I Needed That

How it should be (& is, now)

How it is (was)

 While being interviewed by Emily here, Heather (of There and Back Again)  said:  "I had a Dear Older, Wiser, Christian friend say to me one day when I came to church complaining...'Heather, speak it how it should be and not how it is.'"

How I wish I'd heard that (and better yet LEARNED that) about 50 years ago!

It made me think of a phrase in Romans 4:17 from the King James Bible out of which I first memorized it:  "(God) calleth those things which be not as though they were."   God did it first when He created the world.  And He did it again.  And again.  And in this case, to Abraham.

The Message really brings this out of  this verse and the one that follows it!  We call Abraham "father" not because he got God's attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn't that what we've always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, "I set you up as father of many peoples"? Abraham was first named "father" and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing. When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn't do but on what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, "You're going to have a big family, Abraham!" 

Godliness which reflects the character and nature of God includes speaking it how it should be and not how it is!   Since Jesus said  what I've stored in my heart WILL come out of my mouth  (Luke 6:45), I'm going to keep on hiding God's Word in my heart!  For however many days or years I have left to live, I want to speak it how it SHOULD be and not how it IS!   What an antidote for complaining!  What a prescription for faith-walking!

Thanks, Heather and Emily (and Heather's Dear Older, Wiser, Christian friend).

I needed that.