Believing God When You Have Other Options

Last month I read the book Is That Really You, God? by Loren Cunningham, the founder of Youth With A Mission. (YWAM).

Other books like this one have become my favorite books to read and reread: Pullinger's Chasing the Dragon, Brother Yun's The Heavenly Man, McClung's Living on the Devil's Doorstep, & Baker's Always Enough to name a few. I love these books because they are the stories of men and women of today that dare to believe God....even when all reason was stacked against them.

When I read the accounts of the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph I walk away with the same encouragement. It is good to believe God even when it is the most unreasonable thing to do.

God makes a promise to Abraham when he is 75 years old, and Abraham believes. God promises to make Abraham into a great nation through which all the nations of the earth will be blessed. Years later he speaks again, "I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth."

11 years go by and Abraham does not even have one son. In Sarai's impatience and desperation, Ishmael is born to Hagar as another option. But the promise isn't for Ishmael.

13 years latter God renews the promise. The promise of a son.

It is so hard to believe that God would choose to make a man into a great nation and wait so long to begin.

Finally at the age of 100 Abraham and Sarah have Isaac. Abraham could have had 20 sons by now ensuring the family line but instead God gives only one to whom the promise belongs. (That seems a bit unreasonable to me).

After Sarah's death Abraham has a second wife Keturah and they have 6 sons....none of these would become heir to the promise. His son Ishmael had 12 sons....none of these grandsons would become heir to the promise. Abraham had other sons of concubines (Gen 25:6) ....none of these became heir to the promise.

For 100 years Abraham believed God's promise- that he would become a great nation, that God would establish him in the land and that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through him. He believed God when God told him that He would do this through Isaac. And in the end Abraham sends away (to the east) at least  31 sons and grandsons. And "Abraham left everything he owned to Isaac (Gen 25:5)".  At the time of Abraham's death Isaac only has two 15 year old sons. It takes a lot of faith in God to do what Abraham did. 

So often faith will ask us to send away all the other 'blessings' of God in order to lay hold of the one promise he has spoken to us. And so often when God says "give everything you own to this 'one' " It seems to be the most unreasonable thing to do.

In Loren's book he tells the story of his two very wealthy aunts that offer him a place in the family business. They try to persuade him to give up his ministry nonsense in exchange for extreme wealth and prosperity. But even extreme wealth and prosperity did not persuade him to neglect the promise and vision God had put in his heart. It wasn't an easy choice. It took faith.

And I don't think it was an easy choice for Abraham to look on Ishmael and his 12 sons and know they weren't chosen by God to inherit the promise.

And I don't think it was an easy choice for Abraham to look on the 6 sons born to him in his old age to Keturah and realize they weren't chosen by God to inherit the promise either.

It definitely makes me wonder if I am willing to "send away" or walk away from the things that may be good things, may even be blessings, but fall short of the promise God has for me. Have I allowed 31 other things to crowd out the One Thing God is asking me to give everything I have towards? Do I have the faith to believe God when doing so goes against all reason?

In the last chapter of my life will someone be able to write of me, "She gave everything she owned to Jesus...the heir of the Abrahamic covenant, through whom all the peoples on earth will be blessed... The Son of God....even when reasonable people tried to talk her out of it, AND she had other options." ???

Thought this was a fitting quote to end with (now that I get what he was saying):

Character is not formed, nor are rewards earned in the absence of options. -Bill Johnson

Adam named his wife WHAT?!!!!

The fall of man. What a story. The worst day ever in human history, and there have been some extremely bad days in human history. In chapter 3 of Genesis we have the famous story of the women being deceived by the serpent, eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and well you know the rest of the story.

Something very different stood out to me as I read this just the other day. Like many, I know the story very well, and have heard and read it for years, so I wasn't really expecting to see anything new here.

But there it was in verse 20: Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.

He named his wife what???? Eve. It means life-giver or living. Wow, really. It's as though Adam just missed what happened.

Let's back up.

This women just royally screwed up. She was deceived, she ate, they hid, God finds them, God curses the serpent, increases the pains in childbearing, and curses the ground. God is barely finished cursing the ground because of their disobedience, "...for dust you are and to dust you will return."

And then Adam names his wife Eve.

What a husband! What redemption!

He could have named her: Cursed, Mother of all the dying, Wicked Lady, The Disobedient One, Deceived, The One That Screwth Up Everthingth......but he names her LIFE GIVER! Mother of all the Living!

Can you picture this?

Women says, "Wow, did you hear what God just said?"

Adam: "yep"

Women: "I really screwed things up"

Adam: "yes, we did."

women: "You know He's going to kick us out of the Garden so we can't eat from the Tree of Life and live forever."

Adam: "yeah, that's what He said."

Women: "That means we are going to die."

Adam: pause thinking, "You know what, women? I am going to name you Mother of all the Living."

Women: "Why!? Don't you think Mother of all the dying would be more accurate."

Adam: "nope, no....Mother of all the Living, Eve."

Women: "But I just ruined everything. You heard Him. The ground is cursed, we're going to have pain and suffering, AND we have to leave the garden, AND we're going to die!"

Adam: "Women you will be known as Life Giver, you will not be know as the one that brought death. When ever people speak of this incident until the end of time you will be known as the Mother of all the Living. They won't even be able to speak about this mistake without acknowledging your identity as their Mother, as their life giver. I will make sure that your identity is forever one of LIFE and not death.
Women, you shall be named Eve!"

Eve: speechless, sobing, holding her dear husband that has just redeemed her, covered her biggest mistake and has insured that her identity and legacy will be one of life, purpose and hope.

What a beautiful story of redemption squeezed into the opening chapters of the most beautiful story of redemption ever.

Why blog thru the bible?

I have always been fascinated with the Bible. At a very young age I remember pulling out the old family Bible that my parents had. You know the kind you get as a wedding gift it's big and white and in the front there are all those pages to write down your family tree, marriage dates, baptisms, births and deaths. I couldn't read then but I would flip the pages to the middle where the colorful pictures on thick paper are and I would stare at those pictures and try and figure out to which story that belonged.

Sometime later my older sister got a book of the Psalms in big print. She was already reading, and I was jealous. She received her first Bible before me also, but I lucked out because hers was in the King James version and when I finally received my first Bible it was in the easier to read NIV.  It was under the tree Christmas of 1988, and I was 7 years old and I couldn't have been more thrilled! Reading it at that age was a challenge, but I sure did try hard.

One Sunday when I was 11 years old I was sitting in the church pew as I did most Sunday mornings and my pastor, Steve Troxel was preaching on how important the Bible is to our Christian walk. He even went as far as to say that we should make it a priority to read through the Bible at least once a year. I remember sitting there thinking, "Oh my, I have had my Bible for 4 years now and I have not read through it all the way even once...I'm way behind." So I made a commitment to read it cover to cover for the first time. It actually took me 18 months to read it. I finished it the night before I left on my first of many trips to Mexico with my youth group to build houses in the colonias outside Reynosa.

Since then I have read through the Bible many times (though not once a year), and have studied it in different ways and intensities at different times. It still remains the most fascinating of all books to me. It has really been one of the constants in my life. Even in times of doubting my faith it has continued to have that same tug on me as it did when I was 4 and 7 beckoning me to open it and flip through the pages.

So just recently I got the urge to begin again and when I came across something in the first chapters of Genesis that I had never really noticed before I got the idea to blog my way through this time. A sort of public extension of my personal journaling. Who knows, maybe others will join me on the journey and be encourage.