“The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.””
Exodus 14:14 NIV
“You need only to be still…” Why is this such an enormous challenge for us in this world? How many of us have a hard time simply being still with God? Where we excel, as members of the human race is in trying really, REEEAALLY hard to do God’s job for Him.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what a Christian life of happiness might look like, as I am surely living one to the best of my current ability.
We’ve come to believe, as a society, that we deserve happiness, and we do. However, our societal interpretation of happiness is essentially having life as we want it to be. We make the sacrifices to get the things we want and by golly we are certainly entitled to have them!
NOT!! Happiness and peace that endure will never come from anything this world has to offer. It won’t come from a relationship, a job, online shopping, money, monkeys, or marbles. It comes from the choice of absolute trust in God’s promise. It comes from participating in the beautifully symbiotic relationship between each of us and the Holy Trinity.
Each and every day, we have to choose, REPEATEDLY, to say no to our own agendas and focus our energy on trust over fear. We cannot hold on to hurts and have soft hearts at the same time.
In the same way, we can’t serve two masters. When we allow our minds to be dominated by the worldly troubles, when will we ever truly focus on God? When we are making choices to please people instead of God, who are we serving then?
Study the following passage from Galatians. Be still with it for a hot minute. Consider where in life you might be trying to live by the “letter of the law” in abiding by social expectations and checking your good deeds off like a daily “to-do” list.
“For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of them all, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? “We who are Jews by birth and not sinful Gentiles know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified. “But if, in seeking to be justified in Christ, we Jews find ourselves also among the sinners, doesn’t that mean that Christ promotes sin? Absolutely not! If I rebuild what I destroyed, then I really would be a lawbreaker. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!””
Galatians 2:12-18, 21 NIV
Love each other. Value what God brings to the table and trust it. I’ve seen firsthand the absolutely incredible things He can do when I get out of the way and rely on faith. When I feel anxious, it’s because something isn’t the way I want it to be, so I’m searching for a way to make it what I want.
Peace always comes when I let go of my own vision of how a situation should be, accepting that I don’t ever have the full picture. There are too many variables that are easily missed.
We must also realize that it will always be our instinct to believe what we want instead of considering the idea that what we believe is very tainted, thus unreliable. So where do we turn for clarity?
God.
“Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
Psalms 139:23-24 NIV
Love the Hand of God 