Journals of the Heart

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Some lessons we learn seem to be just for that particular moment while others lessons are for a lifetime. In the case of our text, “God shall supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus,” there is a life lesson we must keep on learning. Sad to say, we have to keep on reminding ourselves that God is our supply.

If the first born is the son of special blessings, then it would behoove us to ask, what makes the first, first? Whatever the answer to that question is, it has a direct relationship to all of us today who are on this side of the cross. It is obvious this picture begins to clear up as we look at it in light of what Jesus did for us on the cross. It is not by birth that we are made first born but by rebirth.

All clay has a purpose but all clay cannot be used for fine pottery. On the potter’s wheel was written the scripture, Jer 18:4 “The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him”.

God has given every man the biological materials to be successful when those materials are given back to God for His blessing. However, success in building your spiritual house depends on how you relate to and learn from other men. The key to each man’s success has a direct relationship to his willingness to sit at the feet of and learn from the wise men that God has placed around him. It seems as though the wisdom of the Lord is like a giant puzzle and God has given a piece of that puzzle to everyone else. It’s our responsibility to retrieve each of those pieces by being a submissive learner. As we retrieve each piece and learn, we then see God’s ordained plan for our life begin to take form, thus ushering us into our destiny.

My hair is now gray and my once smooth skin is now furrowed with wrinkles that seem to shout to the whole world that I’ve been around awhile. The fact is, it doesn’t really matter what I look like on the outside as long as I know that I’m still a strapping young boy on the inside wanting to learn. If life has taught me anything, it’s taught me that I need to learn from the wisdom and experience of others.

I have noticed over the years that there is a relationship between serving others and receiving blessings. Ruth may have looked like the others while gleaning the grain from the field but she wasn’t. Without knowing it she was in fact the future Mrs. Boaz, the owner of the same field she had been gleaning. God is the only one who knows the end from the beginning. There is something about having a servant’s heart that moves the heart of God. Gleaning from the fields one day and owning the fields the next is quite a blessing.

Even though Jesus spent a lot of private time with his Father…He was never considered to be a private person. His mission was that of saving the world and this can’t be accomplished in private. The Luke passage is also interesting because it didn’t say that Jesus pre-qualified the guests who were to fill His house. He seemed to be more interested in filling His house than He was in who the guests were.

Because of the sound of God’s voice in Genesis 1:3 saying “Let there be light” the world was created. The same sound and light that approached Paul as he was on the road to Damascus one day was no less creative. As the world was in chaos before God spoke to it, so Paul’s life was in chaos before God spoke to him.

Sometimes being ‘instant in season and out of season’ is easier quoted than practiced. We usually want to know exactly what the task is before we make a commitment to do it. Being a preacher…I can tell you for sure it is easier to preach than to practice. However, after having said that, I do have many stories of where I died to self in order to do what I was sent to do.

These verses boggle the imagination because it is difficult to think that big. The thought of having dominion over God’s handiwork stretches one’s mind out of its comfort zone. We seem to be a lot more secure in a confined space surrounded with those we know and love. The Bible says in 1Cor 2:9, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”