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Have you had a time in your life when you were waiting on the Lord and you decided that you could take matters in your own hands to speed things up a little bit? After doing this you saw that, instead of making things better, you made things worse. Now, you regret the fact that you didn't wait on the Lord. I think that all of us, if we spoke truthfully, would have to admit that we have been guilty of the same thing. Think about it...how many times have you opened up your mouth and said things that you regretted later? Perhaps, you reacted to a circumstance before you really had enough time to think it through. Maybe you got so angry at somebody that you actually verbalized your anger and hurt that other person. Later on, you realized that the person really wasn't saying what you thought they were saying. The Bible tells us, in the book of James, to be "swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath" (James 1:19). Good fruit is rarely produced in moments of anger.
The fact of the matter is that we all need patience. Patience is the fruit that is produced by the Spirit of God. As we go through our trials and our mess ups it is something that we have great need of. I don't know that there is any better story in the Bible that demonstrates the tragedy that impatience brings to a person's life than the story of Peter in the garden of Gethsemane the night that Jesus was taken. You can read about it in John 18 and Luke 22:49-50. Peter, through his impatience, was the first one to tell Jesus that he would never leave him; that others might, but that he would not leave him. When the solders came into the garden, Jesus asked them, "Whom seek ye?" When they said Jesus of Nazareth Jesus, by saying "I am he," found the solders and the temple police knocked to the ground by His words. The power that was released hit them so hard and fast that they were on their backs before they knew what had happened. While these soldiers were still flat on their backs, Peter decided to take matters into his own hands. Maybe he thought that it was an opportunity to show courage, but what he did was wrong. It is the perfect picture of someone being impatient and acting before thinking a thing through. So, you need to think before you move. He pulled out his sword and swings for the head of the high priest servant. He missed the head, but he didn't miss entirely. He cut off the servant's ear. This last action of Peter put him in great jeopardy. Had it not been for Jesus, Peter's actions would have landed him in jail or worse.
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As we said earlier, the cuckleberry can completely take over a field planted for harvest. We know that in the parable in Matthew 13 where Jesus talked about the sower and the seed that these seeds fell in four different locations. Only one out of the four actually produced a harvest. Even in the one productive field, there were three levels of harvest that were produced.
How do I have a hundredfold harvest? In Genesis 26:12, Isaac received a hundredfold return in the same year he planted. A hundredfold return speaks of maximum yield. How does that happen? Well, the first thing that we have to take into consideration is that Isaac heard from God. He, like a lot of others, was about to make a big mistake in going down into Egypt, had God not stopped him. After stopping him from going down into Egypt, God commanded him to plant in a certain place. God determines the location that growth will take place. It is He who will bring the increase though one plants and one waters. It is He that causes increase to come forth. Receiving a hundredfold harvest requires that the Christian hears from God first and is then obedient to what God is saying. It is impossible to receive a hundredfold if your field (your mind) is covered with weed (your problems). The ground has to be cultivated. The difference in the parable that Jesus told and the harvest was because of the soil, it's cultivation. The soil is your heart. A lot of us, and I believe that even this farmer, did not take time to cultivate the soil and rid it permanently of these weeds. Taking more time in soil preparation will produce big dividends down the road. We have to take time in preparing our hearts to do the will of God. A lot of us get in a hurry and we do not take the necessary time to prepare ourself. I learned a long time ago that God is big on preparation. God took 80 years to prepare Moses for a 40 year ministry. Notice that the time of preparation was twice as long as the time of ministry. Jesus waited 30 years to minister for 3 1/2. We are short on preparation and long on ministry. We want to take a short period of time to minister for a lifetime. We get in a hurry and this is where we fail. Preparing your mind and preparing yourself to do the will of God is where you must start if you desire to stop repeating the same pattern of failure in your life. Preparation can be difficult because it feels like you are not doing anything productive. You will also find yourself in a state of obscurity, hidden, going unnoticed, unrecognized, undetected. But that is what preparation is for you. It is a part of the process. God will never thrust anyone out into their place of destiny unless they have taken the time to prepare their mind. The waiting game is the most difficult part of preparation. There is some suffering in preparation. Moses had to flee for his life. David, too, during preparation, faced the wilderness tending his father's sheep. He had to be faithful at it. In Luke 16:12, the word tells us that if you haven't been faithful in another man's who will give you of your own. We want our own without proving our level of faithfulness in that which belongs to someone else. You will never get yours until you help somebody else get theirs. I know of a girl who was very talented and God led her to our church. It was very obvious to me that she had leadership potential, but I could never get her to trust me with what she had. She kept