A Recess Appointment
Does anyone remember when we were children and went to school. By far the best part of the day hands-down was always recess. Sure learning was fun as was sitting next to your best friend.
It didn’t matter what kind of a day you were having, because when recess came everything got better. You forgot all about the struggles of school, the struggles of the bully on the bus, the homework and chores coming later in the day.
Those were definitely good times! Fast forward now to the times that we live in, wow is there a lot to deal with. Times have changed to say the least!
Peace, love and war were the topics then. Today the attitude is, you can find peace as long as your opinion doesn’t differ with mine!
Love is forever, as long as forever is my way and my terms. As the words Irreconcilable differences can magically clear your dating book, if you so choose!
And war has went from different countries with somewhat of a justification or reason for warring against each other, to the citizens of the same country being at war against with each other, for no apparent reason! Other than political!
Peace and love can remain, but only if the war is focused on the right entity!
We read about Gods chosen people and all of the Bible heroes we grew up learning about. People like Sampson, David, Ruth, Elijah and list goes on and on and on.
The people relied on God and took rest in the fact He was there God. The one true God, capable of anything and everything! As acknowledged many times as in the book of Daniel when the king said such.
Yes, many times Kings have been forced to both publicly, as well on their own accord, acknowledged there is only one God!
The same result was realized with the story of Shadrach Meshac and Abendigo! When the king said three men went into the furnace, but now I see the fourth man and he is in the image of God.
Yes throughout the amazing history of Israel, God in fact has showed up so many times, it is impossible to state the number of times accurately! The same could be said of God’s attentiveness in all our lives!
There has never been a time then, or a time now that God’s presence. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, or the angels He has given charge over His people, or His Son Jesus! God not been attentive to the needs and well being of His people.
Hundreds and thousands of years have passed, generations of sons and daughters and God’s commitment of care has never wavered!
Mankind has made good, bad, even terrible choices in the time span of history. Ups, downs, feast, famine, even enslavement and deliverance were experienced.
I wanna stop for just a moment and remind you. This is God’s chosen people we are talking about! Gods chosen, who have had His favor promised to them for everything they attempt!
Although there have been many different covenants, God’s people have always had a covenant with him. Which God has always been bound to and promised to keep!
As long as Israel, like all of us can say about our lives, kept their focus on God, they were successful! All the heroic things which were recorded and the triumphs Gods people overcame, those were all times they kept their focus on God!
Loosing your focus on God, always leads to the enslavement of some kind of sin! And like any other circumstance, if you set up a cot there you’re going to be staying enslaved longer, than you can imagine!
That’s what the plans of the accuser are designed to accomplish. Since the fall from heaven, every plan the accuser has ever come up with has led to the enslavement of sin and misery of people!
And in Israel’s case, they set up a cot long enough in Egypt they ending up building all the Pyramids! So many years of having their focus in the wrong direction and on the wrong entity!
Finally Moses came along and was willing to listen and be obedient to what God’s desire was for His Chosen people!
Now I say this about Gods concern for His children. Because through it all, there has never been one time. God’s focus on the children of Israel or any of God’s people has ever shifted from being chosen, to unchosen!
Joshua 1:9
9 Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.”
Moses was chosen to lead God’s people out of bondage from Egypt and into the freedom of the Promised land! I’m sure like me, you would’ve thought the choice between enslavement or freedom, would’ve been an easy one!
However the children of Israel had been sleeping to comfortably on the cot mediocrity far too long. What was once an inconvenience in the beginning, had learned to be tolerated and even become somewhat of a comfort in life!
I’m not sure how anyone, could reason slavery and sin would be a greater comfort than salvation or freedom, but they did!
The same could be said of any of us when we are under the bondage of sin in our lives! Great or small, when something takes your focus off of God and the things he has for your life, you are in bondage to whatever it is!
There has never been a lack of opportunity with God! God consistently sends the way of rescue and return. And mankind responds with rejection, or the idea there has to be another way!
Moses with God’s help took on the accuser and obtained Victory, allowing the children of Israel made their exodus from Egypt! Pharaoh decided to change his mind and recapture his loss, as the accuser does every time he loses.
And in his pursuit, when the children of Israel came to the edge of the Red Sea, they became fearful and once again longed for the cot of mediocrity and what they thought was safety! They cried Moses, why have you brought us out here to die, we would’ve been better off to have stayed in Egypt as slaves?
Even after God had provided at least 2 million miracles during their exodus from Egypt! Impossible statement? Simple mathematics reasons there were at least 2 million miracles, easily accounted for! Because 2 million people were said to have left Egypt, with all the treasures of Egypt in hand when pharaoh finally let them go!
Thankfully we know the story, of how God provided the way of escape and split the Red Sea! Allowing Israel to pass over safely on dry ground and then let the waters come back together consuming the pursuing Egyptian’s army, resulting in their death and destruction!
You might say the grand finale of miracles, God provided for them at that moment! Still to this day, the improbability of such a feat baffles great minds of intellect!
