When I was a child, one of the things I enjoyed was building towers made out of simple playing cards. Within a few short days of the discovery of this “new” entertainment, I was making towers of playing cards that almost reached three feet in height. I quickly learned from the mistakes in design that caused the house of cards to become unstable and collapse. Remembering the lessons learned from those days of childhood, each time the cards would fall, I saw it as an opportunity to try something different and new. Sometimes I would be able to build even taller until I ran out of cards and other times I would simply not even know where to begin rebuilding. How little did I understand in those days that God was trying to teach me an important lesson that I had forgotten until now.
We have all hit stages in our life where we look around and realize that our life is not where we thought it should have been. Maybe you are not as far along in your career as you had planned to be. Maybe you’ve gone through relationship issues that you thought you would be beyond by now. Maybe you’ve experienced something that has opened old wounds that you are having a hard time overcoming. Maybe today you are standing in the middle of the ashes of great plans or dreams you had and you simply do not know where to start. It is very easy during these times to become distracted, to become angry, and if we allow it, to become bitter towards those around us and God. It becomes easy to become disgruntled and to blame others instead of really seeking to find out what went wrong. God invites us to do just that: Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool (Isaiah 1:18).
In my own life, I have gone through a number of things that did not end the way I thought they should have. I have experienced the pains of two failed marriages and the feelings of failure, shame, inadequacy, and uncertainty that it brings. I have experienced the confusion and chaos that the loss of a job can bring when things happen beyond our control. In 2006 and since then, when things have not worked out the way I had hoped, I decided to do just that – to reason with the Lord about why things had not happened the way I had hoped. It meant for the first time in my life, of being completely candid and honest with myself. One of the worst things we can do to ourselves is to lie to ourselves; we do it quite often. With my own life, I had a tendency not to acknowledge that my sins were as bad as the sins of others. In fact, the apostle John wrote, If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us (1 John 1:8) as a warning about the condition of our own heart. Even the prophet Jeremiah warns, The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9). When we fail to see the condition of our own heart and when we fail to understand why we do what we do, we are setting ourselves up for future failures.
In 2006, as I watched everything I thought was certain in my life collapse around me, I decided to do something I had never done. I share this with you not because I am claiming to be super-spiritual or that I have all of life’s answers, because I don’t. I am simply sharing what has since worked for me. I needed to find out who I was, what my relationship was with the Lord, and for the first time in my life, to truly seek God’s face and will for my life. I decided to take a Saturday and instead of my normal routine, I left my cell phone at home and took my backpack, a few bottles of water, my knee brace, and my small Bible, and decided to hike every trail in Giant City State Park, spending the time in prayer and in solitude. I needed to hear from the Lord. As I locked my car in the parking lot, I said my first sincere prayer of the day; I asked God to open my eyes and to let me see my life as He sees my life. Folks, that prayer is not for cowards or sissies. Before I even took my first step out of the parking lot, I took a few minutes to read two chapters of Proverbs and decided that each time I took a break, I would read another two chapters. I spent the day either in Scripture, in prayer, or thinking on the verses I had read and evaluating the things in my life that had brought me to that point. Sometimes the only way we can really hear from the Lord is to remove ourselves from our daily routines and to truly seek time with the Lord.
What I began to understand for the first time in my life is the importance of seeking the will of God in all that I do. Whether it is dating, marriage, or even career choice, all too often we have a tendency to make hasty decisions based on emotions or appeal to our vanity. Solomon wrote, Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding (Proverbs 3:5) and his father, David, wrote O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is (Psalms 63:1). Both verses offer profound guidance for the Christian seeking to really understand what the Lord Jesus Christ would have them to do. This was something that I had never done; I had acted on emotional appeal, perceived appearances, promised personal benefit, and a number of other factors, but never had I made a decision solely based on guidance of the Holy Spirit. Never had I made a decision after consulting only the Lord or seeking out His will for me. I simply made the decision on my own and had the audacity to blame God when things didn’t work out the way I wanted.
Ever watch what all goes into building a house? Before the keys are even given to the owner, there are several things that must happen. First, there has to be a plan for construction, the lot has to be prepared, a foundation laid, walls and roof must be framed, and many other steps before the house is even ready for the first picture is hung by the owners. This morning, as I was reading an article about the decline in single family new home construction, I couldn’t help but to notice the picture. I began thinking about the similarities in construction and the development of our walk with the Lord Jesus Christ.
Last month, I began teaching a new Sunday School class at my church. Although I have never been to Bible college, I have served as a fill-in pastor for two Baptist and one United Methodist churches since I surrendered my life to Christ in 1988. About a year and a half ago, my pastor approached me with the idea and vision of starting a new Sunday School class. At the time, I did my best to give the Pastor every reason I could think of not to do the new class. It wasn’t because I didn’t know how to study the Bible or to create lessons and present them to a group of people. Between pastoring and teaching at the college level, those things come as almost a second nature. What made it different is that since 2006 I rededicated my life to the Lord.
