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This is the Way
I am no more confused than you are with figuring out the direction in which I should go. One thing I do know is I spend too much time trying to figure it out and not enough time just listening. I travel down this road, because it makes sense, only to fail. I travel down that road, for the same reason, only to fail again. I ask God, what the heckers is going on, but I ask in vain, because I am telling Him He is wrong and I am right. Due to my vainness I keep going. Thank the Lord for His great mercy to teach me, because today I am not as likely to keep going as I was yesterday. When I hear Him say, “This is the way, walk in it!” I stop, back up if I need too, and go His way. Pursuing the biblical direction is the Way. It is the only way. I go that way and I really want you to go that way too. It is the way to better character and it is the way to your calling.
This Way to Better Character
I assume you believe Jesus Christ. I assume you have faith. So, then I am going to assume that you want to act like Jesus in this world. 2 Peter 1:5-7 sums up the way all of us should go to a better character. Kindness and love is talked about as if it is the way to better character but according to Peter they are the last things to add to our faith. Kindness and love are external character traits that prove out that we have worked out the rest of the list (virtue, knowledge, self-control and perseverance). The way to have the character of Jesus is to work out what is going on inside you first. You need to care about the way you do life then know what you should do. You need to learn how to focus on the way you are being told to go and keep going in that direction despite what you think or what others say. You cannot help but become godly when you are following God all over the place. Treat people kind and show them the love Jesus has for them. When you go to the right or to the left, even if they the wrong way, people will be blessed by you. No matter where you are in your life, better character is always the best way to go to your calling.
This Way to Your Calling
There is only two things to do for Jesus, act like Him and follow Him. He has already been Him (2000 years ago) so you do not need to do what He did, so that has to mean, you have your own plan to follow. As you work out your character traits Jesus will reveal Himself to you along the way to do what He wants you to do. Unless you look like Jesus He will not send you into your calling. Imagine if you have an issue with people calling you by a shortened version of your name and Jesus wants you to become a public speaker of some kind. How will He send you if you lose your cool every time someone doesn’t use your full name. Boy, that will need to be worked out first, or you won’t have anyone coming to listen you speak. Your message will be – call me by my given name or hear me roar. That is not Jesus. The way to your calling is always through the way to better character. Jesus will not allow you to get to your calling any other way so don’t try to cheat, just follow Him. Do not be the thief of John 10:10 by trying to get God’s blessings by any other way but through Jesus. Your calling can be found no other way then by following Jesus. He is the only way to your calling.
Walk this Way!
Stop heading to the right and to the left to find you. Jesus is the way to the character that defines you and He is the way to your calling. Jesus cared about people because He focused on what He was doing for them and why He was doing it. He was focused on going in the way of the Father. He listened for His voice and saw what the Father was doing. His ears heard a Word behind Him saying, “This is the way to go, walk in it.” (Isaiah 30:21) He went to His calling through the Father’s character. Jesus was our example and we can do exactly what He did. We can hear the voice behind us and walk in it. The Father told us we can so we can. Follow “the Way” the Father is directing you and find yourself in the way too.
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From Pride to Qualified
You are in a pit so deep you cannot see the Light any more. Years ago, you made a decision that put you here today and pride has become your cement overshoes. Someone hurt you, and as a result every decision, since that day, has caused a shovel full of dirt to be removed under your feet. Your shoes are heavier than ever before. It is not your fault, or so you have convinced yourself, it’s their fault but they are not in this pit with you which makes you angrier. No matter, your think, you are still down in this deep cold lonely hole in the ground with cement overshoes. The darkness is blinding so even if you aren’t alone you cannot see them, but you know they are there. The darkness is closing in on you squeezing the life out of you. The sweat of fear is pouring down your brow but you can’t move your arms. Even if you could move your arms you haven’t a cloth to wipe it with. You have lost everything even the coat off your back. The cold is inside your heart. Your heart is in a deep freezer with the lid closed and locked. It wasn’t a quick freeze. It took decades of digging this pit to get down below the frost line. Every shovel full of dirt caused your heart to harden just that little bit more. Your heart is so hard with frost bite it could break into a thousand pieces with one tap of a hammer. Any word from any person is an affront to your personhood. You have become sensitive to life. It is running you down and you just don’t think you can handle one more day. You weren’t meant for this day. You constantly ask yourself, “What happened? What brought me to this point in my life?”
God is what happened! God brought you to this point in your life because He is qualifying you for the ministry He has assigned you for. Those cement overshoes you wear need to be broken off. Each swing of the hammer hurts but each swing shows you how qualified you are for the pit. Qualified to encourage your brethren. Qualified to see the need. Qualified to fulfill the need. Qualified to cry with your brethren. To be qualified you need to know you are just like me, human, broken, tattered, mistreated, lost, ignorant, prideful, human! Humility comes from knowing this. Humility comes through crying, falling, dead end streets and face plants. The world says we are qualified with higher education but God qualifies us with lower education. He lowers us down into the pit one shovel full at a time until we are qualified to come out. This is completely the opposite of the world. The world wants graduates while God wants students. When we are in the pit, we will do anything to get out including become a student of the Lord. When we become a person willing to learn, we then become qualified. There is no graduation party. There is no degree. Just you, grabbing the Hand that beckons you from deep within the pit.
Maybe Jesus didn’t have to bury you alive to qualify you. Maybe He just made you feel like you were buried. Maybe the pit was metaphorical because Jesus needed to qualify you for your ministry. Maybe you were born with cement overshoes. Whether your pit is real or metaphorical, the pit is the frat house we all belong too, with the Alpha Omega as its President. Every person who has a calling from God is an alumnus. Some of us are still living in the house of the Alpha Omega while others are the alumni helping you graduate.
