As I read through Genesis, I can't help but appreciate Gods deep intentionality and the awareness and respect his people have for his intentionality and his word. God knows what he is doing. I just read today about Rebekah, and the servant who was sent to find the woman God had appointed for Issac, and how seriously the servant considered Gods intention and Gods selection of the right woman. And my heart is grabbed by Rebekah herself, and that the Lord had made in her a heart to serve. Not a heart to serve certain people or serve in a certain context but a heart that met a stranger and quickly gave him a drink and then ran to the well to draw water for his camels. I've asked God many times his intentions for women. I see them in Rebekah. And I think of the girls that I get to work with and realize that there is hardly a thing more precious and worthwhile in the universe than being a part of their lives and into their becoming women of the Most High God. In their recognition of his love for them and where he is sending them and how he is using them for the kingdom. That the girls I know are eternal and where they spend eternity will be determined in the next 70 years of their lives and that God is allowing me to be a part of that and what a serious and beautiful thing that is.
There is no higher calling than to know Christ and to make disciples.
I finished my exams and am home in Virginia. It scares me to be home because I am afraid there is not enough work for me and therefore that I am purposeless. Which exposes idolatry, because my fear is not that God is not here. I know that he is. My fear is that work is not here. That purpose is not here. That I won't have enough to do.
I do a lot of work. And I know the lord made me to serve and to do work. But I don't look like the men and women in the bible who sought the lord. Who sabbathed every single week. Who waited on him. Who meditated on his word day and night.
I pray that I am more like them. I pray that I value Christ above all else. That anything that I do that his hand is not in will die, no matter what.
And I realize today, just what a gift the word is and how little I know about it. And that the fact that I have nothing scheduled today, that I can spend time knowing it more is a great and precious gift. And I see the way it changes my soul. And I see that the word and time, lots of time, with the lord, will make me set apart. Will make me holy.
Acts shows, the whole bible in fact shows, that the people of God are set apart. That they live in the world but they are set apart. And I realize that much is at stake in how set apart the people of God are. I can't count the conversations I have had where people's perceptions of Christ and of God were set by his people or those who claimed to be.
As I was driving home, I listened to a sermon by Tim Keller on knowing the Father and knowing Christ. The most important question, he said, and the question that must be answered before anything else can be addressed is the question of where you stand and what you believe about JEsus Christ. He himself asked, who do you say that I am?
Is he who he says he is?
Everything hangs in the balance of that question. Because Christianity is about Christ, but not in an intellectual way but in an intensely, uncomfortably personal way. God is a person. And our relationship with him, our knowing him deeply is the most important thing about us. If Christianity was a philosophy primarily, we could look at the merits of it and deal with it in an intellectual way, determining if it is logical. But its not. Relationships are not purely and entirely logical. In what I've seen in my 19 years, I'd say that there is very little that is logic based about them. You don't study relationships, you do them. You live them. Christianity is not primarily a therapy. So we can't start by saying, is this going to heal me? Is it going to make me happy? Will it satisfy my needs? Its not a doctrine, its a human being. Flesh and blood. Someone who ate and cried and laughed. Someone who bled and died.
And you are either with him or not with him- just like a marriage proposal, if you say yes it affects everything about your life. If you say no, that doesn't mean you hate the person or you don't want to be friends with them, but it does mean that you don't want to give the rest of your life to them, to live intimately with them, to love them. If Jesus is who he says he is, everything he said and did has significance and following him will be the most important thing.
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