Want Comfort?
A “faith experience”
You cannot know how to fully trust the Lord in any area of life until you really have to.
Why do we most times have to loose everything before we trust God. We never would trust God totally until we lost something of great value because we had plenty. We don’t seem to willingly enter this level of trust with God?
2 Corinthians 1: 3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.
2 Corinthians 1:6 “If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer.”
God must love you a lot! He doesn’t allow someone to go through the kinds of adversity you have experienced unless He has a SPECIAL calling on your life.
“The depth and width of your faith experiences are directly proportional to your calling.”
This above is describing a process of preparation that God takes each of His leaders(a person of influence) through when He plans to use them in significant ways.
A “faith experience” is an event or “spiritual marker” in your life about which you can say, “That is where I saw God personally moving in my life.”
* It is an unmistakable event in which God showed Himself personally to you.
This faith experience was;
*The burning bush for Moses;
*The crossing of the Red Sea or the Jordan River for the nation of Israel; Jacob’s encounter with the angel.
* It was the feeding of the 5,000 for the disciples.
**It was the time when you saw God face to face in your life.
Phil.2: 1 Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2 then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.
If God has plans of using you in the lives of many others, you can expect that He is going to allow certain faith experiences to come into your life in order to build a foundation that will be solid.
That foundation is what you will be able to look back on to keep you faithful to Him in the times of testing.
1 Corinthians 3:11 For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which IS Jesus Christ.
*Christ must be the foundation for ALL things in our life, else our life will crumble.
*Do we understand that Jesus was fully God and fully man at the same time?
* Do we understand why it is important? *Do we know how he fulfilled prophecy? *Do we understand how Jesus is woven throughout God’s Word?
* Do we know Jesus’ message?
*Do we understand His sacrifice and the power of it?
***Is Jesus our foundational message? **Do we use Jesus as our uniting focus and passion for the universal Church?
Paul continually wrote and preached Jesus and the good news. Jesus is the foundation. The better we know every detail of the foundation the stronger we build and the closer we all become.
Each of us most likley have personal faith experiences in which we experienced God personally so that we could move in faith to whatever He was calling us to.
Do you need a personal faith experience right now in your life? Pray that God will reveal Himself to you. He delights in doing that.
Desperate dependence is the place where we can stop living by our own power.” It’s where we discover God’s strength in and through us.
God has made His call plainly to all the saints, a call to share the suffering of Christ.
Have you ever felt in the midst of your pain, you are doing God a favor?
I can identify myself that I have not looked upon Christ for the comfort that I am supposed to.
When we truly share the sufferings of Christ, we have in Him peace in the midst of it all, and grace to bear it. The sufferings of the Christian are the sufferings of Christ. He sympathizes with His members when they suffer for His sake.
My prayer is that God would cause us to find joy in our suffering, place our eyes on the cross where Jesus had laid down His life for us that we may too share abundantly the comfort He offers.
Hebrews 5: 8 Although he was a son, he learned obedience through the things he suffered. 9 And by being perfected in this way, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him,
Father God, I cannot even begin to comprehend the love that you have for me, and how you were willing to stand by and watch as your son was treated so poorly. Your greater plan prevailed, though, and I am saved by His blood. Your love for me is immeasurable and I am trying so hard to fathom it with earlthly terms. I feel inadequate so much of the time and I will never fully understand it. Please work with me and help me to share in this suffering so that I can experience your comfort and strength. Help me to praise you in the storms, even when things are dark. I love you so much. I ask that you enter my heart and help me to be more like you, give me your eyes and ears so that I may walk into the world as you would have. To see, experience, and interact with the world with the level of interest and patience that you once did. I love you so much and look forward to the day when we will be together in paradise. I love you, Amen
Our love only becomes genuine
when God’s Love first penetrates
our hearts.
“We love, because He firstloved us.”
1 John 4:19
You are the Lord’s anointed, and He has raised you up to do all that is in His heart and in His mind. Your faithfulness goes before you in the spiritual realm to establish the way of favor. Hindrances have to give way to the light of those who walk upright and go forth with integrity and humility. You belong to the Lord and are His chosen.
Psalms 84:5And how blessed all those in whom you live, whose lives become roads you travel;