“One of our great allies at present is the Church itself…” Senior Demon, Screwtape, advising a junior miscreant (Wormwood) about a soul he is tormenting.
I heard a beautiful saying the other day:
” How do you expect to succeed in a full-time battle with a part-time prayer life?”
In the last few months, I have been discouraged, attacked, and made to feel useless and incompetent because of my Faith.
You stand up in the morning and put on your armour, put on the breastplate, get your shield up, your sword is sharpened and shoes are tied… and you take on the day… But when you step off the battleground, you expect to be safe, and you put your gear down… that is when you are most vulnerable.
Unfortunately, my deepest pain and discouragement have come from fellow believers & church members… Christians, who I am sure are speaking to me with what they think is love, care and advice, but in reality have stabbed me through my heart and knocked me to my knees. Sowing doubt and despair.
Paul wrote this to the Colossians:
”…Beware that no one distracts you or intimidates you in their attempt to lead you away from Christ’s fullness by pretending to be full of wisdom when they’re filled with endless arguments of human logic. For they operate with humanistic and clouded judgments based on the mindset of this world system, and not the anointed truths of the Anointed One…”
(Colossians 2:8)
I have specifically been battling with this for the last few weeks, having petitioned God about this very issue, when out of the blue, Things clicked in place and I realised that God has been slowly laying out the puzzle.
I was reading 1 Corinthians 12, (Spiritual Gifts) and how each member of the body has a place and a purpose (the ear cannot say “I am not an eye” I have not part of the body) when I came upon verse 18:
”But God has carefully designed each member and placed it in the body to function as He desires
(1 Corinthians 12:18, TPT)
This is the Character of God, our Father. How many times does he need to say this or show this before it sinks in?
”…For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do…
(Ephesians 2:10, NIV)
and much earlier, He says to Jeremiah…
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
before you were born I set you apart;
I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
(Jeremiah 1:5, NIV)
God does not require me to be perfect. He doesn’t require me to be fully trained. But He does need me to be ready.
He requires me to show up…
God will use what I have, NOT because he is really good at 5-minute crafts, (making something out of leftovers and scraps) but because before I was born He set me apart and appointed me for something specific. That is something no one can argue about with me. If they don’t like it, they should take it up with the Creator of the Universe.
Yes, the fellow believer may be right: I have not been trained, I may not have the resources they think you need. But that is probably because it is not the skills and resources that is required.
All the soldiers were trained to fight Goliath, but it took the “untrained” one that knew how to fight bears and lions to take him down. It didn’t make sense… until it did.
