Do we get it or Not?

1 Peter 1:7 “Pure gold put in the fire comes out of it proved pure; genuine faith put through this suffering comes out proved genuine. When Jesus wraps this all up, it's your faith, not your gold, that God will have on display as evidence of his victory.”

I love those movies where rich children are predicted as never working for anything in their lives.  The story usually goes, they do something that drives their parents to force them to have to work for something they want.  They don’t know how to do it or try to find a way out of it because they find it ridiculous.  In the end, they learn a really good lesson and they find out what they wanted wasn’t as important as they viewed it before.  Most of us have found out that when you have to buy or work for something, it becomes more important to you because you invested into it.  If you’ve noticed, God doesn’t usually just hand us faith when we ask for it; He gives us moments and opportunities to learn it.  If He just gave it to us what would we learn from that?  It wouldn’t be something we completely understood.  He wants it to be a personal feeling to us.  Something we see as important and precious; something worth working for.    

Romans 1:16 “God's way of putting people right shows up in the acts of faith, confirming what Scripture has said all along: "The person in right standing before God by trusting him really lives."

A Surprise Gooey Center

Proverbs 25:21 “If you see your enemy hungry, go buy him lunch; if he's thirsty, bring him a drink. Your generosity will surprise him with goodness, and God will look after you.”

I love gum.  I often forget to bring my own gum with me when I go somewhere.  A few of the kids at the youth center are always happy to share a piece of theirs.  One day, a visiting kid offered me a piece of gum.  I hadn’t asked for any but I thought it a nice gesture and accepted.  I really wasn’t paying attention the gum itself and popped it in my mouth.  I bit into it and was very surprised to get a gush of very strong flavored goo.  It surprised me because I wasn’t used to that in gum at all but it was a good surprise.  It’s now one of my favorite types of gum.  Most of us have grown to expect the usual behavior from people.  It doesn’t deviate too much from person to person.  When you get someone who acts differently than what you except, it’s surprising and catches your attention.  Be a good surprising burst of flavor to people.  Instead of zooming by someone who is waiting for all the cars to pass so they can cross the street, stop and let them run across.  Wave at them and smile.  You know what would surprise me??  It would surprise me if I saw someone alone in their car driving and actually smiling.  Nobody smiles when they’re alone in their car.  Their face is always grim looking.  Have a different attitude other than the one the world pushes on you.  Be that surprise gooey center and snap people out of the same old interactions.  Once you’ve captured their attention, you can direct that attention off yourself and let them know who it is that makes you so different (Jesus).

Romans 12:1 “Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”

Let Meeeeeeeeeee Do it

Hosea 13:4-6 “I'm still your God, the God who saved you out of Egypt I'm the only real God you've ever known.  I'm the one and only God who delivers.  I took care of you during the wilderness hard times, those years when you had nothing.  I took care of you, took care of all your needs, gave you everything you needed.  You were spoiled. You thought you didn't need me.  You forgot me.”

My family has the gift of being able to learn things very quickly.  We’ve gotten into the habit of believing we can just do it after only seeing it be done once.  Most of the time we can, but sometimes we can’t.  After we’ve seen it once, though, we don’t want to be shown again, we want to punt and figure the rest out on our own.  In our walk with God, just starting out, we need to be shown how everything works.  Like a baby learning how to walk and talk, we need to be taught how to begin walking and talking like Christ.  Once we get to a certain point where we’re feeling confident that we’ve got it, we set God aside and say, “Alright, I’ve got this.  I don’t need to be shown anymore.”  Not true.  There’s always something to be learning and without God guiding us and showing us how, we can screw it up.  There’s no punting after that.  When I was learning how to crochet from my twin sister, I would think I had it and then mess it up so bad I had no idea how to start over.  It would be a tangled mess and she would have to patiently undo it and show me where I went wrong and guide me back through it.  Even as a mature Christian, you will always need God guiding you, no matter how good you think you’ve got it.

1 Peter 2:3 “Now, like infants at the breast, drink deep of God's pure kindness. Then you'll grow up mature and whole in God.”