20 Things I Learned About God Last Year - Cary Schmidt

During a year of total change in life and ministry, God proved Himself to be more real, more powerful, more present, and more gracious than I’ve ever personally experienced. Can I share with you some things that God reminded me about Himself this year—in very real and personal ways?
1. He will pursue me relentlessly—Like Jonah if I run, or like Joshua if I obey. His pursuit of me is a good thing. I am loved, valued, and significant to Him and in Him!
2. He calls for recurring surrender—What I do for Him is up to Him. Where I do it. How I do it. How fruitful, influential, or useful I am—it’s all up to Him. Surrender let’s it all go, and surrender is not just something you do once when you are a teenager.
3. His will is my privilege—In the economy of God’s will, I am both expendable and essential. In His will, I am privileged to be essential (by His grace.) Resisting His will, expendable—for He could choose to use someone else.
4. He leads with clarity and specificity—If His leading is unclear, I’m either not listening, or it isn’t time to know more. But when it’s time to act, He knows how to make the command undeniable and crystal clear. If it’s not clear—wait, listen, and let God lead. In time, it will be crystal clear!
5. He isn’t in a hurry—His work belongs to Him. He sets the pace. He leads. He guides. He provides. Trying to push Him isn’t going to get things moving forward any faster.
6. His will sometimes leaves your head spinning—When God moves quickly and His will brings rapid transitions in your life, you feel a very real loss of control. Control is an illusion anyway. But His intervention sometimes leaves you with only one option—hold on to Him for dear life!
7. His vision and purpose for my life is sometimes not even on my radar—My plans are small. I’m spiritually short-sighted. My capacity to envision is minuscule compared to His. Which is why…
8. His plans are big, scary, and perfect—He’s a very big, very good God. His BIG plans are scary to our small, faithless, short-sighted, comfortable worlds. But His plans are also perfectly timed, perfectly fitted to you, and perfectly fulfilling.
9. He responds to and rewards faith—If we could see how He’s going to work it all out, following Him would be easy. Faith has to take the risk and then wait and see. But He always comes through!
10. He is patient with doubt, fear, hesitation, and questions—Jonah ran. Jonah was chastened. Moses refuted. Isaiah questioned. Jeremiah panicked. Joshua feared. John the baptist despaired. And Thomas doubted. But God put up with them. Why? Because they went to Him. They asked Him. God will chasten rebellion, but He will work with wrestling. The key is, bring it to HIM!
11. His calling is not something you can work through—Emotional seasons, mid-life crisis, personal struggles can all be worked through. You don’t work through a call. It’s never going away. You submit to it.
12. His wisdom is available upon request—life is an experience in peering through fog. The future is blurry at best. It seems we can never quite get all the information needed to understand a situation and make a right decision. That’s why asking for wisdom is the answer to all the fog.
13. His Word still speaks powerfully and with laser-like focus—His Holy Spirit knows how to take a portion of the living Word and surgically apply it to your heart and circumstances with unimaginable precision. The real key is to open it long enough to hear!
14. His work is not up to me—Me compared to the need is like being tossed into an ocean, given a straw, and told to “drink it all!” Not only can I not succeed. Can I even make a dent? Could I drink enough to even measure the difference? Any difference we make—ANY—is utterly and entirely HIM, not me or you.
15. His work is HIS not MINE—He can move it forward. He can pause it. He can place it into my hands. He can remove it from my hands. I’m not doing for Him. I’m laboring with Him. He sets the pace. He sets the priorities. He yields the fruit. It’s all about Him!
16. He leads us from comfort zones into useful zones—This year He has repeatedly asked me—”Do you want to be comfortable or useful?” My answer is, “Can I be both?” But He showed me that often comfort is the killer of usefulness. Faith is uncomfortable. Risk is uncomfortable. And usefulness requires BOTH.
17. In His economy, the price of disobedience is always higher than the price of obedience—Think Jonah. He loves us too much to let us run for long. And no matter how much you think obeying Him will cost, disobeying Him will cost you more!
18. He will not wrestle with me forever—Following Him is a great privilege. Fearing His will brings paralysis. He will let me wrestle with fear for the short-term, but eventually He will say, “This is the last time I’m going to ask…” Trust Him. Don’t push Him to that point.
19. He cares for my family more than I do—He doesn’t intend to hurt my family with His will. And the very thing I fear might “hurt” them could be the very thing God uses to grow and prepare them for blessings yet unknown!
20. He is with me where He leads me—His presence is all that matters. My plan, my power, my personality, my experience, my strategies, my knowledge, my abilities—they all become useless apart from His presence. The most important thing I can know is that God is with me. And if I’ve obeyed Him to where I am, then He is.
Trials, transition, and tough times are opportunities for you to see God, know God, and love God on a whole new level. Embrace them! Immerse into them! Spit on your fear and leap into His call.
He will catch you! And there’s no better place to be than right in the palm of His hands!
2 Samuel 24:14 “…let us fall now into the hand of the LORD; for his mercies are great…”

Wasted Days - Tim Trieber

Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” Jonah 1:17

One of the most well-known stories in the Bible is the tale of “Jonah and the Whale.” Even the youngest of us can give an account of the man who ran from God, was swallowed by a great big fish, and subsequently spent three gloomy days and nights in its belly. (Matthew 12:40) Familiarity with this Bible story is so remarkable that even many unbelievers know the drastic consequences of poor Jonah’s disobedience.
As we read through the book that bears his name, we may find many lessons that can be applied to our Christian lives. In the first chapter, we see Jonah’s divine call from his Lord: “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me” (Jonah 1:7). However, the man escaped to Joppa where he boarded a ship on its way to Tarshish. Because of Jonah’s disobedience, God caused a great fish to swallow him. For three days and nights, the would-be prophet was imprisoned in its belly. Perhaps this predicament appeals to your adventurous side, but I wouldn’t want to be trapped in the belly of a whale for one second, let alone three days!
God later used Jonah to see revival in the influential city of Nineveh, but one must remember that three days were wasted prior to that spiritual eclipse. Keep in mind that the city of Nineveh was so enormous that it would take the average person three days just to walk around the perimeter. Countless events—wrong deeds that could have been righted, deaths, and more—would have taken place in that busy city during Jonah’s detention in the whale’s belly. I wonder how many people died and went to hell because of his disobedience? I wonder how many lives could have been salvaged, had he obeyed the first time?

“We Christians cannot afford to waste one moment in this world”

Jesus Christ said, “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.” (John 9:4) We Christians cannot afford to waste one moment in this world. Circumstances—a harried driver unknowingly runs a red light or an otherwise healthy heart suddenly stops beating—can change in the blink of an eye; and, as a result, many step into eternity without knowing where they are headed. We do not have time to disobey God’s will—countless souls rely on “the power that worketh in us” (Ephesians 3:20).
I would hate to stand before our Lord one day, knowing that some or many of my days were wasted. How ashamed I would feel if He were to show me the souls I could have reached had I been obedient to Him. Let each of us do the best we can to make today and the days that follow not wasted days but, rather, ones full of “fruit that may abound.”