However, victory was short lived and it did not take long for the murmuring, complaining and disputing to start and not stop. Even though God would provide water and food, shelter safety and everything one could possibly imagine they would ever have need of, as they made their journey to the promised land.
Because of this, what should’ve taken only a short time ended up taking 40 years. Along the way, someone complained there’s got to be a better way. As a result the children of Israel while they had had the luxury of depending on God providing everything for them, decided they wanted to do things on their own!
They wanted to change the rules, they wanted a new covenant and a new way of doing things with a new set of rules! Rules that would allow them more freedom of choice for self effort. Instead of reliance on God as much!
In fact while God was giving Moses the 10 Commandments, the accuser had convinced the people they could and needed to make their own Gods. The very treasures God had given to them, they were fashioning into the form of a false God to replace God.
It all comes down to this. The devils plan of kill steal and destroy, never stops trying to thwart God’s plans! The flesh is weak and to often cir-comes to the accusers seduction! Thus someone allows themselves to be used by the accuser, to undermine God’s will for His people!
Now keep in mind, ANYONE armed only with only their faith in God COULD HAVE RISEN up against the attempted coup and DEFEATED THE UPRISING, BY THEIR FAITH!!
Far too many times to even imagine happening, it has happened! With their faith in God, God had delivered them time after time, miracle after miracle, through unbelievable circumstances and made them victorious!
But the ones who should’ve stood up with God, decided instead to go along with opposition and once again take the cot in the corner of mediocrity, the devil had set up for them!
The results, were very devastating! The murmurers and the complainers paid a great price and never did see the promise land. The only thing they left behind for future generations was a new covenant, which without God was doomed to fail from its inception!
Fast forward thousands of years and the story sounds all to familiar. Only the story is not about the children of Israel. But it is still about Gods Children!
We are no longer under the covenant of law, we are under the covenant of grace. And the covenant of grace is the best possible covenant there is to live under and by! Because The covenant of grace involved the Deliverance of God’s only son Jesus to introduce and fulfill a new way of relationship, centered around God’s Grace!
We have been given all the advantages of Grace, those before Jesus never realized! Jesus became our way of relationship to God, allowing us to experience the love of God on a grand scale!
With our salvation experience Jesus provided on the cross, we have a more an excellent benefit package provided by God, that is humanly inconceivable!
And once again, even though every single plan the devil has ever made has resulted in massive failure! The accuser has wrapped his tentacles around those who will believe the same lie he has constructed, of there has to be a better way.
America was founded with a constitution to govern our nation! Our constitution was inspired by God, acknowledging God and by doing so blessed by God! By the founding fathers and those even before, who came in search of a place they could worship God without persecution!
What we are feeling now, they felt all those years ago! The only difference is, they were willing to stand up and fight for the right to Worship the One True Living God!!
They did, what the children of Israel should have done! And that’s why God has blessed this great Country! That’s why America has accomplished more in a shorter time, than any other country ever has!
I believe if the devil would’ve had the ability of seeing the future, he would’ve tried so much harder to prevent America from ever happening. It has been said that over 90% of all evangelism generates from America into the rest of the world. America has been a thorn in the devils side from the very beginning! And the more America has been about the business of the kingdom of God, the more God has it been about blessing the business of America!
And that’s where we are, that’s where we stand today. We are at the cross roads of decision and mediocrity! We who are in relationship with God and walking with God, must continue to do the same and encourage everyone else to follow!
If we don’t do so, we will fall prey to the same circumstance of the children of Israel! God‘s plan is not for the demise of America, God‘s plan is to continue blessing America! God’s Plan calls for a Glorious Church and the building of such, full of precious souls living for Him!
God is looking for men and women to stand up and be counted and to continue walking with him! To continue sharing the story of the manger, all the way to the cross!
God’s prophet Moses, told the people of God’s plan to bless them all the way into and beyond the promise land! Those who allowed themselves to be swayed from the truth of the Prophets message, payed for it over and over!
All because they only were able to see in the moment of the present! We have, through the luxury of God’s recorded word, have been allowed to know, understand and realize what they missed out on!
Israel is the crown jewel of all the Middle East and the most coveted piece of real estate! Wars have been fought for it, lives have been taken in the pursuit of it! But God has never wavered one time in His promise, His children would always possess it!
Recently Gods prophets have told of Gods plans going forward in this nation and the whole world for that matter! Gods prophets tell us Revival of a billion soul harvest is underway right now and the best is yet to come!
Those who have allowed the tentacles of the accuser to wrap around themselves, say otherwise and there is a better way! Only the way they portray is darkness and evil, lacking freedom and choice. Not only for our civil freedoms, but for our spiritual freedoms as well!
The time is come to make a choice, to draw a line in the sand and stand by your decision. Do not waiver or worry about your own physical abilities, only put your trust in what God has said he will do and stand by your decision!
In the story of the children of Israel when it came time to go into the promised land, Joshua and Caleb were the only ones who said it was doable!
