Determining God's Voice, Over Our Own- Part 1

January 16, 2014

 

 

I haven't been writing all that much as of late.  As a matter of fact, I haven't been writing at all.  It's been strange and I have this perpetual fear hovering over me in the phrase of  "if you don't use it you lose it."  There is a reason writing is referred to as an exercise.  The more you indulge in your ability, the more fluid and adept you become at it.  Or, a more accurate way to describe writing would be the more you suffer through penning a creation, the stronger your ability becomes at such a task.  Many times I liken writing a piece to giving birth.  It is a mental labor, sometimes taking days or even weeks to finally push through a new creation from your mind and heart, the loins of your soul and the seat of your spirit.

 

My choice not to write has been two-fold:  the first being the most mundane and necessary, which is I have simply not had the time.  The second being the more spiritual and truer depth of my reason, which is that I felt God wanted me to take this break from what I consider one of my very few God-given abilities.  In doing so, it has created a void in my life, one of many that I feel God has been walking me through, teaching me how to truly be surrendered unto Him and completely and utterly dependent upon Him for all things, including my sense of self-worth.  The other thing I feel God wants me to understand is that with all our abilities and talents, and all our efforts in employing them, they are nothing without His leading, guiding and final authority.  They are nothing unless our motives are perpetually in line with and in total submission to His will.

 

In my walk with God these last several years, I desperately searched for His purpose for my life:  what did He create me to accomplish?  What was His appointed work for me to perform for His kingdom?  What ability did He endow unto me to exercise for His glory?  To be a mother and raise Godly children-- yes, this was one of the more obvious conclusions, but was that it?  "Just" to be a mother?  Surely not, I reasoned, surely God had more grandiose plans for my life!  From my flawed human vantage point I reasoned that surely God did not intend to "waste" my willingness to serve Him on simply raising kids and cleaning house?  At that time I still had not yet realized that being a Godly parent was the most important and spiritually valuable responsibility of all, thus I came to the next seemingly obvious conclusion from my flawed human vantage point:  since God had seen fit to give me the gift of writing and articulation (...and militant penchant for proper grammar...) then that must certainly be what I was intended to use for His glory--  to use my writing to further His kingdom.  ONWARD HO!.......and thus after years of writing here and there, mostly sarcastic humor, and mostly just in emails and communications in business and among friends I allowed myself to think that I could actually consider myself a bona-fide, legitimate "writer".  I started a blog, I wrote a book, I joined an online forum as a regular commentary participant, I created my own website, I jumped into writing with a fervor that I had never dared to muster in all my life.  I wrote, I researched, I labored, I examined, I concluded, then re-examined and re-concluded, I edited, I posted, I formatted, I re-edited and re-formatted, all the while growing in knowledge and understanding of God's Word. 

 

I started out writing about what I knew, my blog was my first real commitment to my endeavor as a legitimate "writer", and I started my book during the same time period as my blog.  My intention for the book was for it to be used as a tool for prison ministry.  At that time of my life, my heart longed to serve God but I simply didn't know how.  So, I referred to scripture and noted Jesus' Words, "For I was hungry and you gave Me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave Me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited Me in, I needed clothes and you clothed Me, I was sick and you looked after Me, I was in prison and you came to visit Me." (Matt 25:35,36)

In my reverential fear of God which inspires me to make sure I cover all the bases, the only thing in Jesus' instructions I hadn't yet attempted to obey was to minister to those in prison. So I put the book together, got all the publishing paperwork together and submitted my request for copyright permission from sources used. I never heard back from those sources and since I couldn't publish the book until I received permission from those sources to use copyrighted material, the book remained unpublished. So, I figured being an accomplished book writer wasn't what God had in store for me after all.

 

In the meantime, I continued working on my blog which was mostly about my daily life and experiences as a mother and the more notable and entertaining things I encountered in daily life. My blog reflects my Christian faith lurking somewhere beneath the surface of the earlier posts, but as time went on, my posts became more and more revealing of my spiritual transformation that was taking place. More posts about God, less posts with my tendency toward crude language and humor. However, I couldn't shake the feeling that I wasn't really accomplishing anything with my blog since it really didn't have a definitive purpose. So, as I began to question the value of my time that was being invested in my blog posts, and came to the inevitable conclusion that it was better spent elsewhere, there were less posts altogether as my blogging phase tapered to a close and my online forum commentary went into full-swing. Apparently being an accomplished blogger wasn't what God had in store for me either.

