Your Greatest Regret At The End Of Your Life Will Be The Lions You Did Not

2Sa 23:20 And Benaiah (Jehovah has built up) the son of Jehoiada,(known by Jehovah) the son of a valiant man, of Kabzeel, who had done many acts, he slew two lionlike men of Moab: he went down also and slew a lion in the midst of a pit in time of snow:

How you think about God will determine who you become. You aren’t just the byproduct of “nature” and “nurture.” You are a byproduct of your God-picture. And that internal picture of God determines how you see everything else. Most of our problems are not circumstantial. Most of our problems are perceptual. Our biggest problems can be traced back to an inadequate understanding of who God is. Our problems seem really big because our God seems really small. In fact, we reduce God to the size of our biggest problem. Tozer said a “low view of God . . . is the cause of a hundred lesser evils.”

But a person with a high view of God “is relieved of ten thousand temporal problems.”

. Lion chasers know that their best thought about God on their best day falls infinitely short of how great God really is. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Sunlight is only eight minutes old. But light from the furthest galaxy takes 12.3 billion years to get here. That distance is virtually incomprehensible! And God says that is about the distance between His thoughts and our thoughts. Your best thought about God on your best day falls 12.3 billion light-years short of how great and how good God really is. We underestimate God’s goodness and greatness by at least 12.3 billion light-years. You know what the greatest tragedy in life is? It is someone whose god gets smaller and smaller with each passing day.

Maybe it’s time to stop putting God in a box the size of your cerebral cortex. Maybe it’s time to stop creating God in your image and let Him create you in His. The more we grow, the bigger God should get. And the bigger God gets, the smaller our lions will become.

Long before God laid earth’s foundations, he had us in mind. Long, long ago he decided to adopt us into his family. He thought of everything, provided for everything we could possibly need. Translation: God planned for every contingency you might ever encounter, before the beginning of time. That is one of the most mind-boggling truths in Scripture.

2Ti_1:7 For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; (faithless timid but of power, (dunamis) and of love, and of a sound mind. Discipline self control

We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The word prepared derives from an ancient custom of sending servants ahead of a king to secure safe passage. But God turns the tables. The King of Kings goes in advance of His servants and prepares the road ahead for us. Sometimes His itinerary entails coming face to face with a lion in a pit on a snowy day. But when you find yourself in those challenging circumstances, you need to know that God is ordering your footsteps.

You can have a sense of destiny because you know that God has considered every contingency in your life, and He always has your best interest at heart. And that sense of destiny, rooted in the sovereignty of God, helps you pray the unthinkable and attempt the impossible.

Second Kings 6 records what may be the most ridiculous prayer in Scripture. A group of prophets are chopping trees near a river and one of their iron ax heads falls into the river. The prophet who lost the ax head said to Elisha: “Alas, master! For it was borrowed.” Notice the verb tense. This apprentice uses the past tense. As far as he’s concerned, this ax head is as good as gone. This apprentice regarded his loss as final. He had no expectation whatsoever that the ax head would be retrieved. I think he wanted a little mercy or a little sympathy, but he wasn’t expecting a miracle. He didn’t even have a category for what was about to happen, and there is good reason. Iron ax heads don’t float. Or do they? There is only one way to find out: Pray a ridiculous prayer! Now here is what I love about this story. If I’m Elisha, I feel bad for the guy who lost the borrowed ax head. Maybe I let him borrow mine. Maybe I drive him to the hardware store to get a new one. But it doesn’t even cross my mind to pray that it would float. But you can tell the wheels are turning in Elisha’s mind because he asks where the ax head fell in. If I’m the apprentice, I’m thinking, What difference does it make? But he shows Elisha where he lost it. Elisha cuts a stick and throws it into the water, and something happens that had probably never happened