Reconciled

 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD  Isaiah 55:18

One of the hardest, perhaps the hardest things to come to grips with in the walk of faith is the truth of this Scripture. God's ways and thoughts are so often, most often, completely different from ours. So much so that as we gaze in bewilderment at what is happening in our lives, happening all while we believe in a good and loving God who always seeks our best, we can only exclaim with desperation, "Why?"

I heard a woman named Alexandra Hoover say, "We have to reconcile with God the things that feel irreconcilable." This is the great test. In the face of life events that appear to paint God as uninterested, unloving, powerless, absent, and a multitude of other feelings and thoughts, we have to come to the place of believing that He is who He says He is and will do what He says He will do. In short, we have to reconcile everything that is seeking to deny that He is any of what He promises to be, with all that He has told and promised us that He is. We have to be as Abraham was in the face of a decades long wait for his promised son. A wait that only saw his ability to father a child dwindle away and become impossible. In that place, His Word says that Abraham, "against all hope, in hope, believed." Every circumstance told Abraham that God had lied to him, that God would not come through. With every reason to give up and give in to unbelief, Abraham chose to believe. He reconciled with the irreconcilable. 

This place is going to come to each of us in our faith journey, but there will be a blockage to getting through. Hoover says that, "When we're struggling with our faith, we're really struggling with the sovereignty and character of God." Do we, will we, believe that He is all powerful and all loving? The enemy will attack the character and power of the Father relentlessly. Only making the choice of Abraham, choosing to "against all hope, in hope, believe!" 

In the Garden, the devil's first and most effective assault upon Eve was to get her to doubt and question the goodness and character of God. He has never ceased. We live in a broken, fallen world. A world not created by Him, but by us. Everything is tainted by the sin of Adam and Eve. Pain, suffering, loss, none of this comes from Him. None of us, even we who have believed upon Him will be exempt from the effects of sin. Rain falls on the just and the unjust, but He has made a way through in His Son Jesus Christ. He does send the suffering but He does allow it, and in it, He reveals Himself in ways only suffering can. As He leads us through, our great challenge is to believe Him whenever things around us deny Him. We must reconcile the irreconcilable. If you have come to the Father through His Son Jesus Christ, your relationship has been reconciled and the curse of sin removed. Now remains the choice to reconcile everything else in this fallen world with the reality of who He is. Have you done so? If not, you surely must.

Blessings,
Pastor O