I don’t need to be medicated through the tough times in life; I need to know there’s a cure. Without a cure, I would only fear. I would not be able to rest. I would get lost in the confusion trying to figure out how to avoid the questions I thought there were no answers to. I have asked those questions, and I have found the answers to my satisfaction. You may not agree with them, I cannot convince you to. You may want to find another way. I encourage you to seek Truth. I know that if you truly do, with all your heart, you will find Jesus. He cannot be denied by those who will open their hearts to Him fully, saying, "Jesus, are you there?" Question Him, doubt Him, He will reveal Himself to you if you are willing to embrace the Truth when it is set before you.

John 21
Verse 25: "I won’t believe it unless I see the nail wounds in his hands,
put my fingers into them, and place my hand into the wound in his side."
Verse 27: Then he (Jesus) said to Thomas, "Put your finger here and see my
hands. Put your hand into the wound in my side. Don’t be faithless any longer. Believe!"
Verse 28: "My Lord, and my God!" Thomas explained.

Jesus is not the medicine. He is the Cure. As it said on the t-shirt Phil was baptized in, "Jesus." "Is that your final answer?" To Phil, it was. What man could not cure with all the medicine available in the world, Jesus could cure by His healing power. Sometimes that happens here on earth, sometimes it’s time to go home. Either way, we are healed. Either way, we can rest.

Phil is resting now. I don’t know what he does each day in heaven, but I know that it is good. Because of that, I can rest. I can live each day with hope. I know that my Savior walked on the sea and I have been called to get out of the boat and walk on the sea also, though storms may rage. As long as I keep my focus on what’s true, the storms of life will not pull me under!

We can question, doubt, fear, cry and grow weary, but if we search for Truth through it all we will only know God more, love Him more and be filled with gratitude--then when the storms have passed by we will have learned even more about His loving care in our lives.

What About God?
What about Him do we need to know?
We can ask Him, and He will gladly to tell us! If we deny Him, we will not only miss out on the very best this life has to offer, we will miss out on an eternity spent in His presence, along with all those who believed in Him who have gone before us!

Living and learning,

Diane