"God, I just wish I knew what You were trying to teach me!"
"I just wish Jesus would come and end all this pain!"
There's a proper Kingdom perspective about suffering that I've already started to unravel here, but I can't help but dig a little deeper, because I know so many Christians who don't understand it.
And then there are the non-believers who, if deceived about it themselves by the Christians they know, are not likely to want to get to know Yahweh.
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| Ted Turner |
Ted Turner is famous for being hostile to Christian beliefs and said that "Christianity is a religion for losers." Perhaps it was comments like the ones above that caused him to draw that conclusion. He could not be more wrong, but then again, neither could the believers who utter such statements.
We had the piano tuner here to, well, tune the piano, and he was hilarious. His talking was a constant stream that went from one topic to the next to the next. Levi was spellbound. The guy finally stopped and laughed and said, "You have to just tell me to shut up. I have ADD, and I can go on forever." Then he proceeded to go on forever. It was obvious that he was disorganized and scatter-brained, but he was interesting and full of joy and life, and he was a BRILLIANT musician. Brilliant. He talked about how he couldn't make a living tuning pianos here in Vermont, because there just wasn't much demand. He was therefore also working as a security guard for not much more than minimum wage. He has a wife who's a nurse and four children. He talked about how money was tight, then he said the two things I listed above.
You see, he is a passionate believer. But he talked about his menial security guard position and shortage of money and said, "I'm just like, 'OK, God, I just wish I knew what you were trying to teach me.' It's just so hard, and I look around and am like, 'Ah, Jesus, why can't you just come back and end it all?' but <nodding his head> I know, I know, we have so many souls to reach still."
I'm so unused to that kind of thinking these days that my skin crawled a little. It rubbed me the wrong way, and I'll tell you why in a minute. But I absolutely loved this guy, and I felt his pain. My heart softened towards him, and I know that so many people with families are in a pinch, especially right now. I cannot imagine the weight on that father's shoulders. But his mentality was keeping the weight there, and it was a spirit opposed to the Father, Yahweh. It was an enemy to that man, but he was convinced it was God. And when I heard it speaking in my home, and lying to that sweet man, I wanted to throw daggers. It is the antichrist spirit. For we must also realize that the antichrist is not one big, scary bogeyman that will rise in the Middle East in the end times. (Geez, we Christians have been prone to get all goose-bumpey about the Big Bad Guys out there (whose ruling spirits are paraded already as prisoners of war by Yahshua, right?) rather than focusing our attention on how our side is Bigger and "Badder," so to speak.) I John 4:3 states accurately (of course) that the antichrist spirit is already among us. I'll get into that another time.
So, as my apostle said just this last Sunday in church, "There is no shortage of pain in this world. There is no shortage of suffering. But don't you know that Yahweh wants to give you beauty for your ashes?"
Yahweh doesn't love our suffering; it isn't His desire to inflict it so that we remember who we are and come crawling back to Him to learn our lesson. And although I think it's always the right thing to ask Yahweh what He's trying to teach you, it doesn't follow that the bad stuff came from Him. It just means that whatever is happening in your life, bad or good, He will use it to teach you and to bring you glory if you'll walk it out with Him. Yahweh didn't give that man the menial labor job to teach him a lesson. We blame God for so much that He didn't instigate (Actually, we give the devil credit for a lot he didn't do as well). That man is having a hard time with jobs because in many ways he's still a little boy inside, and he is disorganized and scatter-brained. The best thing for him would be to understand that Yahweh doesn't want him to be afflicted with such debilitations, and to receive Yahweh's direction for healing and focusing and building towards something that can provide for his family both provision and peace.
To pin our troubles on God is to walk away from our own responsibilities in the matter, even if some of the issues were inherited and not chosen.
So that takes care of the "What're you trying to teach me" comment. But what about the "Jesus, come back and save us!" comment? First of all, isn't it weird to say that He's waiting for more souls to be won to Him? Even when I bought that, I didn't understand it. Because while we're "winning those souls," others are constantly being born. If all we're trying to do is populate heaven, I don't think we'll ever catch up. When will He decide, "OK now," when that thinking means there will be souls still lost? Is He then waiting until the "still lost" batch are the particular batch that are not worth His while? And that "saving lost souls for heaven" thinking only wants to get a person "saved" so they can "hold out" till glory in heaven one day.
But what if we're supposed to be establishing His Kingdom here and now? What if He really isn't coming back until His church is a glorious, powerful bride ready to receive Her King? As that Kingdom slowly spreads, then we're making headway, not all twiddling our thumbs waiting for the hereafter. Beyond that, as I already stated in my previous post on suffering, He already came to rescue us! What do you think all that torture, death, burial, resurrection, and release of the Holy Spirit was all about? He rescued us!! Glory! Halleluia!! Now we're equipped to handle whatever comes our way in this fallen world, ready to overcome it.
There will be a second coming, a reuniting of Yahshua, the head, to His church, the body. But in a way, He already is "coming again" through those with His spirit who are walking according to His leading, who are being His body. I know that weirds some people out. Listen, it doesn't take anything away from His God-ness to acknowledge that we're also made awesome and significant because we're joined to the most Awesome and Significant One. If receiving Him doesn't make us amazing, then what does that say about Him?
There is no shortage of those out there who truly love God and Jesus to the degree that they understand and know how. And I hear so many recite these misconceptions that maybe God just wants them to be miserable so that He can show how great He is through their grace in suffering. To the degree that we're walking in His grace to eradicate the suffering, fine. I can see that. But you already know where I'm headed: that glory is not in the constant suffering; it's in giving suffering the boot as you place one more of His enemies underneath His feet. He does not want us to be miserable. Right? He does not want us to be miserable.
He does not want us to be miserable.
The truth is, He has a purpose and a plan for all of our lives. He wants us to walk as His sons in the earth, as kings in the earth. He wants our words to carry authority because we draw from Him. He wants us to put curses, poverty, sickness, heart-ache, addiction, all of it underneath His feet. And since we are His body, that means they must go underneath our feet. He will help us till the cows come home. That's the point. He will talk to us, He will direct us, He will make us do something that seems weird, and then when we see how miraculously it plays out and how we never could've orchestrated it on our own, we'll really know what it means to rejoice.
But we must understand His heart so that we know how to approach Him, and therefore our lives, as confident sons. If we don't even understand how it all works, we're defeated. Our enemies' hands are tied, and they have been paraded by Yahshua as prisoners of war. Therefore, their only power over us is in the words they can whisper into our thinking. They can talk. Were I in that position, grappling to keep my position of authority in the earth as the enemy is, I'd start telling Christians lies about who they are. As long as Christians are incompetent and confused, the enemy's position is secure.
But what if we become Kingdom people?
What happens when we all start to understand and believe who we really are?
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