A brother from church called me yesterday, telling me that the Lord had put on his heart to go door to door witnessing to the people in his condo complex. He wanted to get a few other people to come help him and asked if I wanted to come.
Last night’s witnessing had gone so well, and the people were attentive while we spoke to them, that I was very excited to have another chance to do it again so soon. We met together and prayed and then split up into pairs. Many people were not home. Two people shut the door in my face. And then there was the elderly man watering the grass as he puffed on his pipe. He had to be in his eighties. Two of us walked over to talk to him and when he heard the name of Jesus he became very agitated. He insisted that he had a relationship with the Lord, but when we told him the Bible said Jesus is Lord, he became angry. “He’s not my Lord. He said a lot of things, but He’s never done anything for me.” And he walked away.
Jesus is Lord. This man will one day be convinced of that. My heart has been breaking for him all day. I pray that the Holy Spirit will convince him of it before he meets Christ in eternity.
I had previously shared a bit about my experience years ago in street ministry. I’ve thought about it a lot lately, remembering the joy there was in consistently sharing this wonderful gospel. Somehow the cares of this life pulled me away from evangelism as a lifestyle. Why I have been content in this state of affairs, I cannot understand. But God, in His kindness, has rekindled within my heart the desire to make the gospel of Jesus known. For several months now I have prayed for God to send a like minded person to partner with me. And He has!
Tonight I went with my dear friend Michelle to an apartment complex close to our church. It is terribly hot and humid here in Louisiana, but there were many people outside this afternoon….just waiting to hear the gospel. So for an hour and a half Michelle and I walked around the complex and shared Christ with several individuals and several groups. It was amazing to watch as the Spirit of God began to bring conviction of sin. We felt that the Lord had led us to people who were ready to hear. As it began to get dark we made our way back to the car, filled with joy. People heard the gospel tonight.
Have you ever felt that stirring in your heart that seemed to indicate that the Lord was changing the way you thought or felt or reacted to certain things? Sometimes it can feel like your entire soul is in upheaval during the process. I have been living in this condition (more or less) for about two years.
I have wondered what it all meant. Why was I so restless? I would tell the Lord in prayer, “If You would just tell me what this is all about, and what it is that You want me to do, I’ll do it”. It was a sincere prayer that I thought I meant. However, now that He has begun showing me what all these stirrings mean I realize that I was not ready to respond. For the past two years He has been working in my heart to get me ready for this.
Not long ago I was reading the story of when Jesus called Matthew the tax collector to be His disciple. It says in Luke 5:27-28:
“After these things He went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax office. And He said to him, “Follow Me.” So he left all, rose up, and followed Him.”
My attention was drawn to what seemed to be an unusual word order in verse 28. If I was telling the story I would have written it like this: “So he rose up, left all, and followed Him.” After all, don’t you have to actually get up before you can leave something?
But I think the Holy Spirit wanted to show me what He has been doing in my heart for the past two years. Before anyone can truly rise up and follow Christ, there has to be a leaving all that happens in the heart. Our possessions possess us. The familiar gives us a sense of security. Having something of our own allows us to feel independent. And all of these things need to be stripped away. For Christ would have us be possessed by Him, and find all our security in Him, and depend upon Him. But we are so tethered to this world, that unless He loosed us from these earthly shackles we would spend all our life desiring to rise up and follow, but never actually able to do it.
He has been in no particular hurry with me. Two years seems like an eternity to me, but the Lord has been willing to take this long to do such a work in my heart. He hasn’t asked me to leave my home and family, or to sell everything I have. But I do believe now (as I did when I was first born again), that this life of mine is no longer mine, and I cannot expect that it will be lived in a way that the world calls “normal”.
There is a battle, and for too long I have watched it from afar, fearful of the danger. But I have discovered that the safety of my hiding places is only an illusion and could possibly be the most dangerous place of all.
I thank the Lord for His patience with me and for His loving kindness and for the great blessedness there is in being a follower of His. And I look forward to what lies ahead………
The word of God is a living word that speaks to my life. When I slow down and listen, He speaks to me through it. And many times He confronts and challenges me with it. Yesterday was one of those days. I was reading Luke 21:1-4:
“And He looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the treasury, and He saw also a certain poor widow putting in two mites. So He said, “Truly I say to you that this poor widow has put in more than all, for all these out of their abundance have put in offerings for God, but she out of her poverty put in all the livelihood that she had.”
It is as though Jesus is contrasting two different kinds of people. Both groups are at the temple. Both groups are giving to the Lord. But one group gives God gifts and the other gives God themselves.
