July 29, 2017

YOU ARE A BELIEVER

Recap of Tribe Night - July 29, 2017

Whose view of reality do we cater to? So often I find myself putting the weight of truth on my circumstances and my problems. I look at what’s going on around me and I say, “This is how it is,” and from there, despair tends to come creeping in. I see the difficulties in my own life and I listen to the hardships others are under, and I think, “Where is this God who is supposed to be delivering us?”

I heard recently that if you try to make God your servant (asking him to show up and do what you want or expect) that you will be very disappointed. So while we’re looking to our circumstances to inform our conclusions of what is “true” in our lives, God is waiting for us to surrender to the truth that he is good and just, regardless of the disappointments that surround us.

Where is God? He is inside of us. He has been there since the day we asked him in and invites us to be “filled up to all the fullness of God” (see Ephesians 3:14-21). Jesus said, “I am the way the truth and the life,” and of Jesus it is said, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men (John 1:4).”

What does all of this mean? It means that what is the most true about our ‘circumstances’ is that the God of all life lives inside of us and declares the truth over us that there is hope and a way forward that is redemptive of our pain. When Jesus lives in you, HIS prerogative to redeem the hardships of life in perfect justice reigns supreme. He has covered your sin with his grace and has a plan to overwhelm your present sufferings with a joy that is to come (Romans 8). Impossible? No.

So we declare truth over ourselves. The Prince of Peace lives inside us. The Giver of the Way Forward lives inside of us. The Master of Hope lives inside of us. His perspective is THE PERSPECTIVE, and to this we align our thinking so that we see all of our difficulties through the lens of hope and life - that lens being Jesus.

We pray not to receive all but to gain the revelation that through Jesus we have received all already. We are full of pure life personified in our Lord. This is where faith becomes our frame of mind; this truth needs to be believed. You are a believer because you are defined this way, you believe in things you can’t see. But those ‘things’ are realities that are the most true.

In the end, when you stand before the Lord in all his glory and all these ‘invisible’ truths will be blazingly clear before your senses, and you will have the profound satisfaction that while they were hidden you set them as the cornerstone of your life.