Recent Studies

Wednesday, November 23rd

Recent Studies

Well, I haven’t posted or sent email in a while, mostly because I really haven’t been as motivated in recent days as I have been in the past… maybe I am waning, I don’t know… but for whatever the cause, I am still having my QT’s. I am actually at 147 days in a row now, and am really happy about that. Yesterday, I didn’t want to have a quiet time but am glad I did. I learned a lot actually and it has really helped me. I feel really blessed. Great friends, great family and a great God, what more can you ask for? So, I am reading in several books. Dare to Dream Again and Cry of the Soul are what I have been focusing on within the last month or so, and something I find extremely interesting is how the two parallel each other in so many ways. The insight from just reading one of the books is priceless but when combined, I think the topics elevate to such a high understanding, it is just priceless. I am in the last chapter of Cry of the Soul, and I think the authors have truly saved the most important information for last… it just makes you wish there were more chapters to follow, seriously.

“God confronts us with pain and suffering because He desires to reveal His goodness to us. But the goodness of God will not be validated by any attempt to prove it apart from faith. We experience His goodness only through the revelation of His glory. And the supreme picture of His glory can be seen only through the irony of the Cross. Through this irony, God compels us to look at Him with wide-eyed wonder.” (From “Cry of the Soul,” page 242). So God allows pain to allow me to turn to him. If life was perfect, would I need God? What purpose would God have in my life if everything went the way I wanted it to? I realized that there are three types of pain. First is physical pain, second is emotional pain, and third is spiritual pain. The first two tend to lead to the third, but the third can be felt without the other two. Physical pain is, of course, being cut by a knife or falling down and scraping your knee, that sort of thing. Emotional pain, I would guess, would be loosing a loved one or being bi-polar, and spiritual pain is the pain felt when you struggle with God.

I went for a prayer walk the other night and realized all these things. I had just heard about a girl who cannot feel pain physically. She gets cut and doesn’t know it… and on the surface, that may sound somewhat refreshing, but the thing is that if the pain is ignored, more damage can be done. And that applies to all three types of pain I mentioned. Can you imagine what would be a painful cancer growing inside of her and she not even know about it? What about a cancer in the heart that is separating me from God? If I don’t do something about it early, it grows and festers.

“Cry of the Soul” also talked about how Christians have a belief that they experience a joy untouched by the suffering of the world, which transcends anger, fear, jealousy, despair, shame and contempt of everyday life (paraphrased). However, “human experience alone fails to support this position. No matter how much faith we have, no matter how much good we do, no matter how much effort we invest, we can not make the difficulties and tragedies of life go away” (From “Cry of the Soul,” page 243). Bad things are going to happen, period. It’s the way life goes. People are born and people die, so goes the way of life and its unfortunate that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. But as I read on I came across this: the assumptions of God’s methods. We assume much about God that is not in the bible.

“The assumptions about God’s methods for using suffering usually center on three conditions: to be fruitful, the suffering should be: (1) temporary, (2) understandable, and (3) readily applicable to life’s practical realities” (From “Cry of the Soul,” page 244). So am I frustrated as to why I go through things that I don’t understand, that I see as a life long affliction, or something that I can apply toward my life? The book of Psalms is chock full of information and experiences where people go through stuff and do not see an end to their despair, but yet still give praise to God. The afflictions given to me should cause me all the more to turn to God, if for no other reason than to simply turn to him and depend on him.

2 Corinthians 12:7-10
7 To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. 10 That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

The afflictions given are to show me that God’s grace is to be sufficient enough. Johnny Out.