God's Gift

Do you remember when you first received a revelation about God? And how about when you first received a revelation from God? You can point to the highlights of your walk with God based on those times of revelation. Yet they seemed to flee so quickly. God would speak something to you that would carry you for days. You thought at the time that you had made the final association between you and God. You said in your heart "This revelation is the answer I’ve been seeking for a long time." You felt a sense of security, a sense of being connected.

Your confidence and faith was at an all time high. Your future looked secure and you were confident that you would never go back to the old ways again. You were relaxed in His presence. Your worship and adoration flowed like a river. There was no labor to your commitment and obedience to God. God was so close. You had arrived to spiritual adulthood: you were now a mature and seasoned saint.

Then one morning you woke up and you felt disorganized, distant, discouraged, disillusioned and disappointed. Everything seemed different. Where did that life go? Your prayers seemed to be going nowhere; judgment seemed to follow every act of disobedience; praise was only an exercise of your will. Silence gripped your hollow soul like cancer, eating away any sense of God’s presence. You faced closed doors, unforeseen bills, obstacles and hindrances to your blessings, while others around you seemed to be flowing in blessing and success.

You perceived the world filled with false hope and judgment. You wrestled with reasoning until you were flooded with criticism and doubt. The road back to God only seemed to be an exercise in religious futility. "Why me!" Your record of sins only seemed to justify God’s right to silence. Self-hatred mixed with a longing to please the Lord perplexed and frustrated your power to make right choses.

Romans 7:15, 24 "For that which I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate … Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?"

Solomon 2:15 "Catch us the foxes, The little foxes that spoil the vines, For our vines have tender grapes.

We often lose the big battles because we were unwilling to fight the little ones.

CHANGE!!!! When all truly comes to an end, then you will know that time was meant to develop patience, frustration to develop simple faith, self- hatred to culminate a love for others and finally a turn from the naturally dependent life to a spiritually dependent life. This metamorphosis comes from losing your life for the sake of His and the renewing of your mind with a constant focus on Him.

Where did that life you received in the revelation come from in the first place? Did it come from the truth of the revelation? Was it in the expelling of ignorance and deception? Why was revelation given and then seemed to lose its effectiveness? "Is it me?" "What have I done?" "I must have caused this emptiness and silence." "I feel a sense of hopelessly falling away." Your desperate tear-covered prayers are not able to return you to that place that you lost.

Solomon 5:6 "I opened for my beloved, But my beloved had turned away and was gone. My heart leaped up when he spoke. I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer.

Silence can be devastating and damaging. It incapacitates you and squeezes you like a vise. It causes you to wonder if God really spoke to you at all. Yet you can’t stop praying; you have nowhere and no one else to turn to. You feel that somehow God will sympathize with your pain and break through the clouds of despair and deliver you. "If He loved me, wouldn’t He deliver me?" Years go by and it causes you to wonder. Oh, if you could only find the answer, if only you knew how to please Him and end this longing. In your heart you know that there is nothing more that you want than to please Him. Yet your mind and feelings seem to be your worst enemy in your pursuit of Him. You find yourself a victim to your own destructive reasoning. The more you reason the more you fall into a sense of hopelessness. Has God closed the book on your life? You begin to deduce and therefore reduce your relationship with God. "Surely God is good and Christ is my substitute." "If good life and blessing have been removed from me, then surely God has left me. He must be finished with me." There seems to be no end to this pit in which you have fallen. "Who am I that God should look down at me?" The curtain falls…there is no answer, there is no voice, there is no hope, there is no one…