All I can do therefore is to “abide in Him,” and He does all the rest. And this satisfies me in my very soul. I am filled with Jesus and therefore I am filled with righteousness! I no longer frustrate the grace of God. I only desire that grace may have free course in me and be hindered by no legalism. I can leave all in His care!! And doing this, I have no anxieties. My cares, my temptations, my growth, my service, my daily life moment by moment I commit to Him, and He accepts the trust… Oh the rest and calm of a life like this! One with Christ—abiding in Him—what more can the soul desire? Great joy and manifest and outpoured blessings would be precious it is true, but Jesus is enough without these, and I know He will give me just what He sees best. I only want to be like clay in His hands, to be used by Him or laid aside, just as He pleases. How can I have any will but His whole desire for me. He is such a glorious Saviour? How marvelously He has been working in me to will and to do of His good pleasure. When I look back at my experience and at all the darkness of my former life, I am lost in wonder at His marvelous working.
—Hannah Whitall Smith’s journal, March 12, 1867
But you must remember, beloved, the predictions of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ. They said to you, “In the last time there will be scoffers, following their own ungodly passions.” It is these who cause divisions, worldly people, devoid of the Spirit. But you, beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. And have mercy on those who doubt; save others by snatching them out of the fire; to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh. Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of His glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.
~ Jude 17-25
Oh beloved, it is true. We live in a world that wants to divide, isolate and crush us beneath its weight. And apart from Him, the world is able to do just that. If we look away from Him and begin to try to handle the immense pressures and wedges of this life, we are doomed to a miserable experience.
There will be places He sends us where our ability to even process the range of stimuli is way beyond our abilities. We may be immersed in cultures and situations we cannot even understand.
Our relationships may be strained by the normal circumstances of money and time and logistics and distance.
Our health may find its limit as the the toxicity of the world in which we live pours into our pores.
Our mental capacity becomes strained by the torrential data flow inherent in our culture of information.
Our human willingness to help gets stained by people who would take advantage of the Love He has poured into and through us.
Our sense of any sense of well-being wains as we see the culture around us in free-fall. The false hope of the golden arches and new wave music simply do not even come close to anything resembling a solution to the problems we face in both the East and the West.
And as we look away from Him, and towards the problems instead, our sense of His presence – and the diamond-hard strength, born of joy – seem to evaporate.
Oh but can we see it? Can we see that the consistency of our relationship with Him is from Him and not from us? So yeah, this stuff is absolutely going to come into our lives. And to deny that stressors are not there is, to put it simply, goofy.
But there is an even goofier goofiness we simply must avoid. We have to run like a man running away from a burning building, from the temptation to believe that the problems in our lives can break G_d’s wonderful plans for us. The rogue waves of our lives are real, but they are finite – no matter how big they are. And we, beloved, are supplied with grace from an Infinite Source.
There is only one thing that can throttle His grace moving in our lives.
Us.
When we start moving in our own strength, we can in no way stop His movements, but we create a spiritual turbulence that is akin to a baby squirming in his or her daddy’s arms. The dad is not going to drop the precious child, and will eventually calm the one who is fidgeting. But, what happens in moments like these, is that the comfort and nourishment of resting in dad’s arms is delayed – and may even convince the child (in its foolishness) that the dad is the source of the discomfort in the first place.
What if we stopped squirming for just a moment, and looked up into His beautiful eyes? Yeah, we know the answer.
Can this fool of a writer preach for a moment? Look to Him dear reader. He has you. The waves may seem huge – and He still has you. The wave will pass, and He will remain.
