Marc Goodman

https://mggoodman.com/miscellaneous/357/

https://mggoodman.com/miscellaneous/354/

https://mggoodman.com/miscellaneous/350/

https://mggoodman.com/miscellaneous/347/

https://mggoodman.com/miscellaneous/344/

https://mggoodman.com/miscellaneous/341/

Maybe the better questions are: Do we understand how God loves us? How does He communicate His love to us?

The OT speaks about seeking His face and I believe that as we seek His face we are to open our hearts to receive what He has to give us. But I’ve seen a certain behavior in myself, and I’m sure it exists in other Christians as well. When we seek His face and He asks us to receive from Him what we perceive as “negative” we turn away, not willing to receive these things from Him because we do not want to go through uncomfortable situations. But what happens (and it has happened to me and my family a lot) when the very thing the Father wants to give to us is really for our benefit? Maybe what we are to receive will allow us to know Him in ways we could never have imagined, wouldn’t we want to receive those things from Him?

The difficulty lies in the actual participation. Once we receive the “waters of affliction” do not run or turn away and hide from Him, but open our arms, embrace the difficulty, learn from it, find joy in it and give that joy to others. The Father loves us and is willing to allow us to suffer for a little while so that He can have His way with us and allow us to see and participate in His divine family. It’s worth the effort and makes all the difference in our lives.

Unanswered prayer is one of the things that confronts me as I walk with Christ. So much doubt and fear are injected into my faith when I feel that God is not listening. But my recent experiences tells me that it is not God who is not listening but me. I had struggled for years with my faith attempting to understand why the Father would put me through so much anguish in my life, then one day I came to a better understanding of my walk with Him.

The Old Testament speaks about seeking His face but when I did this I saw a subtlety that I had not noticed before. As I turned my face toward Him and opened my hands and arms to receive whatever He had for me, it was I who turned away (and at times ran away) from Him because I did not want to receive from Him those things that I deemed negative (the positive things, for sure I accepted hungrily) and uncomfortable. But clearly He conveyed to me that those things that I saw as adversarial was His way to allow me to know Him better. So, cautiously I received from Him those circumstances that were hard and looked to Him to teach me what He knew I needed to learn to know Him better. As I began to quiet my spirit and listen to His voice within me I began a journey that took me to a place of dependency upon Him, this, I knew, was what He was attempting to do all along when He set that “mountain” squarely in my path. Where I was only seeing the obstacle in front of me, He was using it to allow me to become more and more dependent upon Him.

My son has been in trouble with the law for many years and it forced me down a path that, at first, I did not want to walk. But walk I did and instead of struggling and attempting to run away and hide, I opened my heart to the Father and received from Him the “negative” circumstances of my life. I quieted my spirit and allowed the obstacle that sat impeding my progress forward to wash over me and receive from Him, because I knew, beyond any doubt, that He loved me and only had good intentions for me. I discovered a gem within the adversity, within the difficult circumstances: a love for my son that I never knew existed. It was His love, originating in Heaven and given to those that are Christ followers. A great and awesome gift for sure.

Now I view obstacles as a way to receive from Him. I don’t run away but trust Him because I know His love for me is very real and awaiting on the other side of the mountain is a deeper dependency on Him with all its glories.

So many Christians struggle with pain from childhood but because of a lack of knowledge, carry that burden into their adult life. The pain has morphed into something difficult to understand as it expresses itself in ways that are destructive to a healthy relationship with the Father and to each other.

Romans 8:26 says: In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. But Christians have been taught by our culture that weakness is to be pushed and hidden into the background of our life. This is the destructive nature of our conforming to the patterns of this world. The Father, however, wants us to bring our weaknesses to Him so that we may be healed. Hebrew 12:12-13, James 5:16, 1Peter 2:24 all say the same thing – the Father wishes to heal us. We look at our weaknesses and wish to hide them from each other but the Father has determined that we bring these things to Him.

Too often we say it was a blessing to be raised by Christian parents but isn’t the opposite also true? Is it conceivable that the Father placed us in the exact family He desired so that our frailty would one day glorify Him with our own lips for the condition we have overcome with His healing?

Instead of a carrying a pretense of being someone we are not in order to disguise or deny our weakness/sin/pain, allow the Father to be glorified by first accepting the infirmity received in childhood and placing it in front of His throne for Him to powerfully restore us to whole health.

Why is it so important to worship with other Christians? Many believe that one can consistently worship God alone, individually and have no spiritual need to include others in this intimate act of love and adoration. Worshipping the Father is, by its very nature, a communal act. We, as individuals, can only offer a small reflection of the Father’s characteristic as we worship with others. But together, we can offer each other a much bigger (fuller) picture of the divine Father.

But thinking corporately brings up another issue. If the church is the human community that lives by divine life (Galatians 2:20) and participates in and reflects the divine fellowship (2Peter 1:4), and I am counting on my brother and sister to be a resounding board for revelations from the Lord then it is incumbent upon us all to first of all allow space for the believing priesthood and then strengthen it so that when we come together new revelations of Jesus will permeate our time together.