The word “livelihood” caught my attention. It is the word “BIOS”, which means life. This widow gave her life. She kept back nothing for herself. She had no way to sustain herself or to meet her own needs. She was utterly cast upon the Lord. This kind of giving is uncomfortable….fearful even. But sometimes it seems that there is no alternative. The working of God upon the soul will bring us all eventually to the settled conviction that it is unreasonable and even impossible to continue with life as is. All must be laid on the altar, tossed into the treasury, placed at His feet.
Have you ever felt that way? What is one to do when it seems that God is requiring a surrender of everything comfortable and familiar for…..something unknown, unrevealed and almost certainly unexpected?
Surrender. For the servant of the Lord is there really any other answer?
I was a new believer (saved just over one year) and I was driving to work. There on the corner at the intersection of two busy streets I saw him standing. It was not a place where you would expect someone to be standing because there were no sidewalks and no foot traffic in that area. Thus he stood out. I wondered what he was doing there and as I drove nearer I could tell that he was saying something so I put my window down so I could hear. And what I heard was the sound of the gospel being preached. I was so moved that I cried the rest of the way to work.
Others saw him that morning and labeled him as some crazy man. My eyes had seen something different. I’ve never forgotten him. It was a very short time later that I had the opportunity to be involved in street ministry here in Baton Rouge and also in downtown New Orleans. It’s been over 10 years ago, but the memories of those times are precious. As I have been reflecting over this time in my life recently, one thing that I remember so clearly is that all of life was centered on Jesus, and in a very natural kind of way because we were daily sharing the gospel. There was no need to continually turn the heart back to Jesus, because it dwelt there.
I love Jesus, and I want my life to be lived before Him in such a way that He is glorified in it. Maybe it’s inherent in my personality type (or maybe just the fallen nature of man) but even such a spiritual desire has led me to selfishness. A spiritual selfishness that is always looking inward in self examination, many times to the exclusion of looking upward and outward. But God has begun to stir my heart concerning these things….and I am looking upward and looking outward and waiting to see what He will do.
Each day I check a national and a local news website to keep up on major world and state events. I’m just about to the point of leaving this practice. News coverage of recent disclosures of inappropriate behavior by some in the political world have left me reeling. Why is it necessary that there be all the racy headlines and pictures of a man who has been humiliated before the world? I hear the people in my office making jokes about it, but I have yet to find the humor.
Jeremiah 8:12 says this: “Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? No! They were not at all ashamed, nor did they know how to blush.”
We are a people that has forgotten how to blush. We glory in our shame. We feed on it and crave more. We find our entertainment in things that are a stench in the nostrils of God.
I do not exclude myself from this number. All of this has brought me face to face with the revelation that I have more of this in me than I want to admit. And I hate it.
May the Lord stir his people to a holy hatred of sin again, and a refusal to be entertained by it. Our time would be much better spent in seeking the face of God that we might be delivered from the flood of evil that is overwhelming our country. God help us all to wake up to the hour we are in.
After God created Adam and Eve, His first command to them was “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it….” But we find that the only thing they were able to produce was sin. As then, so now. We are born into this barren wasteland of sin and we add our own barrenness and our own sin to it. Inevitably there comes a day when we realize that we are barren and it becomes first troublesome, then heart-breaking and finally unbearable.
Proverbs 30:16 says there are 4 things that are not satisfied and never say “Enough”. One of those is the barren womb. I was reminded of Rachel’s agonized cry to Jacob – “Give me children or I die!”
But this is not just the cry of a barren womb. It is also the cry of the barren life. Aren’t there those moments when time seems to stand still and you see your life, so much of it foolishly squandered, and you realize that it may be that more of it is behind you than lies ahead of you……and it is barren. What a panic and mad scramble this can create as we try to dig deeply into every crevice of ourselves to find something, anything that we can offer to the Lord, only to realize that there is nothing – not so much as a crumb. Our life is barren because we are barren. We are all in the same barren condition, but we have learned how to not notice that there is no fruit from our lives. How easy it is to become content with producing that plastic wax-like fruit that is created to display in some sort of centerpiece. Nice to look at but not suitable to eat. But at least it is something we can point to as evidence that we are producing something…….
Isaiah 54:1 says “Sing, O barren, you who have not borne”. Why would a barren woman sing? Her greatest desire has been withheld from her. What cause for rejoicing could she have? But the passage continues “for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married woman, says the Lord.” We labor so diligently to be fruitful, striving, trying, working….but true fruitfulness can only come out of the admission of our utter barrenness and our dependence upon Another to produce the fruit.
