How Does God Answer Us?

Pentewan Beach.

We moved down here in 1995 with our young family -  two toddlers and a new born baby. Cornwall offered a much better family life style than we felt London did where Paul would leave home before the children were awake to get to the office and be back in the evening after they had gone to bed! The money was good, but there is more to life than that!  When Paul started working in St Austell, we were renting a property in Polgooth. It was such a lovely treat to be able to have Paul home from work by 5.30. During the summer we would be on the beach at Pentewn a few minutes later enjoying a picnic tea! 

While we were waiting for our house in Stoke Poges to sell, we were still paying the mortgage on it, as well as paying rent, all on a much reduced salary to what Paul had been earning in London, so when we heard we were just a day or two away from exchange of contracts, we were very relieved indeed!

However on the day of exchange, we had the devastating news that our buyer had pulled out! We were devastated! We were really worried about how much longer we could survive if we didn’t sell the house….how long was it going to take us to find another buyer?  We had already been here 10 months!

It was my bright idea! It was me who believed God had called us down here! Suddenly I doubted everything I thought I knew. I don’t know if you have ever experienced that, but it is certainly a confidence breaker! It is one thing to believe God has called you, but when your response to that call affects the lives of others, and when things seem to go wrong, suddenly you feel the huge burden of doubt. Oh my God - what if I got it wrong!!

I cried out to God and said, please, please let me know! What do we do now? I really need to know! Then I did something that you are not suppose to do! With my bible in my hands, I picked it up, turned it over and around, opened it up with my eyes tightly closed, I let my finger fall on the page and it landed on….Job 33:13!

What a verse to pick!...“Why does man complain that I do not answer him” is what it said! Then God told Job, “I do answer, one way or another, but not everyone is listening”. I couldn't believe it!  Are you talking to me Lord?!  That prompted me to read the whole book of Job, all 42 chapters! Not an easy book to read I must admit. It took me about 4 weeks. 

Job was a faithful man of God. His life was very blessed with good health, a good family, lots of wealth and happiness. But he couldn't understand why God allowed so many horrible things to happen to him. One disaster after another kept happening to Job until he lost his health, his wealth and his family. Absolutely everything that was dear to him was taken from him.  He suffered more than anyone. He just wanted to know why. Why did God allow this to happen to him?  If anyone had good reason to lose their faith, Job did! Yet he remained faithful to God. 

Even his closest friends kept insisting he must have done something wrong to upset God and should repent. Job didn’t think that he had.He had always been a faithful servant. He just couldn't understand why God wouldn't answer him. And that is the part of the story that my finger landed on. God replied to Job with “Why does man complain that I do not answer him when I do answer him, one way or another, but no one perceives it…”

The test for Job was that even without knowing the answers, he still had to trust God. Which is exactly what Job chose to do. What Job teaches us, certainly what I learnt from reading the book, is that God is in control. Sometimes things happen to us – things can go bad for us. It doesn't always have anything to do with what we have or haven’t done

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Sometimes when things go wrong we might feel God is getting his own back. We demand to know why? Why me Lord? I haven’t done anything to deserve this! Why me?

The message I felt God had for me in my circumstances, was that I had to trust in Him. Never mind how desperate things might seem, God is always faithful to us and so therefore we are called to remain faithful to him.  I made the choice to do that, to hang on in there and trust. The day I finished reading Job, we sold our house to a new buyer! 
When I shared all this with my husband Paul, he said, “You should have read faster!” 

So how do we hear what God is saying to us?

God speaks to us in a variety of ways. God spoke to me through his word. He can speak to us through the still small voice of calm. He can speak to us through his creation. He can speak to us through others. But, can we perceive the answer? We need to know who God is so that we can.   

In chapter 38, God begins to challenge Job. His many questions to Job are asking, “How well do you know me? And that is a question for us as well. How well do we know God? God asks, "were you there when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if YOU understand!"
"Who marked off its dimensions? Surely YOU know! Have you ever given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place?" Have you?

God was using Job’s ignorance of the earth’s natural order to reveal his ignorance of God’s moral order. If Job did not understand God’s physical creation, how could he possible understand God’s mind and character?
Well it’s not only Job’s ignorance that is being shown up here, but also our own.

 

Sometimes we forget who we are.

• We are the created. God is the creator of us and all things.  We haven’t even explored all that he has created on in this earth and under the sea, let alone the all that is out there in the universe! 
• We are the small. In trying to understand God, we judge him according to our limited knowledge and understanding. 
• We are the younger. Our knowledge, our experience is nothing compared to our God who is the elder, the wiser, the higher supreme.

It is useful to remember this for when we try to find answers.

• When we read the bible and it says it took God 6 days to create the world…some say impossible.
• When God held back the Red Sea allowing his people to escape on dry ground…some say it was a Tsunami that pulled the tide back.
• When Jesus took the two fish and five loaves to feed the 5000….some say everyone brought their own picnic.
• When Jesus died and rose again from the dead….we say …… actually, what do YOU the person reading this, what do you say?  

Because if you are inclined to find explanations to the likes of the examples mentioned above, if you struggle to accept the other stories are true as they are told, how can you believe in the resurrection?

If you think you have the answers to explain those miracles, God could ask you the same questions he asked Job: Were you there when he laid the foundations of the earth? Tell him if you understand?  “Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know these. You speak as if you do.

Who are we to say I know God well enough to say what he can or can’t do. What he has or has not done or what he will do in the future. Who are we to say these things?

How can we possibly know God’s mind and character? There is no standard or criterion higher that God himself by which to judge. Our only option is to submit to his authority and rest in his care.

