Lessons from an uneducated shepherd.

Our pastor has been walking through the book of Amos in our recent sermon series. I’m gonna confess that sometimes I don’t remember the message after I leave the pew. So, I thought it’s a good time for me to read through (and study a little) on my own, then go back and re-listen to the series. I want the Word of God to deeply touch and change my life, not just to let me warm a pew on Sunday mornings. BUT I’ve got to do the work. So…

As I was reading through a commentary to get an overview look at Amos, I once again was reminded that he was a farmer. That was his job. He wasn’t counted particularly as a “man of God”, or a man of renown for his prophetic abilities, nor was he even trained as a prophet. Did they even have Prophet Schools? If so, he never went. He was simply a shepherd.

But God had a BIGGER purpose in mind! 

My life is small, well, valuable but small.

Did you ever see You’ve Got Mail? I love that movie (and in case you didn’t notice, I find insight into the spiritual realm in all things mundane, even movie quotes!) There is a point in the movie where the heroine is talking about her small bookstore and the small impact it has made over the decades in her small neighborhood. And she says, “My life is small, well, valuable but small.”

I’m just gonna say out loud… THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH A SMALL LIFE! Most of us lead small lives. We have jobs, we may get married and have children, we go to church, we grocery shop, we might volunteer or go to a gym.

• Most of us are not millionaires.
• Most of us are not national or international speakers.
• Most of us are not household names via movies or TV or national bestsellers or music videos or social media influencers.

Most of us live small, quiet lives. And hopefully we are looking to live those small lives in obedience to God’s call on us – every day, every moment, in every encounter.

Our extraordinary God uses His ordinary children in supernatural ways.

My question to you (and for me) today is: do we KNOW that God sees your life as valuable? Valuable in a BIG way? Is there something that God is pressing on you to do or to be that you are thinking, “Oh no! I’m just a… (fill in the blank) – God can’t want me to do or be THAT!”

Remember, beloved, our lives are supernatural! We are part of His divine creation and order. We are children of the King. We are chosen, we are called, we are loved, we are redeemed, we are transformed, we are made new!

It should not surprise us when God reaches down from Glory to raise us up for a MAGNIFICENT work. He delights to use us to display His Glory. He used a very simple shepherd to proclaim His judgement and justice to rulers and kingdoms, and I’m pretty sure Amos never saw THAT coming! BUT the glory of God was displayed through the voice and obedience of that small life.

So when those extraordinary times come through our God using our very ordinary lives, REJOICE and accept His Big hand on our small lives as a declaration that we are HIS and HE is ours!

Expectant faith / expectant hope!

This has been a theme God has been working into my heart for the past several (ok, maybe 30??) years. My life has been very different post-stroke, and I continue to find things that give me pause, sometimes exasperation, sometimes fear, sometimes renewal. But at least this is true: there’s never a dull life with God!

I am not a planner. Nor am I an analyzer. I’m more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants-er. So sometimes things will be happening in my life and I don’t even notice patterns, at least not until I sit down in frustration with the Lord or with Kevin and gripe about it. And then in that moment (or in the days that follow) God will remind me of the patterns that have been repeating in my life. You know, this whole “evaluating life” thing is kind of interesting! :D

Today I just had OOMPH in my soul to write a post. Not about anything in particular, just to write. I often find that God clarifies things for me when I put things “on paper” so to speak. So, I opened the blog and stared at a blank page. As I prayed about what God wanted to show me, I heard the words “expectant faith/expectant hope”… words God has spoken to me MUCH MORE since my stroke 5 years ago. So, I searched to see if I’d written anything about it before (and perhaps needed to be reminded of). And sure enough, I found a post I’d written 2 years ago on God’s gifts and IT WAS SOOO GOOD for me to read! But God had (has) more for me to learn/meditate on.

Do I live my life in expectant faith for God to work?