What joy there is in realizing that our barrenness is not the enemy of fruitfulness, but the platform for it!
Hosea 14:8 says “Your fruit is found in Me.”
And thus we come to the conclusion of our study and where else could it conclude but in Christ Himself! John 15:4-5, 8
Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing……by this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit.
Shall we remain contented in this unnatural state of barrenness when Christ has made the promise of much fruit, and such fruit that is pleasing to the Father? Oh will we not come to that holy place of abiding communion with Jesus, where we have realized that all we can offer Him is our barrenness, but also that He is able and so very, very willing to produce lasting and God glorifying fruit in us.
Let the barren who trust in Christ rejoice, for the fruit of His life in us is guaranteed.
Hannah was a woman who seemed to suffer greatly from her barrenness. Unlike Elizabeth, we meet Hannah when she was a young woman still in her childbearing years. Not only did she endure the sorrow of her barrenness, but also the provocation of her husband’s other, fertile wife, Peninnah. Not content to merely enjoy the blessing of motherhood, Peninnah entertained herself by provoking Hannah to an intense emotional state over her barrenness. 1 Samuel 1:6 says that her adversary (Peninnah), “provoked her severely to make her fret”. Interestingly, that word fret is also translated thunder. Peninnah didn’t just make Hannah cry, she made her angry!
Regardless of what her exact emotional state was, because of what she lacked and the continual harassment of her adversary, Hannah couldn’t enjoy what was set before her. And in the house of the Lord the shame of it all must have pressed upon her even more. Her husband, Elkanah, was a Levite, which meant his sons would also serve the Lord as Levites. Peninnah had many sons to offer to the service of the Lord, but Hannah had none. Nothing to give to God. And so we come to her prayer, as she pours out her heart before God. Could I just summarize it like this – “Oh God, would you please give me something that I can offer to You?”
The soul that realizes it has nothing to offer the Lord but that which He Himself gives, is the soul that is only a hairs breadth away from great blessing.
You know the story…..she has a son whom she gives into the service of the Lord. He is Samuel, a mighty prophet used greatly by the Lord. And on that day when she brings Samuel to the house of the Lord her heart cannot contain her joy. Her prayer of triumph is recorded for us in chapter 2. One verse in particular caught my attention:
“The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken in pieces; from heaven He will thunder against them. The Lord will judge the ends of the earth.” 1 Samuel 2:10
No longer does Hannah speak of her adversary for the Lord has vindicated her. No longer does Hannah thunder from vexation because the Lord has thundered in judgment. She smiles at her enemies because she rejoices in the salvation of the Lord, for He has rendered the weapons of her enemy powerless against her.
Elizabeth – Her name means “oath of God”, yet she lived her life with a promise unkept. She was barren and now old. Where were the promised children for the righteous? Luke 1:36 tells us that Elizabeth was called barren. It was a label that had been pinned onto her for years. I can almost hear the whispered remarks of those in her town – “that’s Elizabeth…..she’s barren.”
I wonder if she ever reflected back on the fathers (and mothers) of their people. In each of those beginning generations there was barrenness, and each time God intervened to bring a child. He did it for Abraham and Sarah, for Isaac and Rebekah and for Jacob and Rachel. But Elizabeth remained barren.
Her barrenness was a reproach. Deuteronomy 7:14 says “You shall be blessed above all peoples; there shall not be a male or female barren among you or among your livestock.” Her barrenness declared her life as one that was not obedient and therefore not blessed. What a horrible stigma to bear.
Yet Luke 1:6 tells us that both Elizabeth and her husband were “righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless”. And in that moment when the Lord did wonderfully open her womb, Elizabeth said that God has “looked on me to take away my reproach among people.” Elizabeth knew that even though people may have little regard for her, that she served a God who carefully watched all the details of her life and knew the great love she had for Him that compelled her to live a life of pleasing obedience to Him even when her greatest desire was denied. She knew that she had no reproach before God even though the blessing was withheld.
Since Elizabeth was an older woman, she may not have known she was pregnant as soon as a younger woman may have known. So there could have been months that Elizabeth thought of herself as still barren, when actually there was life stirring inside her. There was a span of time when her barrenness was over yet she did not know it. But then there came a day when it could be a secret thing no longer.
And when God sent this blessing, it came in a big way. For it was only after years of bearing an unjustified reproach that she was prepared to bear the forerunner to the One who would bear the ultimate unjust reproach. Who better to teach John how to remain faithful to God and disregard the opinions of men?
Were all those years of barrenness a waste? No, they were a training ground to prepare her for her greatest assignment.
He is my Delight 