Easy to say, I know! How can we be expected to blindly submit ourselves to a God whose story, from our perspective, leaves more questions than answers! 

Thankfully, God didn't leave us on our own. He sent us his son Jesus. Paul the Apostle teaches us in his letter to the Colossians that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. For in him everything was created. All things have been created through him. Jesus was there at the beginning when God laid the foundations of the earth. In everything Jesus has the supremacy of God because the fullness of God dwells in him. Everything Jesus teaches us about God, is straight from God.

For us then to know Jesus, means, we can know God. God sent him be our mediator  - our means of being reconciled to God. Jesus is the spiritual connection between us and God.

To be connected, we need to have a personal relationship with Jesus. 

He is the way the truth and the life. There is no other way to God except through him. It is through our relationship with Jesus that we can get to know God better.  

Ask him, seek him and you will find Him....the one who holds the answers to all things. 

Who is God?...

"If you can explain the Scriptures, you could say you understand God. If you think you understand God, then there is no mystery. If there is no mystery then you don't know God."

Who are we to say...

Until man has explored the full measure of God's creation and while we have more questions than we have answers, who are we to say what He has or hasn't done or what He can or can't do?

The Bigness of God

That's the problem with us being so small and God being so much bigger, higher and divine. We can't figure it out!

The Scriptures give us more than a glimpse of who He is. But we should not be surprised to find there are some gaps between our limited understanding and what has been written by man under the inspiration of such a big God. 

 

There are a lot of the 'gaps' in our understanding of the scriptures and we are often left asking 'how did he do that?' We are not content with the 'this is who I am' and 'this is what I have done'  While we are looking for a scientific explanation, we miss the point of who God is, who we are, why we are here and very importantly, how we can be re-connected back to our creator.  

Thinking Beyond the Clouds.

Professor Brian Cox's series of programmes on the planets reminded me how vast the universe is. It is so vast that we haven't even been able to discover it's full measure, let alone have the capacity to explore it!
It occurred to me, that if God made the universe and everything in it, he must be even greater, and outside of what he has created. It is no wonder we struggle to get our heads around who God is -when we can't even understand his creation on earth let alone in the universe! No wonder we needed Jesus - how else is such a big God going to engage with us.

So here's a thought.. 

Scientists only know what they can measure. Just because they can't measure heaven doesn't prove that it doesn't exist. It just means they haven't found it yet.

Unexpected Surprises of Easter

The other day I took an assembly at a local primary school.
I had a couple of eggs that I painted with chocolate and wrapped them in some foil from a Cadbury Cream egg. I told them I had some chocolate eggs laid by a chocolate chicken. When I asked how many believed me, about half the children put up their hands. Now, that is what I call living in hope! If only chocolate chickens were real! If they weren't laid by chocolate chickens, what did they think would be inside the egg. Some said cream and when I asked what sort of cream someone said caramel.
They all gasped with surprise when I broke the chocolate egg and out came a real egg! It wasn't what they expected at all.

It was a nice introduction to Palm Sunday because the people who witnessed Jesus triumphant journey into Jerusalem didn't get what they expected either!
There were different groups of people all expecting different things to happen

-       The Romans, who ruled over the Israelites, were not expecting Jesus to ride into town being hailed as a king! 

-       The religious leaders – they thought they were in charge. They were awaiting the coming of the Messiah but they had been waiting for over 400 years and when you have been waiting a long time for something, you don’t really expect it to happen…. today! They certainly didn’t believe it was Jesus!

-       Some of the people of Jerusalem and

-       The disciples believed Jesus was the Messiah sent by God to save them, but they expected the Messiah to be a powerful leader who would physically save them from their enemies and set them free from Roman rule.

The Religious leaders were getting increasingly worried and annoyed at Jesus popularity and so turned the people against him. 

By the end of the week, all those expecting Jesus to rise up against the Romans were deeply disappointed. Things were not working out as they expected.

The Romans didn't expect Jesus to be killed, the religious leaders did! But the people of Jerusalem and the disciples didn't expect that to happen. And of course, in the end what did happen caught everyone by surprise because no one expected Jesus to come alive again!

God is indeed a God of surprises! So where does that leave us?

We have the benefit of history to tell us the story. What we know from the past helps us grow in our faith because we have the experience and testimonies of others who have gone before us to encourage and inspire us.

But what about the future?
We are heading towards something that mankind has never experienced before - and that is Jesus' return. That puts us in a very similar position to those first believers who welcomed Jesus into Jerusalem. They knew and understood about as much of Jesus' first coming as we do about his second coming! Like them, we can refer to the prophecies written down in the scriptures about future events which are yet to be fulfilled. No matter how confident we may feel about the future return of Christ, as we wait expectantly, we can only imagine, with our limited knowledge and understanding, how events will eventually pan out.

What we can learn from this Easter story, is that while God may appear to be full of surprises, he is always faithful to us. His ways are higher than our ways and beyond our understanding. When we look at the extent of the universe and see how vast it is and think how little we know about that – we can’t expect to know all there is to know about our creator. But one thing we can learn from history and from the Easter story is that God is faithful to us…always.   Bible stories like this can give us the confidence to be prepared for the unexpected and encourage us to stay faithful to God, even when things appear to be going wrong, because sure as eggs, (if you will excuse the Easter pun) when Jesus' comes again we will be in for a few surprises and we don’t want to be caught out.

Note: I got the idea for the school assembly from:

http://assemblyideas.wordpress.com/2010/03/23/easter-or-palm-sunday-assembly-ideas-using-a-chocolate-egg/