 

I spent close to three years on the online forum, which is an international forum with people from all over the world and every walk of life you can imagine, a place where Christianity is villainized and attacked with excruciating scrutiny. It was a challenge just to maintain an amicable composure while interacting, much less to offer any sort of apologetic argument for the Christian faith that wasn't immediately disregarded as ignorance or crushed with secular rebuttal. It is a place where science and science fiction are their religion and faith is a thing for the deluded and ignorant. It is a place that can suck you in whole and spit you out in pieces, a place that can fill your mind with lies or be a stark example of deception. It was in this place that I was forced to thoroughly know and understand not only why I believed the tenets of Christianity, but to also explain my reasons to people who had already made up their mind that I was wrong. My faith was challenged on a daily basis, I was persecuted for my belief on a daily basis, I was thought ignorant and foolish on a daily basis. Most Americans have absolutely no clue of what the "real world" thinks of Christianity. Most Americans are acclimated to the ever-decaying bubble of Protestant-majority America, even despite its accelerated decay as of late. You tell an American Christian that the world hates them and they have no idea of the tangible reality of the depth and breadth of that hate experienced by the rest of the world's Christians on a daily basis. It was in this place that I truly felt I was doing God's work, being a light in the darkness, a voice of truth among the shouting of lies. God had given me the ability to communicate, surely my participation in being a voice for Him in this place was within His will for me? However, as it turned out, participating on the forum was yet just another season of refinement that God allowed me to experience in my life.

 

I knew and understood that God had given me a gift.  I was certain that because God had given me this gift, then it was something that He intended to be used for Him.  But what I hadn't yet realized, was that any gift given by God, still has to be surrendered back to Him in total submission.  Which means, any dream or goal we envision in our mind to be accomplished with our gift has to constantly be held accountable to God's eternal vision for our life, and more importantly, His plan for accomplishing that vision rather than our own.  We must hold on to God with all that we are, but hold loosely everything else because it all belongs to Him anyway.  Many times we make the mistake of convincing ourselves that because God gave us a gift, as long as we try to "use it for Him" then He will bless our efforts and anything that gets in our way of using our gift for Him must certainly be an attack of the Enemy.  The only way to make the discernments between our own efforts versus God's leading or the Enemy's attacks is to have perpetual intimate fellowship with Him.  The only way to determine God's will and purpose for our life is to surrender ourselves to Him not just daily, but moment to moment.

 

I wondered, which one of my efforts was God's will for my life or were they all just wasted time?  Did I hear Him wrong, were they all my own pursuits?  Did I quit too soon, or should I have even started them in the first place?  As it turned out, they were all His will and purpose for my life, but if I had allowed myself to become consumed by pursuing my own goals of reason and stopped at one of them and never continued on to another, then I would never have grown to my next phase of refinement.  They were all His will and purpose for my life because God teaches us through our experiences, and what I learned from those experiences is that if I had chased the goal of becoming an accomplished book writer, a proficient blogger or being a battle-scarred soldier of Truth on an internet forum, then ultimately I would have limited myself to my own goals rather than God's.  If I had not held those goals loosely, then even though God's intention was for me to experience those things, my refusal to let go of them and truly surrender myself to Him would have kept me from hearing and discerning His voice over my own.  God's goals and desires for our life are more than we could ever hope to dream or imagine.  The world tells us to "never give up on your dreams", but to be a Christian means to not be like the world.

 

Does this mean that we are to be "tossed back and forth by the waves, blown here and there" as described in Ephesians 4:14?  No, James 1:16 tells us that we "must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind."  However, the context of the passage from James is the testing of our faith in which we are to ask God for wisdom, "If any of you lacks wisdom he should ask God, Who gives generously...but when he asks, he must believe and not doubt." (James 1:5)  Therefore, when we are told that we must believe and not doubt, it means that we are to believe and not doubt God's ability, promises and plans-- not our own.

 

Sometimes we become so blinded by what we have convinced ourselves and are so certain that God must want for our lives, that we lose sight that God has an eternal perspective on the matter and His way of carrying out a plan can greatly differ from our own perception and understanding.  God gives us all gifts and talents to be used for His glory and His kingdom purposes, but because we are flawed and sinful creatures, we must constantly submit to the re-examination of our motives so that we can constantly put them in submission to God's eternal perspective.   Anytime you chase something, your vision naturally becomes locked-in on whatever you are pursuing. Therefore when the world tells us to "chase our dreams", our focus becomes the dream itself and our efforts become focused on simply accomplishing that dream. That is when many Christians make the spiritually fatal mistake of losing themselves in their own motives because they lose the ability to discern God's direction and desire over their own. It is at that point in which the idea of "doing it for God" or "following His lead" is kept around in the background to justify our efforts, but in all reality we have deceived ourselves into chasing our own idea which renders all our efforts as spiritually fruitless.

 

Sometimes when we chase our dreams, we're running in the opposite direction from God. To truly hear God and to truly be led by Him, we have to die to ourselves....daily and completely.

 

"Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me, and know my anxious thoughts. See if there be any offensive way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way." (Psalm 139:23)

 

Sometimes to be led in the "everlasting way", means to leave behind what we perceive of ourselves.  To truly surrender ourselves unto God and submit ourselves to His re-examination of our motives, means that sometimes we may even have to give up on our dreams. As Christians, it's okay to give up on our dreams because as Christians, giving up our dreams does not mean we are giving up on God, nor His dreams for our life. As Christians, we are not "giving up", we are "giving over"-- we give up our dreams, so that we can realize His. As Christians, sometimes we need to "give up and give over" our dreams and goals to God so that He can examine our heart and keep our motives in line with His will. In so doing, we ultimately give God the opportunity to work out His dreams and goals for our lives. In so doing, we rightly continue making our lives about Him, not us.

 

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