#sufferingwithdignity
“Trust in yourself and you are doomed to disappointment; trust in your friends and they will die and leave you; trust in money and you may have it taken from you; trust in your reputation and some slanderous tongue may blast it; but trust in God, and you are never to be confounded in time or eternity.” -Dwight L. Moody-
Preface
The photograph above [Try God] was a gift that I received from a colleague of mine, Dwayne Nelson, when we both were employed at a residential treatment center in Atlanta, Georgia, and we both were youth counselors for troubled youth some 25 years ago.
I have this gift positioned on my wall in my bathroom where it is literally impossible for me to not see it even if I tried. One additional reality about this plaque is that it offers different meanings or more specifically, the expression, Try God can be expressed and or experience differently depending upon what is impacting my life at the time or my attitude!
Try God
As an example, first, if I find myself acting and or functioning independently from God’s will and purpose for my life, this quote is a timely reminder for me to never lose sight and connection of my first and most essential love for my present and eternal fate, that being, God’s unconditional Agape Love that is granted on my account daily.
As I thought about unbelievers and souls who are living their entire lives on their own strength, wisdom, and abilities or those who perhaps unbeknown to their knowledge, are controlled by this secular culture, gives this expression to Try God an entirely new meaning!
For this population of people, to Try God is a worthwhile non-secular option that will invite spiritual benefits and blessings into their lives like never before! To Try God when everything and everyone in their life has failed you are not only just smart, but it is really God’s very best will for each human being.
Secondly, when I reflect, read or discover God’s vast and plentiful soul-care promises and provisions that are given by Him on my behalf as His heir, I then will plead my case before Him night and day, testing Him while wrestling with Him in an effort for Him to manifest, all of His promises and covenants in my living presently.
The obvious rationale for this most important spiritual disciplines [prayer, fasting, reading and being still before God], not only is for my benefit, but it is also for those individuals that share my life in The Messiah with horizontally. They too will become partakers of His blessings that come into my life due to my vertical intimate relationship with The Father.
No Greater lesson that God has taught and prepared me for than this matter of blessing others by giving freely, unconditionally as opposed to giving out of obligation!
For me, the final meaning of to Try God is perhaps the greatest, in that over the last few years of walking with The Master, I have committed to living my life as an experiment under God guidance, as He lives within me, empowering my life to be an actual living parchment testimony that, moment by moment, day by day, He proves through my life, that He does exist in this present godless culture!
Such a willful desire that I have toward my Lord God is directly related to my response to His concern for my own welfare and His endless love that comes from the Kingdom of God and not of this world.
It is my prayer that both, the believers as is the case of the non-believers, to lean not upon one’s own wisdom and understanding. This very special gift of life will only happen or really make any sense until human beings learn to acknowledge and live-out-loud God’s presence and purpose in our lives on earth.
Ways that God Exist
“For I know the thoughts that I think towards you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil: to give you an expected end.” Jeremiah 29:11
For I know the thoughts that I think towards you, saith The Lord
Beloved of God, it is initially not within us that we seek after God. For it is God in His infinite wisdom throughout all generations that God has within His heart, directed each divine purpose and resolution for each nation, each ethnic group, each living soul for all eternity.
‘as it is written; none is righteous, no not one; no one understands, no one seeks for God.’ Romans 3:10-11
This is not so with The Heavenly Father!
For it is because of His foreknowledge of our sinful nature that He has committed to take up many thoughts in the free offering of His love, grace, and mercy in the response concerning our proclivity toward sin.
For it is God who seeks after us, and not man after God!
What a most wonderful and great gift for all of humanity than our ability to become partakers of all of the Kingdom of God’s spiritual blessings that are found only in The Messiah! Please consider these spiritual blessings below:
Redemption [ It is by His divine design, that we have torn away from the law of sin and death, and are once again, returned to our original owner, who is our Heavenly Father.]
Salvation [Because each of us is helpless in this present tense and under the eyes of God and Satan, God has delivered us, granting us preservation, safety from the molestation of sin and our assigned enemies. We are also blessed with the eternal safety of our soul-care condition and future destination.]
A Calling [We are invited after faithfully embracing the gift of eternal salvation, to take on our own cross as we are to forge as a life-long learner, dying of our old nature while forging a new identity like The Master by becoming His Disciple. As a follower of the Messiah, we are forced to contend with two kingdoms, the kingdom of secular and the Kingdom of Heaven.]
An Adopted Heir in this life and the eternal life to come. No better explanation of an adopted heir than James 1:9.
http://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/gills-exposition-of-the-bible/james-1-9.html
thoughts of peace, and not of evil:
The Father’s commitment of shalom on behalf of all of His people is our blessed assurance that amidst all the evil, wars, hate, violence, pain, and physical death that we will experience in our temporal status, yet, it is by His mighty hand, that we are granted His peace.
In the single, horrific torture and execution of Jesus from Nazareth on the Cross, not only brings about soul salvation but His suffering also provides each follower of The Master, the much needed inward spiritual peace of our mind, spirit, and a clean conscience.
How true and much needed is that in His granting His followers His shalom as we are called to dwell in the very shadow of death, while being spiritually commissioned to engage on behalf of His Kingdom while comingling with an ever-growing evil generation!
For within our faithful daily warring between the secular and the spiritual kingdoms, [not to mention, our moment by moment warring with self], God will permit evil to befall each of us as was the case of The Master.
It is so and unavoidable, accordingly to His divine plan, for such realities is meant for our good, as it does spiritual regenerative work within each of us as we live-out loud, our Faith.
To Give You An Expected End
Where ever a living soul finds themselves in this matter to Try God, our physical existence one day will come to an end. On one spectrum of our discussion is the multi-generational promise that God has promised and granted to those who seek after and respond to His divine offerings.
The other reality is our human will to either respond positively or reject His loving offering toward our present and eternal soul-care welfare. It is the Creator’s desire that each living soul will positively encounter Him in their respective lives in that of His sovereign will is governed by His promises to granting that their lives were not a failure, nor did they live their gift of life in Vain.
Only in The Anointed One From on High
To Try God starts and eternally continues in The Messiah, in whom God’s supreme wisdom supernaturally endows each follower this absolute truth; that it is He who is the Alpha and Omega, our very beginning and our ending of all things seen and unseen.
Beloved of God, let me deeply encourage each of you to be challenged by God’s spirit to grant you the noble desire to live your very life, before this evil age, as His redeemed spiritual experiment that is each day, proving that He is who He says that He is for all eternity!
There really is no Greater honor nor purpose than being called a spiritual regenerated human servant, who willfully yields themselves unto the world as a “living sacrifice unto the Lord our God!” Amen.
To Try God enables all things in creation, in The Holy Scriptures to be very real and obtainable now, for the very ones that The Father directed and willed them for, before the foundation of this world, in Christ and for His beloved community of The Called-Out Ones.
To Know God’s will is life’s Greatest Treasure;
To do God’s will is life’s Greatest Pleasure. -Anonymous
Grace and Peace
Brother Alonzo