(Opening Reading Psalms 139)
Text: I Corinthians 13:12
Prayer:
Before we get started, I don’t expect a lot of “Amens”.
I want all of us to consider the Bald Eagle. Marjorie and I saw one a couple of weeks ago hovering over our church. A beautiful site. An impressive bird in how it lives.
One of the fascinating things about the eagle is how it trains it’s young to become the graceful bird it is. The mother eagle will take it’s young to the air and actually fly with them on her back.
She will do this for a certain length of time until she is sure they have gotten the idea of flying. When the young chicks get old enough to fly on their own, the mother eagle will do something to unusual to encourage her chicks to leave the nest.
The eagle has enormous talons (feet) that will often grow to as much as 15 inches in size. With her talons, the mother eagle will begin to rearrange the comfortable nest. Before the chicks were born, the mother eagle prepared the comfort of that nest with grass and straw and her own feathers. And when the chicks were born she used their down to make it cozy and warm.
But there comes a time when the mother eagle will take those talons and break up her cozy nest.
She will throw out the feathers and the straw and the down making the nest uncomfortable for the more mature chicks to live in.
She then will take the chicks back out on a training flight to show the chicks this is to be their new home. This is where they belong. This is where the young eagles are called to live.
This is their new habitat. You would think all of the efforts of the mother eagle would be enough to convince her offspring to leave the nest. But they don’t.
Finally one day the mother eagle decides this enough of all this coddling and nurturing. Something has to change.
The mother eagle at this point will take those 15 inch talons of hers and destroy what is left of the nest.
Afterwards she will take the eaglets up for their first solo flight.
The eaglets will climb aboard their mothers back one last time.
Off they go into the wild blue yonder. The mother eagle will then shake the eaglets from off of her back forcing them to fly.
Most of the eaglets adapt to this rejection from mom and they begin to fly on their own. Most of them.
Except there usually is one that just doesn’t get it. But there isn’t any not getting it at this high of an altitude.
The mother instinctively will swoop down and catch the eaglet before he crashes into the side of a mountain. She then takes him higher yet into the thermals of air to try again.
Scientists have recorded as many as 40 to 50 times that the mother eagle and the eaglet go on with this until the eaglet finally realizes there is no returning to his old nest.
This is the same process that each of us may have to face in this series. Many of you may have tried to understand your calling before but you have found yourself in a tailspin headed into the side of a mountain. We need to keep after until we get it.
There is a great one liner in the movie “The Lion King”.
“What you have become is not what you are.”
No matter how blessed you have become in ministry something in this teaching will apply to your life.
"What you have become is not (necessarily) what you are."
We are all here because we all are still becoming what the Lord has called us to be.
Many of us are still relying on what was so comfortable in our lives (in years past) to be all that God has ever wanted us to be.
The wings of the Holy Spirit may have to take you to a higher thermal (or level) in order for you to become all that God wants you to be. We cannot always rely on the things in our spiritual life to change in one quick moment of experience.
God may have already tried that many times and you didn’t respond. But the Lord is faithful. He is not going to give up on you just because you still don’t know how to fly.
We will always be moving forward with the plan that God has for our lives. This will require a very serious commitment on our part. One of the things that will hold many of us back is the culture we live in. I am not just talking about the secular culture we live in, but our churchy culture we have grown accustom to.
We have programs we train ourselves with, but I believe the Holy Spirit has a process He is wanting for us that is much more likely to take us where the Lord is calling us to.
The spiritual events that have taken place in our lives are not “sequences of coincidences”, rather there are certain events and challenges that are part of a precise plan of the Holy Spirit.
Let’s read again our text.
We all have this perspective of ourselves that we can only see from a biased viewpoint. We think we know all there is to know about ourselves, but we seldom see ourselves as the Lord see us.
Example would be a tapestry. You only want to see the side with the pattern that is unusual or beautiful. But if you turn that tapestry over you will see yet another viewpoint that is very tangled with strings hanging everywhere with the glue…
You know that there is pattern to that mess on the other side.
We need to realize that inspite of the mess we often see of our lives that it is the Hand of Lord Who is creating an amazing life story in the spiritual realm (of our life).
We cannot see ourselves as Jesus sees us.
God’s perspective of us is different than what we see.
When I see myself I see a 16 year old boy living a life of confusion, but Jesus saved me.
God sees it differently.
Ephesians 1:4,5, 11 & 12
We don’t have to solve these passages…Calvinists or Armenians.
We have only to accept this as God’s truth. Sometimes we have to accept Him without debate or discussion. Why?
Because God is God and you are not.
That (to me) is the easiest way to understand what faith is.
He said it…I may not understand it…but so what?
I still don’t understand how Jesus saved me, but He did.
I can only see my salvation through a mirror dimly,
“poor reflection” (NIV)
Isaiah 41:4
Who has performed and done it, calling the generations from the beginning? ’I, the LORD, am the first; and with the last I am He.’"
Read Isaiah 46:9-10
The difference is like building a home. Your contractor has the blueprints to go by and he knows what has to come next, but we try to put in the windows before the walls are finished.
God is the Master Builder and He knows what He is doing.
He decided what He wanted our life to look like before He created it. God has ultimate goals for us, and we need to let Him have His way.
Read Jeremiah 1:5
Read Revelations 13:8 & 9
Before time began, God determined some important some things.
Sacrificing His own Son was one of them.
Read Psalms 139:1 thru 6; 13 thru 16
God made me the way He wanted me. The same for you. Some of you may think you need to be someone you are not inorder to be all that God has for you. That is not true, because He created your “inward parts” (NKJ) “inmost being” (NIV).
Read Philippians 3:12
Paul was quite a guy before the Lord got a hold of him.
In vs. 5 we see that he had all kinds certificates of approval, but none of that meant anything without the plan of God for his life.
The Greek word for Jesus taking “hold of me” is eagerly grasping us. He is not going to let you go unless you force your self from His hand.
There was a higher purpose for Paul’s life than being a circumcised Pharisee.
There is a higher purpose for your life than just to be a born again believer.
Paul had at this point accomplished many things for the Lord. And yet Paul decided that it was time for him to take hold (eagerly grasp) what the Lord had planned for his life.
Read Ephesians 2:10
We are Jesus’ beautifully created craftsmanship. His tapestry.