As I said, God has been weaving this theme into my relationship with Him for awhile now. Sometimes I notice, most times I don’t. But this I know:

I want to live out my remaining days with open hands, ready to receive what God has for me:

• the wonderful
• the easy and recognizable blessings
• the hard times of training and pruning
• the call to follow in the steps of Jesus

I don’t want to live my life in the lethargy of “if it be Thy will” praying. By that I mean how easily we tack that on to the end of our prayers kind of like thinking: well God, in case nothing happens, I’ll give You and out. I want to live in the tenacity of

-Moses who sat on the mountain for 6 days silent before God until He spoke
-Jacob who held onto the angel of the Lord until he was blessed
-Peter saying where else could he go as Jesus alone had the words of life
-Job who said “though He slay me, yet will I trust Him”

Are YOU expecting God to work, to speak to you today?

This was the question I found myself asking ME this morning? And YES, I AM! I believe with all my heart, soul and mind that God IS a God who hears, who provides, who covers over us, who is peace, who heals, who fights for me.

Just as my post on God’s gifts I don’t want to unwrap talks about my struggles with my memory, my hope – my faith is not in ME or MY abilities. My expectations are in God – the God who is the same yesterday, today and forever; the God who called His children out of slavery into the wilderness to give them the promised land; the God who planned for our deliverance from the foundation of the world. THIS is the God I’m trusting and putting expectations on to work in my life, to draw me closer to Him, to bypass my physical limitations, and to reveal Himself to me through the supernatural that is all around me even when I can’t see it.

God, I open my hands to You and declare that I expect You to be faithful to Your word. My hope is in You!

When I was 57 and beginning to go through hormonal changes that accompany women “of a certain age”, the thing that I did not expect was the mental fog and forgetfulness. I remembered my mom when she forgot why she entered a room or what she was gonna say. But I really got distressed one day when I told my children that I was going to my room to have my quiet time with the Lord. One of them said, “Mom, you did that 3 times already today.”

When I went upstairs, I just sat and WEPT! If I couldn’t remember even spending time with God, remember the scriptures I was reading, HOW IN THE WORLD could I continue to grow?

God in His absolute SWEETNESS said clearly in my mind, “Honey, don’t worry about your mind… I’ve got that! You take care of filling your spirit!” Oh, beloved, I cannot tell you the peace and rest that filled me from top to bottom! I could trust God to take care of my mind and even if I spent 7 hours throughout the day in “new” times with Jesus, I was gonna fill my spirit with Him!

He revealed this as a gift He was giving me.

I do remember at the moment thinking, “Do I really have to unwrap this one?” But over the years, I’ve seen the gift that it has been to me and the blessing of unwrapping it and how I’ve gotten to show others the beauty and sweetness of His love as He’s continue to reveal the part of my life that He’s got, even if I don’t feel like I do!

Fast forward 9 years.

For the past year (maybe a little more?) I’ve noticed the difficulty I find in spending extended time with the Lord. I will sit quietly with Him and one of two things happen:

• Either my mind RACES with nonsense or
• My mind goes completely blank and I cannot *see* God

Both of these things become places where I listen for Him to speak to me and I hear nothing. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Like when I first started menopause, I find myself being frustrated and fearful. Now, of course, God is NOT in frustration or in fear – but that is the human response that has gripped me for these past many months, often without my really even noticing. I USED to hear from God very clearly, but it just seemed to have stopped.

A couple of weeks ago (it could have been a totally different timeline, because time seems to have lost its significance for me) I really began to pray about this, and sometime in this past week (could have been a month, who knows?) I realized something. God DOES speak to me, but these days it seems to only be revealed when I’m with others – when I’m praying with others, when I’m counseling others, when I’m ministering to others, when I’m discipling others. You get the drift.

He was giving me another gift!

What IS it with these gifts that I didn’t want to unwrap??

