Growing up, I had one primary prayer request: my mother's healing from her emotional illness. As early as I can remember, this request topped every prayer list I ever made. It was the subject of every spoken and unspoken prayer request in church and Sunday school, the thing Grandma and I prayed for each time I spent the weekend with her, and what Dad prayed for every night. With this much prayer going up on her behalf, I knew one day God might just get fed up with hearing her name and answer our prayers, so we'd all move on to something else.
For most of my life, I have struggled with identifying my purpose in God's kingdom. As such I have been a doer and an achiever, always trying to get things done for God because I wanted Him to value me. This is the same issue that Martha had with Mary. If you remember the story, Jesus basically told Martha that she needed to take a lesson from Mary and chill out. Well, that's my interpretation. I knew that but I still had this drive to achieve and be identified by what I did. I was a writer, then an editor, and finally a publisher. I thought I had arrived, but then everything went south with the newspaper industry, and who was I?
What is truth? Where can we find it? I love words. So, I went to the dictionary to find out what truth means to people. It tells me that truth is five things. It is: 1. the body of real things, events, and facts; 2. the state of being the case; 3. a judgment, proposition, or idea that is true or accepted as true; 4. sincerity in action, character, and utterance; and 5. a transcendent fundamental or spiritual, God, the supreme ruler of ultimate reality. The problem we have today is that the first four definitions can be skewed as to what we want to think. Notice, what we think is not on the list of what truth is.
Is God good? We say, "Yes! Of course, He's good," until something happens that we disagree with and blame God for. The other day a woman asked me on social media why did her husband die of cancer. I told her I was sorry for her loss and then simply said death entered the world through Adam and Eve, so we will all experience natural death at some point. She said she understood that but didn't understand why her husband wasn't healed because she had faith that he would be. This is a much deeper issue than could be worked out in a few words on social media. However, asking "Why God" is never the right question. Asking Him where do I go from here or what do You want me to do now are valid questions.
Our goal in all that we do should be total transformation - spirit, soul and body. The vehicle to get us there is habit change but the enemy loves to try and throw obstacles in our way. One of the biggest obstacles I have faced recently is random health issues that have seemed to come out of nowhere, especially the last two years. For various periods of time, I have had to stop my water exercise because of surgeries, falls and knee issues. I hate it when I cannot exercise in the water because it has become a habit and without it, I feel lost.
Every person wants to change something about themselves but few have any idea how to do that. In my case, I weighed 430 pounds and wanted to lose weight. When I finally got to the point that I surrendered this issue to God, I knew I couldn't go on another diet. Diets had never worked for me because I always went back to the way I had eaten before and gained the weight back. God revealed to me through several different sources that I needed a forever lifestyle change. However, in order to change anything about myself, I realized I had to learn how to change the habits that had gotten me into the mess I was in.
As a child, I don't know how many times during church services I sang the old song, "I Surrender All." I'm not sure what I thought the words meant back then. I probably thought they were defining what I did when I accepted Jesus at age seven and gave up my life of crime as a candy thief. I stole some penny candy from the grocery store and Dad marched me back there to confess to the store manager. That's when I realized I was a sinner. I was like all the bad people the preacher yelled about every Sunday night. I needed salvation because I didn't want to go to hell.
How can we be thankful in the midst of everything going on in the world today? We've been through a lot in the last few years and I just want to stop a minute and thank God, even for the difficulties many of us have gone through. One of my favorite songs is "Through It All," written by Andre Crouch in 1971 after having purchased an engagement ring for a young woman. He was heartbroken when she announced that she was getting married, but not to him. He wrote: "I thank God for the mountains, and I thank Him for the valleys, I thank Him for the storms He brought me through; for if I'd never had a problem, I wouldn't know that He could solve them...I'd never know what faith in God could do.
Why didn't I stop eating foods that contained processed sugar when Jesus told me to stop back in 1977? Because I was stubborn and rebellious and wanted to keep at least one pleasure for myself. "Let me keep sugar, Jesus," I'd say. "It makes me happy." Of course, it also made me super, morbidly obese with a cardiac surgeon declaring I only had five years to live if I didn't lose weight. However, Romans 14:17 (AMP) clearly states, "The kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking [what one likes], but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." Notice that the kingdom is not about eating and drinking what we like. It's about righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Nothing else matters but allowing God to lead us.
Most Christians want to serve God but many miss this one big key. We can only serve God in the power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 12:1-2 tells us about how we must surrender ourselves to God to be His sacred living sacrifices and then be inwardly transformed by the Holy Spirit. After we have laid down our selfish desires and learn to lean on the Holy Spirit, then we can begin serving God. In order to do this, He starts showering us with His grace gifts so we can do the tasks He has called us to do.
Follow Up
