Words Of Encouragement For Your Day (Friday 08/03/2012)

Before You Were I Was

Job 38:3-13 Amplified Bible (AMP)

³ Gird up now your loins like a man, and I will demand of you, and you declare to Me. ⁴ Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Declare to Me, if you have and know understanding. ⁵ Who determined the measures of the earth, if you know? Or who stretched the measuring line upon it? ⁶ Upon what were the foundations of it fastened, or who laid its cornerstone, ⁷ When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? ⁸ Or who shut up the sea with doors when it broke forth and issued out of the womb?— ⁹ When I made the clouds the garment of it, and thick darkness a swaddling band for it, ¹⁰ And marked for it My appointed boundary and set bars and doors, ¹¹ And said, Thus far shall you come and no farther; and here shall your proud waves be stayed? ¹² Have you commanded the morning since your days began and caused the dawn to know its place,¹³ So that [light] may get hold of the corners of the earth and shake the wickedness [of night] out of it?

            My young adults are at that stage in lives where they think my thinking is obsolete. They think they know everything and every situation that they are encountering is new and I have never experienced the pressures, thoughts, struggles and temptations that they are now facing.  I often sit back and listen to their long drawn out explanations or dialogues about things, as Will Smith once said, “Parents just don’t understand.”  I have learned not to take it personally, but to know I too once walked where they now walk, in a ball of conceit, and self-confidence that no one understood and had a clue but me, and that the world as we know it was nothing before the present.  Many times as with my children wisdom came through the experience of hard headedness, and the consequence of disobedience. In this season no one seems to know best but us, and any other alternative or possibility is absurd or to be questioned.

            Ironically, we are this way with God.  We say we recognize who He is and that He is the creator of the universe, but yet we question His ways, and His methods.  Instead of adopting the “Father knows best,” attitude we are constantly asking why me, why now, why not me, why not now, why, why, why?  We want it to be understood that what we are going through is unique and there is no possible way that anyway to include God could possibly understand our plight, and our situation.  But the truth be told, wisdom, come through time, and if for that reason alone God is the wisest entity that exists.  But that is not the only reason, God is after all the creator of all and He is Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and Omniscient. He knew what would be before it was and He is neither confined by space, time and limitations as we are. He is limitless, as He told Moses when Moses asked who should I say sent me, and God’s reply was “I am that I am.”  But if God is all this and so much more why do we wrestle so with His will for our lives and to follow Him?  Simply put, when sin came we became self-centered instead of God-centered; we became self-absorbed instead of God immersed. We have made God like us and in many a case less of a factor than we are; when in fact He is the only factor.

            Before we were God was and still is.  We have no greater example, power and source than the Lord God Almighty. It is us who needs to remember that God’s ways are not ours and His thoughts reign so far above ours.  It is us who needs to have our thinking renewed to Christ’s not the other way around.  God has our best interest in hand and at heart; His desires for us is to be in health and prosper.  God wants us to be blessed in all that we apply our hands to do and every place our foot treads upon, but we have not come to realize who God is and that He brings more to the table than we do, and that all He asks is our obedience and our worship to come into a place and a season of favor with Him like we have never experienced.  We have nothing that really is ours but our choice to be obedience, but God has all and is worthy of everything that we can bring to Him, to include the life that He allows us to steward.  God was, is and forever will be can we say the same?