God is Watching to See What You Will Do
Will you wait or will you act?
God is watching to see what you will do when it seems as if he is away.
Faith is easy when he is near.
But what will you do when your human love cannot match the faith you have when he’s around?
Will you wait?
Will you stop?
Will you hesitate?
Or will you abandon all that you know and throw yourself into the little you do remember, and do so with wild faith?
Jump!
And crush the enemy with your faith!
You need not have perfect faith!
That’s not what God is looking for!
He’s not looking for 100% perfect love from you.
He’s looking for 100% of your broken love.
He’s waiting for you to throw yourself into him without thinking twice.
Why?
Because that’s what he does for you.
God doesn’t want to see you doing everything right, planning everything right, organizing everything right, or thinking the right things, saying the right things, and making the right decisions.
He literally does not care about that.
He wants to see if you love him faithfully enough to act when you don’t know what is going on or why it is happening.
He wants to see if you love him enough to trust him.
He wants to see if you’ll throw caution to the wind and jump into the unknown for him.
He wants to see if you trust him to catch you.
He wants to see how long you’ll wait for him to come save you.
He wants to see if you really love him.
He created us to love him, but he won’t force us to do so.
He wants to see a full response to his crazy love with our crazy love.
His heart beats for us alone.
Our hearts must beat for him alone.
So when he is far from us and our faith is weak, we must not despair.
He’s simply waiting to see how we will react.
If our faith seems small to us, that doesn’t matter to him.
We must only employ 100% of the small faith we have for him.
He does not want to see us perform miracles.
In fact, we can’t work any miracles without him.
He wants to see us love him with a fiery burning passion.
Throw away all of your standards.
Throw away all that you know.
Throw away everything that you’ve assumed in the past.
Throw away all expectations, all norms, all opinions, all ideas.
Throw it all away.
And instead, throw yourself into him.
Throw your fears into him without worrying about doing the right thing, doing what’s right and wrong, being the best.
The only ambition you should have is the ambition to love him and honor him in a way that gives all of yourself.
Throw yourself into him by honoring him in a way that goes deep inside of your soul, in a way that travels into your fears, that travels into your insecurities and acts from there.
Gift him a slice of your soul, and do not care what the world says, or thinks, because the world does not understand the love between God and his child.
Because God came into the world as light and the darkness did not understand it.
Gift to him from that place of perspiration, that place of palpitation, that place of uncertainty, that place of fear.
Gift to him from there.
Explore him.
Imagine what he might do with all of your flaws and might’s.
Imagine what he might do with the deepest pains that you have.
Imagine what he might accomplish with all of your history.
Sit inside the height of your flaws, the height of your being, and give it all to him with the wild and crazy hope that he will do something so great and so unpredictable and so stupendous, that the entire world will be lit on fire.
Gamble on him you must gamble on him.
He will not disappoint you.
Fight for your life.
For your soul.
Fight for the redemption of your being.
Do the thing those around you are terrified of doing.
Give all of yourself to the idea of a God that will not let you fall.
Give yourself to him.
Give yourself to him so that you may come alive.
Give yourself to him so that you can see who you were made to be.
Do the thing with all those around you are terrified of doing.
Commit yourself to believing that God is real, and that he knows the deepest parts of you and seeks to pull yourself to him.
Submit to the great act of courage when you give all of your knowing, all of your thinking, all of your identity to a God which you are not sure is real, but you suspect must be real, for it is this act of courage, this act of faith that can reveal God.
Cry out to him.
Give him all that you are.
Tell him you want to know him, to love him, to be with him.
Tell him that you’re afraid.
Tell him that you’re afraid but you want him anyway.
Tell him that you feel as if your heart is being squeezed to the point of death and you need him.
Tell him that you feel your sins and your flaws are too great.
Tell him that you feel you’re too broken.
Tell him, tell him, tell him.
Tell him who you think you are from the bottom of your heart.
You must tell him.
Be honest with him to the best that you can be.
You must be honest with him.
It is those who are most steeped in the darkness of sin that are most entitled to the mercy of God.
Don’t settle for who you are.