talking about "my ministry"..."I'm going to do this when I get my ministry". This went on for months. Finally, as she was talking with me and talking about "my ministry" I stopped and corrected her by saying: "You don't have a ministry". "Everything that you have is God's". I don't think that she ever got the concept. Not much longer she felt led to leave our church and eventually started her own church thinking that she was going to reap a hundredfold return. She later found out that she had never really cultivated the ground. So, "her ministry" never produced. The pesky weeds came up and choked the seed and she began Gagging for Air. After a year or two she lost hope and gave up. Why did this happen? The answer can be summed up in four words: The Lack of Preparation. Joy is characteristic of the Christian walk, the second part of the fruit that the Apostle Paul mentions in Galatians 5, and the first of Jesus' signs in the gospel of John in turning the water into wine. It is not to say that joy is a moral requirement for Christian living. Some of us experience events that are full of sadness, pain, and rejection. Some of us descend to low points in our lives when joy seems to have prominently departed. We should not use that as the final proof that I am not a good Christian.
I believe that it is good when our mouths are filled with laughter and our tongues with shouts of joy. It is not a sign that you are a Christian and it certainly doesn't meant that if you don't have it that you are not a good Christian. It is not what we have to acquire in order to experience the Christian life. It is what comes to us when we are walking in the way of faith and obedience. I am talking about joy. Eventually it comes. "Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing..." (Psalms 126:2). Some people are just lazy which is why they never see anything accomplished with their lives. They blame that lack of success on this, that, and everything but themselves, but God is no respecter of persons. What He does for one He will do for all. Hebrews 11:6 says, "But without faith it is impossible to please him; for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him."
The key factors that make the difference are not about God, but about a person's level of determination and his/her willingness to do whatever is necessary to achieve a goal. This is a hard fact to face, but ultimately we are all responsible for our success, or lack of success. We all possess the same promises, the same faith, the same power, the same spirit, and the same Jesus who sits at the right hand of God to make intercession for us. The main thing that determines who succeeds and who doesn't succeed is our attitude. You have to want success in order to get it. It doesn't float on clouds and it takes hard work to achieve it. Because most people are willing to do only average work they reap average results. When I was in the military years ago, I quickly found out that in the beginning stages it was a place where you could do average work day after day and get by. What I found out was that there were some promotions that came automatically because of your time in service but the higher promotions came because of hard work and diligence. To achieve super results, one must do super work, be deeply committed to the task, and be willing to do whatever is necessary to realize goals and aspirations. Hebrews 11:6 says that God is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. According to this verse, even God rewards diligence. In fact, He only rewards those who diligently seek Him which means people with a lazy--lethargic, do nothing, take it easy--attitude will never be greatly rewarded by the Lord. This verse says that God rewards the diligent seeker. Diligence is required for any success. The phrase "diligently seek" is taken from a Greek word that means to zealously seek for something with all your heart, all your strength, and all your might. It presents a picture of one who seeks something so passionately and earnestly that he literally exhausts all of his power in his search. Because this word portrays such an determinant effort, the ideal of being hardworking, busy, constant, and persistent in one's devotion to what he or she is doing is also included. What this tells us about Hebrews 11:6, is that God is a reward of those who put all their heart, strength, and might into seeking Him. Those who are so committed in their search that they are willing to exhaust all of their natural powers in their search for Him, they are the ones who will find what they are seeking. You see, you have to be diligent to be rewarded by God. So, it should be no surprise that diligence is going to be required in order for you to succeed in every area of life. It is just a fact that the lazy, neglectful attitude will never get you where you need to go. If you take your life's assignment lightly and approach it with a casual, easy-going, take it easy, relaxed attitude, you will never go far in the fulfillment of your call or your dream. Everybody desires increase. We want to have more, go more, do more, be more. The fact of the matter is increase doesn't automatically come because you ask God for it. I know that this may surprise (or sound strange to) some because a lot of us have the mentality that if we ask and just believe it will happen. Years ago, I was praying for increase and God plainly told me that if He gave me more, I wasn't able to handle it. He told me that He wasn't going to give me more than I could handle. That disappointed me at the time, but as I thought about it, it made a lot of sense. I knew of people who suddenly came into large sums of money and found themselves after a few years broke. Why?...because they didn't know how to handle it. The statistics show that even in things like weight loss, the large majority of those who lose it will gain it back because they don't know how to discipline their appetite. There are also all types of resolutions that are made in January and by March those resolutions are gone by the wayside.