10 men said no to Gods plan to inhabit the Promised land, 2 men said yes to Gods Plan! 10 men were wrong, 2 were right! Those 10 men’s lack of faith, ended up costing countless numbers of God’s people to wait another 40 years to enter what God had intended for them to possess only a few days after their exodus from Egypt! Those who didn’t believe what God said was possible, died before Israel’s possession of and never did see the Promised Land!
Joshua 24:15 King James Version
15 And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.
When God gives a word of deliverance that He is going to make a way, God’s intention is not to take you all the way around the mountain! When God gives a word, God is willing to back up that word with mountain splitting, Red Sea parting, even North America continent conquering ways of achieving what He is promising, like the founders of our nation found out!!
Joshua and Caleb with a word from God, inspired a group of believers to march around the heavily fortified Stonewalled city of Jericho and flatten it with the sound waves of their voices only!
When those who God has spoken to decide to put their faith and trust in God and rest only on what he is capable of instead of what they think they can do, the outcome is unfathomable! The results too great to comprehend with our limited understanding!
Now is not the time for compromise, as far as the plans God has for his children and in the time we live! Now is the time to say “YES” as Joshua did, “as for me and my house we will serve the Lord!”
Which brings me full circle back to my original opening thoughts of recess. In the beginning of this great country, our founding fathers had no other choice but to depend on God and rest in that fact alone! It was undoable without Gods help and they knew it!
The acknowledgment of recess in gods ability or resting in gods ability, has taken the obedience of the original pilgrims who came to this great country and bestowed reward like none other to all who have ever walked in, or inhabited this Country!
God’s plans for this country and God’s will to bless this country has never one time changed! However, the accuser has changed the minds of a lot of people to think otherwise nowadays. I would remind everyone, there is Gods way and there is the path to death and destruction! There is no middle ground!
Just as we looked forward to recess as children, God wants us to have the same child like faith! For every believer, to take a lifelong recess in the rhythms of His Grace and in His ability! God doesn’t want us to be concerned with a how improbable situations may appear in the natural.
The prophet Jeremiah understood what we’re talking about and prophesied as such in his day!
Jeremiah 29:11 NKJ
11 For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. 12 Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you.
Jeremiah 32:17 NKJ
17 ‘Ah, Lord God! Behold, You have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power and outstretched arm. There is nothing too hard for You.
At Gods instruction, the prophet Jeremiah told the people of the plans God had in store for their future. And then either by doubt or unbelief by the people, Jeremiah had to remind them that nothing is too hard for God to do!
Then finally it’s as if God told Jeremiah to tell and remind the people, “HELLO!” if you’re wondering what’s taking so long for things to happen? It’s because you’re not relying on God and taking the recess of rest, God has provided and afforded you!
What God had Jeremiah tell His people, is still relevant to all of us today who have been adopted as sons and daughters, because of the Salvation message of Jesus, we have accepted!!
Jeremiah 33: 2-3 NKJ
2 “Thus says the Lord who made it, the Lord who formed it to establish it (the Lord is His name): 3 ‘Call to Me, and I will answer you, and show you great and mighty things, which you do not know.’
God’s people then and God’s people now do not have the ability to figure out impossible situations!
That’s why God instructed Jeremiah to tell the people to call upon Him for deliverance and He would show them great and mighty things which they have no idea could come about in their lives, when and if they would heed God’s suggestion!
God has spoken through His selected Prophets in every generation, including the time in which we live. Have there been false Prophets? The answer undoubtedly is yes!
Where their false prophets back in the times of Jeremiah? The answer is undoubtedly yes, also!
Were and have there been those who said they were Prophets, who retracted what they thought God had said, when the accusers accusations, opposition and the timing of deliverance were have thought to been taking too long, for the word to come to pass? The answer again, is undoubtedly yes!
But not for the ones who truly heard from God! Because they know, Gods word, once it is released never ever returns void!! God’s word never stops until it brings to fruition, God’s Desired Results!!
Many modern day prophets have spoken and stood by what Gods word and desire concerning the future for America, for His church, His people and the fact a great revival is coming!
The time now is not to question, or to settle for comprise and the ease mediocrity brings to the moment! But to hang on to God’s unchanging hand and get ready to witness the impossible become reality!
This is a 10 and 2 moment! Will you choose the way of the ten, or the faithfulness of the 2 who declared what was achievable, by what God had already promised to them!
Will you stand with what seems is the minority and hold on to the word you have been promised? Or will you choose to set up a cot in the corner and in the comfort of the house of the ten?
As for me and my house, we will choose to live in Gods house and to remain in the faithfulness of the recess of rest!!
The question is, will you?
Amen?
Let’s pray...
Fellow Contributors,
If you have found this teaching helpful, I invite you to check other resources and books I have authored available at all online bookstores! Or you can follow me on Facebook at my Charlie Roberts Author page.
Available now:
I AM, I CAN, I WILL “all about exploring God’s Grace”
MY SCANDALOUS RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD “all about exposing God’s Grace”
PARKING LOT FAITH “the realization you already have enough faith to move your Mountains”