Don’t settle for death.
Don’t settle for the meager, minuscule, pathetic standards of this world.
Listen instead to the deep cry in the inner chambers of your heart, the cry that knows that there must be something more, the cry that knows that we were created for something greater.
Do not settle for the standards of the world, because the standards of the world are death.
The world does not understand God.
God came in order to separate us from our attachments to this world.
He came to divide us from our dark tendencies, our habits, our norms.
He came to release us from the slavery of our sins, and to open up our hearts and our souls to true life.
God came down to wage war for our souls.
He came not to bring peace but to wage war.
He came to give us life and to give it abundantly.
He came down to fight valiantly and wildly and zealously for us.
He came down to destroy the evil in us.
And he will stop at nothing to save us.
He gave his life for us, in that single ultimate sacrifice.
But he has not stopped there.
He continues to be at our side, every moment of every day, intimately planning and conspiring to uplift our hearts and our souls, and separate us from our darkness and bring us to everlasting life.
He doesn’t want us to wait to head for heaven to see what that life is like.
He wants us to see what that life is like now.
He wants us to engage with him so that we can see the doors he has opened for us and the heavenly life that we can live with him here.
His sacrifice purchased the opportunity to live in a constant intimate relationship with God and we cannot forsake that opportunity.
We cannot lie around and wait and be content to have good jobs and healthy bodies, and good relations with our friends and our families and our acquaintances, and to say to ourselves, “Alas, this has been a good life.”
This is the culture of death, and it must be fought with rage and fury and zealotry and mercilessness.
We must not cave in to a way of life that is so small that it is death in comparison to the infinite glory that is a relationship with God.
We must not settle.
We must not let it overtake us.
We must not become complacent.
We must not surrender ourselves to even the smallest of sins, because even the smallest of sins can overtake us and overwhelm us, and make us forget who God is.
We must always operate from the perspective of “standing next to God” and commuting with him, asking him what he thinks, what to do here, how to proceed.
Ask him, “Lord, what is the mightiest way that I can proceed from this point?”
And then he will speak to your heart, and he will tell you the mightiest of ways.
Even in our smallest moments, give the fullness of our smallest selves to him.
This is what he wants from us.
He wants all of us.
He wants everything that we are.
He wants our complete identity, our complete beings.
He wants all that we have to give whether it’s great or small.
And in return, he justifies us, redeems us, calls us to him, and we share in his glory.
This is why we must love God with all of our might, all of our strength, all of our soul, all of our heart.
This is what it means to have faith.
It is the giving of ourselves completely to him with the hope, with the singular hope that he will not let it go unseen, that he will respond in a way that allows us to share in his glory, that he will multiply all that we’ve given and give it back to us in return as a reward for loving him, as a reward for our courage, as a reward for our faith.
This is the way he asks us to live.
He asks us to live steeped into him, soaked in him, that we know nothing, care for nothing and hope in nothing but him.
He is an all or nothing God.
Give him all of your brokenness, without fear, without restraint.
And if you should feel fear and restraint and hesitation, it is entirely normal because it is in our nature to wrestle with God.
Jacob wrestled with God for an entire night before coming away with the blessing.
So this is entirely normal, we were made to wrestle with him.
We were made to fight against ourselves, and even fight with him so that we could know him and know ourselves.
So be willing to fight.
Be courageous and fight and wrestle with him and fight against yourself.
We were meant to do such things, and we were meant to do them courageously.
Know that God will never leave you or abandon you.
He is in the depths of your heart.
He is at your right side.
He has gone before you in all things, and he is waiting to see if you will fight your nightmares in order that you might live.
His companionship is assured.
His presence is assured.
Never was it known that one who submitted themselves to God and begged and pleaded, and gave all that they have to him were left unaided in their plight.
In fact, he does more than aid you.
He saves you in mind, body and soul.
He makes all things new.
He will give you new life and put a new spirit in you.
So go to him without remorse, without fear.
Dare to gamble on him.
Dare to bet on him.
And you will walk away discovering what all the saints have come to know: God is real, and he is mighty.
