God’s ways are higher

Do blessings fall from cloudless skies?

Have you noticed that “blessings” from God are not always clothed like blessings? Sometimes when they knock on our door we do not recognize them. Like peddlers, mendicants, little girls with cookies or young men and women with glossy literature we want to turn them away, give them a scrap of our time, be polite but hesitate to open the door more than necessary to converse briefly with them and then hopefully send them on their way to our neighbors. We don’t see them as blessings, but as nuisances and interruptions in our busy day of pursuing blessings by another more familiar name. We are too caught up in crossing things off our to-do lists so we can at least feel blessed, even though we really may not be blessed.
When blessings come, they are not only unrecognizable but they are also sometimes late, out of sequence and just not what we would affix as giving value to our lives. We are much more prone to bemoan the absence of blessings in our lives in the frustration of dealing with their delays and in so doing prove ourselves more ungodly than godly and anything but deserving. It is a catch 22 as they say, a paradoxical conundrum in which the very act of seeking a blessing has a way of dredging up the ungodly side of our nature that would threaten to disqualify us from the very thing we yearn.

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Faith the Divine Exchange

“Blessed are all those who put their trust in Him.” Psalm 2:12

Faith is a divine exchange.
We exchange the visible for the invisible. (2 Corinthians 4:17-18)
We let go of what is tangible to obtain what is intangible. (2 Corinthians 4:17-18)
We forgo trust in self, in order to trust in God. (Proverbs 3:5)
We relinquish what we can control, to give God control. (Proverbs 3:6)
We surrender our will so we can live in His will. (Luke 22:42)
We give up doing it our way to do it His way. (Isaiah 55:8-9)
We renounce self-centeredness for God centeredness. (Mark 8:34-35)
We confess our unrighteousness to receive His righteousness. (1 John 1:9)
We risk temporal loss for eternal gain. (John 12:24)
We exchange the ashes of our lives for the beauty of His. (Isaiah 61:2)
We ignore what we can see to discover what He can see. (Romans 4:17)
We set aside what we know in order to learn what He knows. (Isaiah 55:8-9)
We exchange the unpredictable for the predictable. (Hebrews 11:1)
We give away what we have, so He can give us all He has. (Luke 6:38)
We forego our time-table for God’s time-table. (Ecclesiastes 3:11)
We disregard the natural to appeal to the supernatural. (Romans 4:19-20)
We silence the negative to speak the positive. (1 Thessalonians 5:18 & 2 Corinthians 4:13)

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God’s higher math

God’s math is higher than our math. In God’s economy if you want to multiply something you must first divide it and if you want to add something you must first subtract from it. It makes us scratch our heads and wonder how it works, but it just does. Consider the way in which Jesus fed the 5000 starting with just five loaves and two fishes. We are told that He divided them among the multitude and they all ate and were satisfied. When the disciples collected the leftovers, miraculously they had multiplied into twelve baskets full of bread and fish. (Mark 6:41-44) Go figure. How did He do that? The little boy who gave his lunch away ended up with a staggering return on his investment.

Walking with God requires faith and the ways of faith defy logic. (Habakkuk 2:4) God’s higher math applies to time. Think about the Sabbath principle. God created the heavens and the earth in six days and then established the seventh day as a day of rest. He then commanded His creation to incorporate a Sabbath rest in giving a day to Him, into the rhythm of our lives as well. When the demands of work and projects overwhelm us, the temptation is to skip the resting part and our time with God.

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The counter intuitive ways of God

I slept in a separate bedroom from my wife last night. No we didn’t have a fight. I am still in radioactive isolation. (See yesterday’s blog Watchout! I’m radioactive!) This was a first. Never in over 40 years of marriage have we slept in separate bedrooms under the same roof. That my friend, is a testimony to the grace of God in being the reconciler in our marriage, and not to any merit of mine.

This whole cancer thing has driven home to me like nothing before the counter intuitive ways of God. (Isaiah 55:9) See If life is short, how should I live? and Do not waste your troubles. God’s economy is the opposite of the world’s. He turns foolishness into wisdom, weakness into strength and what others despise into a treasure. (1 Corinthians 1:25-29)

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