December 31, 2007
Call Me
My friend teaches an adult Sunday School class for the mentally challenged. She loves her class, but her husband is sometimes resentful of the extra time spent on her students outside the classroom. “I’ve been doing this class for five years and I’m not going to give it up until the Lord takes it away from me.” I like her spirit. Personally, I’d rather have the pain of the Lord prying my fingers off of a ministry, than having the regret of giving up on the Lord’s work prematurely because of the insistence of others. However, I do think when the Lord takes a ministry away from us it would help if He’s tell us to, ‘take two aspirin and call Me in the morning.’
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Dec 31, 2007
Whose am I
Gail;
-----I never did understand this stuff of, “The Lord takes it away from me,” “The Lord gave it to me,” “The Lord told me…” “The Lord gave me a vision.” When I am trying to do something and it just is not working out, I have a tendency to think first about what skill I lack, or what circumstantial happenstance may have arose to hinder me, and how I should deal with whatever it might be. I have always been reluctant to think that the Devil is hindering me or not, or the Lord is closing a door or opening one, or some other mystical idea. I think it is fortunate for me that I do not regard the events and obligations of my life this way, because otherwise, everything in it has been difficult enough to figure the Lord is just against anything I do. Though I carry that feeling, sometimes predominantly, I continually remind myself that the Lord is for those who call upon Him, which I do. Therefore the issue really becomes twofold, how much of what I am doing is really for Him (and therefore worth the effort), and what I am going to need to get it done.
-----So when I read of your friend’s attitude, “…I’m not going to give it up until the Lord takes it away from me…“ I kind of cringed a bit. Paul laid a decision before us in I Corinthians 7:32-34, “I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord's affairs--how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world--how he can please his wife--and his interests are divided. An unmarried woman or virgin is concerned about the Lord's affairs: Her aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit. But a married woman is concerned about the affairs of this world--how she can please her husband.” There is a certain amount of devotion each spouse owes to the other, for God has arranged the marriage to be a pictorial testimony of a person’s relationship with Him. In Ephesians 5, Paul tells the wife to submit to the husband as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. It is a deep and fundamental principle, yet it is more than somewhat ignored, it is even outright impugned in our society. But Paul’s command to the husband is even more ignored and impugned. Paul tells him to love his wife as Christ loved the church, giving Himself up for it to make it clean, holy, and blameless. This is a far cry from taking advantage of the wife’s submission to steer her into the husbands own selfish ambitions and desires. Rather, the husband takes advantage of the wife’s submission to steer her towards the things she truly needs in her life, feeding and caring for her, helping her to achieve the ambitions that give her honorable fulfillment before the Lord. In this way, they operate as a unit, a body, each in submission to the other, neither independent of the other, each for the other, both together for the Lord. If we desired to be independently responsible towards the Lord, then we should not be married. Then we could be concerned about the Lord’s affairs entirely, having no concern for a spouse.
-----I view my marriage to Char as my service to the Lord. I try hard in it, and I see my failures more easily than I see my accomplishments. But the more I get to know Char, the more I understand what pleases her and the more I can try to achieve that. I also try to know my Lord more, because she is His. And the more I can influence her fulfillments to be towards His interests as she understands them, then the better both of them are served by me. None of us are independent of one another, not since Char and I exchanged those vows in His presence. So we no longer have the option to think of ourselves as concerned about the Lord‘s affairs only. We have each become a part of the other’s thinking. What is important to Char is important to me, if indeed it is important to the Lord, then I try to accommodate it. That requires understanding and learning, discernment and decisions, commitment and effort, more than fleeces and the closed-door/open-door mystique of circumstances.
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