I got a visual of the expression, “it’s easier to steer a moving car.” For whatever reason, God is bypassing my mind once again – when I sit quietly in His presence, the things He is revealing/speaking to me are going deep into my spirit, and He pulls them up out of the ‘storehouse’ when they are needed to minister to someone else. Sometimes the things He reveals are “well, I don’t know if it’s from the Lord or not, but this keeps coming to my mind.” And sometimes I don’t even realize they are being spoken until I see the BAM in the other person’s face that God touched them.

And just now, as I was writing this, it came to mind that the theme verse of the first 20 years of my Christian life was:

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not tremble or be dismayed for the Lord your God is with you, wherever you go. (Josh 1:9)

And what has been the overarching emotion this year? FEAR! Looks like I’m coming full circle in my walk with the Lord. Learning not to fear in deeper levels, levels that seem to be a major part of who I am. YET, my identity is not in what I can perceive of God — my identity is in who I AM in Christ! Even when He chooses to bypass my mind and go right to my spirit – His design and purpose for me doesn’t change.

It’s funny. Before I got saved, I put all my stock in the fact that I was intelligent and could do anything I wanted because I was smart enough. And here I am, 46 years later, with God saying, “You do know that you can do anything I call you to, because *I* am enough, right?!”

And THAT, my beloved, IS A GIFT WORTH UNWRAPPING!

Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda which has five roofed colonnades. In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.”Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.

~John 5:2-9a

This story always touched me, but today’s meditation on it spoke about something else to me.

How often do we accept the limitation of the world’s viewpoint?

The story of this particular pool was that an angel would come down periodically, stir the waters and whoever was the first in would receive healing. (NASB includes a verse that was not in earliest manuscripts.) Was this story God’s story or man’s story? We don’t know, but we DO know that it kept people looking to THE POOL and not to THE SAVIOR.

This poor man had been sitting here for years, possibly the entire 38 years of his being invalided. Can you imagine? Unable to walk, he’s sitting by this pool in the hopes that the waters will stir. And there were multitudes of others sitting there, all with the same hope, “Let me be the first to enter the pool and to win my healing.” Can you envision the clamoring whenever there was a slight breeze that would stir the waters? Whether someone was healed or not, the hopes of a healing would keep them chained to this spot. And if someone got in first, it kept them chained outside of the pool, believing they wouldn’t be healed because they weren’t first.

This story of this *divine* pool kept people stuck in their afflictions, stuck in their fear, stuck in their beliefs that they could never leave this spot JUST IN CASE. Tell me, beloved. Does this bondage sound like the character, love and grace of our Almighty Father? Yeah, not to me either.

Origin of lies

The original liar was Satan. He is called the father of lies.

He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies. John 8:44

The NIV says “he speaks his native language”. There is no truth in him. Yet, we are often quick to pick up those lies and run with them.

• you are not loved by God
• this is just who you are, you can’t change it
• you don’t have enough faith
• faith is a crutch, you need to suck it up and accept your lot in life

All of these lies, and more, are being shouted into your mind: by the devil, by the world, by so-called believers, and by yourself. Sometimes they are so loud and so non-stop that we can barely hear the Spirit speaking Truth to us. But just like the father of lies speaks out of his character, our Heavenly Father speaks TRUTH out of His!

Do you want to be healed?

Sometimes Jesus asked, “What do you want” or “What do you want me to do for you?” I think these questions forced the listener to really ponder their deepest wants. But here, He cut right to the chase: do you want to be healed. Have you ever been in such despair that even having to formulate the hope against hope you’ve kept buried deep within is too much? I think about this poor invalid, stuck in the bondage of his illness and in the bondage of his fear and I can’t help but imagine the despair permeating his soul. For Jesus to just ask, “Do you want to be healed” would be like a soothing balm to the open gaping wound of the public humiliation he’d lived in for 38 years.

But even in the hope of Jesus’ word, the man repeated the lie: there’s no one who can put me in the pool; the pool is my only hope!

In the simplicity of the power that comes only from God, Jesus told him to get up, pick up his pallet and walk. AND HE DID! No questions, no buts, no doubting. He was instantly well and he instantly obeyed!

