“Before, you used to go to this person and that, but now the notion of the Divine control is forming so powerfully in you that you go to God about it…There are times, says Jesus, when God cannot lift the darkness from you, but trust Him…Keep the notion of the mind, of God behind all things strong and growing. Nothing happens in any particular unless God’s will is behind it, therefore you can rest in perfect confidence in Him.” Oswald Chambers http://www.myutmost.org/07/0716.html
The Holy Spirit’s been building the notion in me of the “God of All Things” for some time now. He began just in time, too! It’s been a challenging 12 or 14 months, with events of all sizes and shapes plowing up deep rooted questions and fears in my heart.
I haven’t been all alone in finding myself in the hard places–it seems just about everyone I talk too has been taking it on the chin. The Holy Spirit doesn’t tell us why as His chosen means of comfort, though; He tells us about Who. In fact, he reveals a Who behind “all things” that knows exactly what He’s doing.
Comfort and strength isn’t found in “why”, but in the fact that the difficulties big and small, all were chosen. Chosen isn’t a word to breeze over. There is a deliberateness and preparedness as part of the definition of chosen. We’ve all heard it said that nothing touches the lives of believers that does not have God’s explicit approval.
How much have we thought about that? Just how extensive is His power and wisdom to select the “all things” that enter our lives? Does He really pick everything, from who is born or dies or even the day the alarm clock died and made us late for work?
A God of Chosen Things, A God of Chosen People
He is a God of more than “all things”; He is God of Chosen Things. He chose the number and variety of plants, their purposes and quality. He chose to make a rhino with one horn and a rhino with 2 horns. He decided upon the strength of lions, and their relative weakness outside of a pride. He gave birds every color imaginable, and made monkeys noisy.
Then, oddly enough, He gave to Adam the right to name all created things. The race of man was given choices. He chose to create the nation of Israel out of a semitic man called Abram, and selected the customs that identify them as Israelites, too. Yet they have the choice to live inside His behavioral contraints, or not to. Lions aren’t allowed that.
Chosen has an impact on every part of our lives. It’s not an accident this or that happened. It’s not an accident this or that happened to me, or you. The things were chosen, and so are we. But why? Here’s some synonyms for “chosen”: appointed, designated, desired, prefered, confirmed, established, privileged, intentional…
Each of those synonyms carry explicit meanings, and implied ones. The things that are chosen to affect us are not picked at random, but are desired by God. They’ve been designated to accomplish certain goals. Whatever happens, “good” or “bad” as we happen to judge events, has a confirmed purpose for our growth into maturity of grace.
Things are chosen, and so are people. We are not only chosen to endure whatever we’re enduring, we are appointed to the position, and privileged to be chosen for it. He has established you and me in the place we are at, in the family and job we happen to have, the church we go to…God has established us right here.
Okay, this is good theology, yes, but what on earth was He thinking doing this to me…Asked that? Yep, me too. A short answer is His thoughts aren’t “on earth” half so much as ours. Earth is all we see and grasp, yet it is only a small fraction of the whole span our lives will be. We are, well, nearsighted. There is more than this, much more.
Understanding the God of Chosen Things
The first idea we need to grasp as believers is: it’s not about us. He very much desires us as individuals, adores us and has graven our name on His heart forever. We are loved beyond describing. Being loved by God doesn’t have enough adjectives in all the tongues of earth to ascribe to it. Yet it is only the first half of a relationship.
We love our spouse or our kids, but we love them beyond our own comforts and how they make us feel. We love people, when we really love, for their benefit rather than our own. I’d say a good chunk of divorces come from a self-serving root where one or both people simply refuse to look beyond what they want, clinging to unfulfillable expectations.
Being loved inspires loving, it inspires selflessness from both people. If you want to know whether God is selfless, look at that cross. He is completely selfless towards us, and waits for us, teaches us to be selfless towards Him. His adoration inspires adoration in us because He is proven to be worthy of it.
We reach a point where the love God gives us pulls us out of ourselves and our little self-created worlds. His wonderous nature reveals our clawing for this and that as so petty it becomes contemptible to us. We begin to reach out for Him, and to want to have the same selfless, pure, magnificence of soul that He has.
The second reality we have to understand if we are to ever become selfless, pure, and magnificent of soul is it’s not God’s job to make our circumstances easy. It is ever His work to make our nature holy and our character flawless. His goal for each and every appointed moment of our lives is to make us look, act, speak, love, and be HOLY, because He is holy.
Our love for Him makes us want that too. We see the beauty of Jesus, we long to share in such a perfect nature. The only way that happens is learning from the hard places He has chosen for us. The more we want of Jesus, the more hard places we are willing to endure; “Though He slay me, yet will I follow Him…”
Becoming is the Divine filter through which everything that affects us passes through. We have chosen and been chosen to be transformed, from the self-absorbed, scrounging, defiant animals we’ve made ourselves, into unblemished mirrors of God. We have an appointed place in His world, and are privileged by choice to reflect His pure glory.
We’ve all seen those old mirrors, with spots and scratches, whose silver has tarnished to the point that very little light or detail gets accurately reflected. That’s where our transformation starts. We may get our silver melted off, our glass ground and polished, our frames sandblasted. Oh boy do we get the treatment sometimes.
But the treatment is needed, however harsh it might feel. The result is a scratchless surface, a pure silver backing, and a gilded frame that shines with such brilliance it cannot be overlooked. As merciless as being sandblasted feels, it is a privilege to be chosen, a privilege to be desired by God, and even worked over by Him!
A privilege? Are you kidding?!… Nope. A lion will never be anything but a lion. A dog will forever act like a dog. An angel will always dwell in the lot of an angel. A human can chose to remain a self-serving animal, or he/she can chose to be made into both image and likeness of God Himself. We can be beasts or sons and daughters.
No other creature is offered that opportunity to become more than what they are right now. Only us. Only a few of us, to be realistic, will take Him up on the offer. Quite a few will call it quits when the grinding of their glass gets more painful than expected.
This past year has been something else for me:my service dog in training fell ill and still isn’t right, my hopes for what Kenai could do for me were dashed, my Mom’s depression just about sucked the life outta me too, my brother’s devastating our finances and subsequent death, my health took a nose-dive, the discouragement with “I can” shrinking back to “I can’t”, bouts of anxiety…
There’s the worry over my dear sister-in-law’s shaky mental health, our best friend’s son died and it’s wiping her out physically and emotionally, I’m beginning to lose my hearing, the stock market slammed us with deep financial losses, another sister-in-law is now a struggling single mother…
I’m being ground, melted, blasted, hammered, resurfaced, remodeled, and RESTORED. It hurts. It’s frightening. It’s worrisome. It’s a privilege. I have discovered more of God’s nature and purpose this past year than in just about all the years before it combined.
I’m learning hope and fear travel together, the gains outweight the losses, I’m only helpless without God, and He indeed is God of Chosen Things. There is much more restoring to do, but heaven help me hold onto gratefulness that I am chosen to be like Him. Heaven help me harder to be transfixed by His heart and soul!
“O Lord Jesus, we would bow at thy feet, conscious of our utter inability to do anything without thee, and in every favour which we are privileged to receive, we would adore thy blessed name and acknowledge thine unexhausted love.” –Charles Spurgeon
Tags: anxiety, change, Charles Spurgeon, christian growth, expectations, faith, fear, feelings, God, grace, helplessness, love, Oswald Chambers, selfishness, service dog in training, sorrow, struggle, the cross, trust
