Tuesday, December 11, 2018
I personally did not grow up moving from home to home or city to
city. I grew up in one house and moved
out when I went to college. However, my
mother did not grow up with the same comforts.
She moved around a lot and struggled going on vacations and living out
of a suitcase. She longed for “home”.
Abraham
came to be known as the Hebrew. Hebrew
means “stranger” or “alien”, and from the perspective of the people who lived
in the land of Canaan, Abraham and Sarah, were somewhat the misfits. They didn’t really belong. They were strangers.
But
this couple understood that everything that this world had to offer was
temporary at its best. Their ultimate
citizenship wasn’t here on earth. They were
living for an eternal home and that was what made them willing to live as
strangers, as aliens, to not fit into this world and this world system because
they had an eternal home for which they were headed.
If
we really pay attention to Abraham’s life, it’s a lot like our own. We have a series of surrenders over the
course of our lives. We surrender
because we believe in God. We believe in
His promises. Each time we come to a
point of surrender, we build an altar.
We acknowledge God for who He is, we believe in His promises, and we
know that to receive His promises we have to surrender what is keeping us from
moving forward. We leave it there for
God to consume.
I
don’t know about you, but the transition into having adult children has not
been easy. At times, they still want and
behave like young children. At other
times, I want them to still be young and ‘under my control’. The advice I give them is from years of
experience. I share my failures and what
made me successful in hopes that they will have less failures. But over and over I hear God telling me to
leave them with Him. It just doesn’t
make sense to give up all I have hoped for.
But I have seen it – God has blessed me more than once when I’ve truly
surrendered, and left things on the altar, He opens another door. I know I have to recognize that all those
other altars of sacrifice and surrender and faith, each one of those were
preparing me for these moments. And as
each child graduated from high school, I had to face the same altar – each time
I surrender, I confirm that God is worthy of my trust and He is preparing me to
trust Him with bigger surrenders that may occur further down the road.
“Altars
speak of sacrifice, of devotion, of surrender of being consumed. They speak of life that is wholly given up to
the One for whom the altar is built.”
Nancy Demoss Wolgemuth
I
used to go to our chapel during my lunch hours and pray. I would visually lay down on the altar in the front of the chapel what I was
struggling with letting go of. It was comforting to know that God would take
it in His hands and use it for His glory.
So
when you think about it, faith is really the biography of God through my
life. A.W. Tozer says, “Faith is less
about what you say you believe and more about how you behave on a consistent
basis despite your circumstances.”
So
don’t be surprised if God asks you to give up secure surroundings in order to
carry out His will. And as I heard on a
program last week, “we need to stamp eternity on our eyeballs.”
