What happens when we begin to get everything we need and the desires of our hearts are met in abundance? If we don't have a God-centered vision for our life, the result can be disastrous and detrimental to our walk with God. Foundational truths must be in place to ensure God is our focus and main desire. In our human way of looking at life, we see that our way of thinking about things is dumbed down to just wanting more, which puts the cart before the horse, and we end up pulling the cart ourselves. We look at things from our own perspective and try to figure out how to handle the basic things of life. Sometimes we latch onto a pure truth, and it just blesses us at our core, and that is what I want for myself and for all who call Jesus Savior and Lord.
The pendulum swing in the basic truths of our faith are sometimes wider than maybe God meant for them to be. We see someone blessed and they immediately begin to fall away from the faith and become fat and sassy! It's like the baseball player who committed so much of his effort to develop his game and during that process found great success and had a pure focus on what he was doing. He gets greedy and negotiates a new contract and after acquiring much wealth his career takes a downward turn. He loses his edge and then he falls into mediocrity! In a sense, he forgot where he came from and drifted into a life of apathy and laziness. When he loses that focus and suddenly wakes back up it seems like he has lost his talent, but that is only in his mind.
We as believers can also lose our focus in the midst of God's blessings and begin to get fat and sassy in the blessings of our heavenly Father. We get puffed up and begin to think we are the source of our strength and take a downward turn and an inward step that is dangerous and weak. We begin to think we can renegotiate our contract with God because we are "all that" and a bag of chips. Then reality hits and we think we have lost our faith for good and that God can no longer use us. That is when the reality of God's perfect grace comes into focus and we see once again that God is still wanting to use us and bless us again. Things we relied on in our walk with God like prayer, reading and studying God's Word, and following the voice of God are no longer replaced with our human way of looking at life. We come back to a close walk in our relationship with God and once again see His blessings in our life. We become lean and mean and God is once again our source of true life and living. Remember this. God didn't move. We did...
This brings us to a Psalm that explains the whole process and it is found below.
Psalm 139:1 O Lord, you have examined my heart and know everything about me.
2 You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I’m far away.
3 You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do. 4 You know what I am going to say even before I say it, Lord. 5 You go before me and follow me. You place your hand of blessing on my head. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too great for me to understand! 7 I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence! If we will admit it, we need to have God examine our heart and show us what our heart is like. Jeremiah 17:9 “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things,
and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is? So there's a chance, (ala Ace Ventura) that we can fall away because our heart has a tendency to do that very thing.
But there is a very living hope that we can hold onto that shows that God works on that heart from the inside out and when we come into His presence like an open book He will read our intentions and show us a better way to go. Fat and Sassy can be overturned by God's grace and Lean and Mean can become our heart's desire once again. I believe God's Word is very clear on what needs to happen to keep our heart, or our core, right with God and it is beyond anything we can do in our flesh. It must be done through the power of the Holy Spirit. These next few blogs will be a "come back to Jesus" type of writing. God's Word will not only show us the way but will give us step-by-step instruction. My purpose in approaching this subject is to call us back into the presence of God and back into realizing He is with us and wants to show us the way. So I will be writing and bringing God's Word and what it says about the presence of God before you to think about. I also believe God will show us all how to "guard our hearts" and keep our walk current in every way. If you feel led, go on this pilgrimage with me and see what God is showing you through His Word.
God is all about working a great work in our heart and the writer of proverbs says it like this in Proverbs 24:12 Don't excuse yourself by saying, “Look, we didn’t know.” For God understands all hearts, and he sees you. He who guards your soul knows you knew.
Time to get Lean and Mean, and deep in our walk again, or for the very first time and just see where God will lead us. Lets take this journey together!!
The Pilgrimage Continues...
David Warren
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