I See You Now For Who You Truly Are

I can honestly say that the last few years have been the hardest I've experienced but yet if you were to ask me, "What would you do differently?" I don't know if I would do it differently or ask God to change it.  It has been the most trying of times but truly the best of times.  I can look back the last four years and see God so clearly sustaining, guiding, instructing, stretching, providing His will for my life and my family. 

One of the books God used to mightly in my life was "Trusting God" by Jerry Bridges.  I read this book right after I got married in 1992.  What does that tell you about me? I remember it had a huge impact on me to the point that when I wanted to start a Bible study with the young ladies at church that was the book I went for and grabbed.  What unfolded was God displaying His magnificent power and beauty of His sovereignity to me in ways that I've never experienced before.  As the world as I knew it seemed to be shaking and crumbling around me, God used that book to remind me of who He was.  A good and loving God who was in control of every detail of my life who wanted me to trust Him with every aspect of my life even though it might mean that my life as I know it would change completely but it was for my good and His glory.  God used that book to show me the idols in my heart.  I was trusting in those idols not in Him.  At the end of the day, it was my flesh and it was what others thought of me.  I learned that my hope was tied to this world instead of the living hope of Jesus Christ.  God began to strip me of these idols.  It hurt.  Hurt so deep that the only way to get out of this deep hole was to look up and say, "all I have is Christ."  I am thankful for a loving God who is using everything in my life to refine me into the image of His Son.  Who created me, who knows me and loves me that nothing escapes His plan for me.  As the ground beneath me was shaking (not literally) acting like Job and asking and questioning why God would allow this in my life.  I felt as though God was saying to me, "do you trust me?" Bridges goes through the attributes of  God and shows us who God truly is and uses the truths of Scripure to back it up.  I am convinced that you cannot know God if you don't believe who the Scriptures says He is.  It's not until that you view yourself rightly compared to the God of the Bible that you can completely understand His beauty, splendor and majesty to where you completely surrender your life wholely to Him and be able to say, "yes Lord, I trust you!"  Job understood this completely in Job 42: 1-5

"Then Job answered the Lord and said, "I know that You can do all things,

And that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted. Who is this that hides counsel

without knowledge?  Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand,

Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. Hear, now, and I will speak;

I will ask You, and You instruct me.  I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear;

But now my eye sees You;"

See Him for who He truly is,  the one who holds every detail of your life in His hand.  His name is Jesus.