Use me, Lord, please use me
I know I’m frail O but I am here, Lord
Use me, Lord, please use me
For Your Kingdom and Your Glory
I am weak but You are holy
Countless childhood surgeries. Yearlong stints in the hospital. Verbal and physical bullying from classmates. Multiple miscarriages as a young wife. The unexpected death of a child. A debilitating progressive disease. Riveting pain. Betrayal. A husband who leaves.
If it were up to me, I would have written my story differently. Not one of those phrases would be included. Each line represents something hard. Gut wrenching. Life changing.
But now, in retrospect, I wouldn’t erase a single line.
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When we complain, it is frequently evil. But complaining is not necessarily evil. There’s a faithful (believing) way to complain and a faithless (unbelieving) way to complain.
The Bible often refers to faithless complaining as grumbling and warns us not to do that (Numbers 14:26–30; John 6:43; Philippians 2:14; James 5:9). Grumbling complaints directly or indirectly declare that God is not sufficiently good, faithful, loving, wise, powerful, or competent. Otherwise, he would treat us better or run the universe more effectively. Faithless complaining is sinful because it accuses God of doing wrong.
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Every day we are faced with choices: surrender to self-pity, or press on in spite of disappointment and failure.
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He starts with a quiet heart, but he begins to ask God and his friends and himself and anyone who will listen all these questions that come flooding into his mind. It really all comes down to the question of why. Why me? Why this? Why now? Why? What happens as the book progresses is that Job begins to try and understand things that are not fathomable. And because he can’t understand, rather than being content with mystery . . .
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You see, from an outside perspective, Elisabeth Elliot had so many reasons to give up, to curl up and to turn inward over the years. Her first love was martyred, her second was lost to cancer, and her third and final nursed her as her memory left, not to mention all the trials and struggles that come just from the living of life in a broken world. Time and again, she looked into the darkest and most difficult and she saw God and found Him to be faithful … and then she wrote it down so that we wouldn’t lose hope when it was our own turn in the dark places.
Read MoreBut God did not give us a trouble-free day. Instead he let us come into trouble (which, of course, he could have kept from happening) and then helped us in some amazing ways in the midst of our fear and frustration and sweat and disappointment. So here, as in a thousand other times of my life, I was thanking the Lord for his grace, not to keep me from trouble and sickness and frustration and disappointment, but to give me amazing help in the midst of it.
Read MoreIf, believer, you require still greater comfort, remember that you have the Son of Man with you in the furnace. In that silent chamber of yours, there sits by your side One whom you have not seen, but whom you love; and often when you do not know it, He comforts you in your affliction and softens the place of rest. You are in poverty; but in your lovely house the Lord of life and glory is a frequent visitor. He loves to come into these desolate places, that He may visit you. Your friend sticks closely to you. You cannot see Him, but you may feel the pressure of His hands. Do you not hear His voice? Even in the valley of the shadow of death He says, “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God.”
Read MoreTV may not be a problem for you. There may be some other issue where God is calling you to surrender. But I’ll tell you that when I finally said, “Yes, Lord,” and made the changes I knew I needed to make, it led to incredible new freedom and fruitfulness in my life. I don’t know what you may be struggling with, but whatever it is, let me just encourage you: Don’t delay obedience.
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If “enter into the joy of your master” is the heartbeat behind every one of God’s commands, and if we actually believe that, do you think it will change the way we obey in this life? Maybe it will mean that our adolescent push back will begin to pass away more and more, until the day when it passes away into eternal oblivion, never to be seen again.
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Devotional material from Morning and Evening, written by C.H. Spurgeon, revised and updated by Alistair Begg. Copyright © 2003, Good News Publishers and used by Truth For Life with written permission. (Originally posted on Truth for Life, May 2, 2015.)
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Surrender. Being yoked to Jesus in such a way that he is carrying the weight of my burden—giving me rest for my soul, peace in the midst of the trauma of decision-making, release of harmful stress.
This is what I want. This is what I’m seeking. However, I know I’m incapable of surrendering on my own in this way. This kind of surrender is only possible through his power and enabling grace—the power of his indwelling Holy Spirit—the reality of his resurrection power in my life.
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For many months, I would just pray. I would pray that she would “Run with endurance with her eyes fixed on Jesus … keep the faith and finish strong.” I would pray that God would make Forwood a mission field for her! I would pray Number 6:24–26 over her. Occasionally we would recite Psalm 23 together. It was our chance to share God’s truth with roommates and anyone walking by, because Ginger was VERY hard of hearing, so I had to nearly yell my prayers!
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One disadvantage, if there are any, of “growing up Christian” is that profound scriptural truths can become clichés we take for granted before we really understand what they mean. One such phrase is “do it in God’s strength, not your own.” We’re on sound biblical footing with this: “. . . whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—” (1 Peter 4:11). ‘Tired?’ we ask. ‘Well, you’re trying to do it all on your own strength, just rely on God’s strength.’ (If I had an hour for every time that’s been said to me concerning my duties I’d have time to do them all and bake bread from scratch.) But increasingly I’ve had the question what does that mean?
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I am a stay-at-home mom. There are days when I am at home in my job, rocking the comfortable clothes and cuddles and cookies in the oven. But there are days (or perhaps times in each day) when it’s sheer hard work. It’s constant interruptions (even the interruptions are interrupted). Sometimes it can seem like an endless round of thankless menial tasks. A precious friend of mine, a wiser woman than I, once described motherhood in a comment on this blog as a series of deaths to self. (My Self wants to write this right now. My Self has been interrupted by my Duty (and his big sisters and his baby brother) seventeen times since I started this paragraph.)
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In the same way, when I do my duty, I am helped to go on doing it. Why is it easier to obey once we begin? Is it that we are made creatures of habit—and this is turned to good account when the habits we build into our lives are faithful ones? Is it that we somehow actualize or demonstrate our faith by acts of obedience, however small, and God (the one who rewards those who seek him) then comes to our aid?
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Just a question: When did “duty” become a dirty word?
We laugh, admitting that sometimes we tell our children to obey “because I said so” as though it is a silly and unreasonable response—when surely shouldn’t it be considered, coming from parent to child, as a full answer? Whenever the word “ought” was struck from our working vocabulary (for struck it has been) we lost something precious: a big, basic building block from the foundations of faithfulness.
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This modern hymn by Keith and Kristyn Getty and Graham Kendrick speaks biblical truths that we can sing to instruct our souls.
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Father, we come to you this morning like expectant little children, our noses pressed against the glass, shouting joy to the world, the Lord has come! And yet we wait and watch for your great and awesome return when you will descend in glory and power, and you will whistle and your servants will be gathered safely in from the four winds. And like children, Father, we itch and scratch against the ‘now and not yet’ nature of our ultimate salvation. Father, we want to be faithful to the end, through suffering, through pain, through lonliness, through sudden unexpected trauma and also long term, exhausting seasons of grief. And we confess that we are not strong enough, or brave enough or clean enough to remain faithful till the end. So Father we ask for courage and comfort, so that we can stand in all things, and strangely and ironically, we know this as well, that it is in this holiday season that many among us struggle the most. … So, Father, for them especially we ask for courage and comfort.
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