When we were in the pit ourselves, we saw others at the top but we couldn’t reach their outstretched hands, as much as we wanted too. They were not qualified to pull us out only the President is qualified. He has the power to pull us out or to leave us in. He can either throw a ladder down for us to climb, or He can throw one rung at a time. He is in control of the student’s education. You will graduate from this pit when your training is complete qualifying you to walk worthy of your calling. This is your choice. Will you begin walking worthy of your calling or will the President of our frat house have to knock his pledge back down into that pit for some more training. I am fresh out of my last pit but the remnants of it still exists. It haunts me sometimes but the Lord has again made a way out of my temptation to go back into training. Each trip into the pit He gives you a way out but each trip into the pit makes me strong enough to use His way out.
Ephesians 4:1-6 has Paul beseeching us to walk worthy of the calling for which we have been called. The calling in which Jesus is making us qualified for minus the pride. The pledge is the prisoner of the Alpha Omega and He is training us to be worthy of His calling on our lives. He teaches us to be able to walk in our calling with lowliness and gentleness and with longsuffering. While we are in our training, we see others in training and others who have graduated. While we are in the pit, we commiserate with our fellow pit dwellers. We despise those we see walking freely above us. Our pride will not allow us to see they are just like us and they truly want to help us. We do a happy dance when we find out they are in their own pit of training. These emotions belong to all of us and disqualify all of us from our ministry until we check them at the door, so back into the pit we go until we are able to bear with one another in love creating unity.
Our calling cannot be done by us alone. We need each other. I am currently walking worthy of my calling on my own but one day Jesus, the Alpha Omega, will provide a woman, out from her pit, to walk beside me while we blaze a new trail, cut out by Jesus Himself. He beckons me to throw away the shovel I use for digging pits and use the tools He provides. The tools He gives me to use qualifies me for my ministry but I am the one who has too keep picking them up. I do pick up the tools and my ministry is to show you the tools Jesus has provided for you to pick up. Those tools will make you qualified for your duties under the President of this fraternity house we call the Body of Christ.
Whether you are in the pit or out, the Alpha Omega has training specific to your calling and for you alone. No one goes through the exact same training. He qualifies you for that calling in His way so you can be of service to Him. The pit happens to the best of us who are already qualified for our ministry. The pit keeps us humble and dependent on the President of our fraternity. The Christian life is filled with training and God Himself is the Teacher. Your qualifications depend on no man. As long as you are in the Body of Christ you are qualified to go out on the mission field you are assigned. As long as you use God’s tools for His work you will go from pride to qualified, I promise.
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The Unfolding!
The Pagan Unfolding
It is a day like any other in the life of a married mother of four with a full time job. She leaves the older children at home to get themselves on the bus and drops the younger ones off a day care. Leola drives the few miles to work and begins her daily duties. She is a CAD Design Leader for a company fully capable of designing everything under the sun yet they cannot seem to get along with each other nor were they working to their full potential. Designers are an eclectic group of people with different needs and different wants. It is in this job Leola discovers her quest to help people improve their life skills. The Father had not called her yet but today she knows His hand was all over this job.
This was an exciting job for her because she was gifted to lead and gifted to design products too. She has a good eye because she is a visual person and she can easily see what she is looking at from all aspects. She is a visual person even today with a good mind for detail and an eclecltic imagination. Leola spots things long before most people plus she is gifted with Administration and leadership which is how all of these God given talents all work together to make her good at what God calls her to do. Leola was thriving in this role but she was well aware of those who would challenge her authority. She was more interested in those who were willing to learn and grow in all areas of their life and stayed away from those who didn’t. She saw every day how some would be dedicated yet struggled. There was always more going on then she saw but the only thing she could do is help with their work. Leola saw her future calling unfold right in front of her eyes.
Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing. And we urge you, brethren, to recognize those who labour among you, and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love for their work’s sake. Be at peace among yourselves. (1 Thessalonians 5:11) We all have a job to do in the body of Christ, which encourages each of us to see getting done. If we watch closely we can see those who need our help and those who need our guidance to discover what it is God will have them do. We know the will of God because He lays it out for us in the Scriptures but our individual work from Him is different for each of us. It is a wonderful thing to discover it and begin walking in it. We will each go through a tremendous change in our soul so we can be the perfect person to do the perfect job given to us by God. From the time I discovered His work for me until now it has been more than a decade and more than a few horrible years of character adjustments. I want to labour among you and guide you to the calling God has for you! God did that for me and He will for you too.
The Godly Unfolding
Leola’s work every day, not only was leading, but guiding as well. She made it her personal mission to help those she worked with in all levels of their work. She was a fierce person to deal with when the designers were being verbally abused. She went to great lengths to stand for those who needed it, sometimes at her own expense. Tuesday, September 11, 2001 was a horrible day at the office. The world stood still along with all the work. Two months later her company closed its doors for lack of business and they all went their separate ways. Leola was convinced by this time that she had to learn how to help people in the workforce live better lives. There was just too much sadness and to many fights. This was the beginning of the pagan unfolding. Even when Leola is down she can be found encouraging and building people up that they would do the work God has ordained them to do. The pagan unfolding has become the Godly unfolding because He planned it this way.
There can be no doubt that God has His hand on those He has called and is going to call. Think about what He did for you while you were dead in your sin. It is hard to see when we are dead but when He brings us to life we can only come to one conclusion – He was unfolding us right before our eyes!