The pallet, once the symbol of his suffering and humiliation was now the symbol of freedom, the banner of love God waved over him. It was no longer a burden, it was deliverance.

Then comes the rebuke.

The enemy has so much riding on our walking in bondage, stuck in the controlling lies in our minds, that immediately after freedom, victory and deliverance – the rebuke comes.

The religious leaders of the times hated Jesus so much, hated anyone being delivered (because it took control away from them) that they found any reason to rebuke that healing. And they surely did here.

But you know what? We are subject to NO MAN — only to GOD!

-the more deeply we live the surrendered life
-the more fully we understand the character of God
-the more closely we listen to His Voice and block out the noise of the thousands of voices of distraction
-the more intently we press into the Father heart of God

… the greater our healing and victory! We can reject the rebuke of those who don’t even KNOW who it is that is healing us!

Our healing power (for way more than the physical) comes from the Holy Spirit within. It’s not from positive self-talk or brain waves or radio frequencies. Our healing power comes from God Himself! Step into HIS healing, receive HIS promises and cut off the lies that seek to enslave us – because beloved,

Jesus died to FREE YOU!

Jehovah – the Great I AM

God introduced Himself to Moses back in Exodus 3:14

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”; and He said, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

You know the story. Moses was out in the desert and saw a bush on fire but it wasn’t being consumed by the fire. He moves closer and God stops him, and tells him to take off his sandals as that ground he’s on is holy ground!

We understand that it wasn’t the SOIL itself that was holy — it was the presence of GOD that made it holy. And how astounding that God would actually be speaking to Moses from within the bush! When I was a kid, people would have been asking, “Am I on Candid Camera?” These kinds of things just DO NOT HAPPEN in real life! But, when it is the Great I AM in the center, stepping in to deliver His people, you better believe it’s a huge supernatural expression of Himself!

Who are YOU?

Let’s back up to Moses’ question in verse 13:

Then Moses said to God, “Behold, I am going to the sons of Israel, and I will say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ Now they may say to me, ‘What is His name?’ What shall I say to them?”

In all God’s revelation that He is gonna send Moses to deliver the people out of Egypt, Moses doesn’t ask, “Who am I?” He asks “Who are YOU?” In order for him to go to Israel and say God has sent me to deliver you, he knew good and well they were gonna ask, “Oh yeah? Well what’s His name? Huh??”

Moses knew, in some deep level, that the question is never “Who are WE?” The real question the fuels our lives and fills our souls and answers all our longings is: WHO ARE YOU, WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

I love how God always answers the longing heart. He doesn’t reprove or say, “SERIOUSLY? Can’t you guess by this non-burning burning bush?” No, He gives an answer that is THE answer to every question we have – I AM WHO I AM.

What is Your name?

This is the name Jesus references when He tells His disciples, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” 

He IS –

• He is the answer to all our needs
• He is the One to fill up our emptiness
• He is the One who has always existed and always will exist

Think about this name that means Self-Existing One. In Revelation we see Jesus called The Alpha and Omega – The Beginning and The End. Does this sound like it’s reflecting His name from Exodus?

There are many books and studies and teachings done on this holy name of God by people much more learned than I. These are just thoughts from my meditation today on the name Jehovah.

How His name gives me HOPE

To know that He is The Great I AM fills me with hope

• that He never changes – that He is the same yesterday, today and forever
• that He is bigger than I, stronger than I, more all-encompassing than I
• that He lifts me when I fail and fall
• that His forgiveness is eternal and never falters
• that He has called me to live a journey larger than these few temporal years

Knowing that He is from BEFORE the beginning and is the Author of all I hold dear settles me into a rhythm that my life is not all in a rush… I’ve got time to allow His character to be built in me. And His name I AM WHO I AM fills me with tranquility that, while I’m always still learning who I am, He IS.

How does this wonderful name of God encourage you today?