There is a major push today for everything that happens to make sense to us. We strive to understand everything from the celestial patterns of the stars above to the very small idiosyncrasies that we all have. We struggle and strive to make everything fit into a neat and tidy box where everything fits and has a place. And when it doesn’t many of us struggle with why.
Every one of us from the smartest person to the least intelligent struggle with trying to make our lives make sense. The reality we all live in, even though we do our best to ignore it, is that life really doesn’t make sense. We fight and struggle to make all the pieces fit, and we are sometimes successful for a time. But then something happens. Life enters our perfectly aligned world and scrambles all our pieces again. For many of us this can be extremely traumatic depending on our circumstances and how badly we need our lives to be in order. Life just refuses to be squeezed into our understanding of what we think life is meant to be.
The same thing happens when we try to make God fit our understanding. I have spoken with many Christians who don’t understand what God is doing and often write it off because it doesn’t fit with their understanding. And as a result completely miss out on a tremendous blessing and life changing encounter with the God who created them and deeply desires to be known and experienced by them. It is unfortunate that this happens and my heart goes out to them every time. Not everything that happens can be called a move of God. But a great many moves of God have gone ignored and missed completely because they didn’t fit with our expectations or understanding.
We are not the first ones and definitely will not be the last ones to struggle with this. Jesus himself walked the earth and many people were powerfully blessed and impacted by Him. But a great many refused to receive from Him because He didn’t fit with their expectations and understanding. Jesus didn’t make sense to a great many people. The Pharisees were the ones who prided themselves on knowing and following God. They even bragged about being able to know what God was doing. “If we were alive when the prophets of old were here, we wouldn’t have stoned them, but would have known what God was doing and have surely followed.(my loose translation)”. And yet they missed completely who Jesus was. Jesus Himself said to them “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.”John 5:39-40 ESV
Many times we miss the moves of God because we have expectations that God does things a certain way and are guilty of missing what God is doing because we rely on our understandings to reveal what God will do, rather than be open to God speaking to us and revealing Himself in ways we don’t expect.God often moves in ways which cause us to say “That doesn’t make sense”. Our task is to be open to what God is doing and allow Himself to reveal Himself to us and be willing to set aside our expectations and understandings and allow Him to be who He is, not who we expect and understand Him to be.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,”declares the Lord.” Isaiah 55:8 NIV
We will always get ourselves into trouble and miss out completely on what God wants to do if we rely on our own wisdom and understanding. God is moving in our world and in our time, changing and impacting lives. Will we choose to be open and apart of what He is building, or will we hold tightly to our own understanding and expectations and miss out?
The Blog of Tom Sanders 