I began to research scripture and I found several places that address these matters. I don't have the space to discuss all of them here now, but one in particular in Luke 16:10 says: "He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much." What I saw in that scripture is that the way to the increase is to manage what God has already given me; to manage that well which is already in my possession. During the early part of my adulthood I was frivolous in spending. I was a poor manager of what God had allowed me to have. My credit was a mess and it was just a reflection of my attitude toward scripture at that point in my life. I didn't see the connection between how I managed that material things that God brought into my possession and my integrity. I definitely didn't see how that would hinder what God would trust me with in the way of increase, and I was a pastor at the time. It was the small things that were hindering me like not paying my bills on time and buying things that I didn't need. I had to learn how to become a better manager, and that was not easy. Coming to the realization of that was powerful, but to put it in operation was very difficult. It requires a life-change. One of the major keys to increase is managing well what God has already given you, whether it be money, time, talent, or relationships. Are you preparing yourself for increase? Prepare to be blessed by learning how to appreciate and best use what you already have. Growing up in my house there was never a dull moment. When I was younger, my daddy taught us all to work. We had to work. There was no option. He was self-employed with his own construction company, so we all had to learn how to do construction work. Back in the early years, My father worked a lot of men who couldn't get jobs anywhere else. Some of these men didn't have the opportunity to go to school because they had to enter the workforce really young in order to take care of their family's needs.
I remember distinctively two men who could not tell time. One of them always wore a watch, even though he couldn't tell time. Well, the one who did not have a watch and couldn't tell time went to the man who had the watch on but couldn't tell time. (Remember this would have been before there were digital watches.) So, when the man without the watch went to the man with the watch he asked him, "What time is it?" thinking that it was about time for lunch. The man who couldn't tell time held it up in the other man's face and said, "There it is right there!" The gentleman who also couldn't tell time looked at it knowing that he couldn't tell time either and said, "I'll be dogged if it ain't". They both walked off not knowing what time it was even though there was a time piece there to tell them, but they just couldn't read it. The Bible says, that we have not because we ask not. In this scenario, there were two men who could have not only gotten the right time if they had asked, but they could have learned how to tell time, if they were not too proud to admit that they couldn't. A lot of Christians are like that. They would rather look like they know something knowing that they don't know it rather than to admit that they don't know and learn what they really need to know. The temptation is always there to look better than you really are. You can't get help like that. You have got to admit: "I don't know." Once you admit it, you can go to the right person (or the right place) to get the right answers, and equip yourself to know exactly what time it is! One of my observations is that in the early years of life, our bodies grow rapidly and then we slow down a bit until we peak around the age of 20. A decline begins after that. Our minds too develop rapidly when we are young. When we reach our twenties, we are still learning, but it becomes harder to grab a hold of new concepts. Even though we reach our mental learning peak a little bit later than our physical growth peak the same saying applies. There is a slow, steady deterioration. Our minds become rigid and lack flexibility. It becomes increasingly difficult for us to learn. We become set in our ways.
We can learn a lot about the way to continue to challenge ourselves by taking a look at Jesus' approach to learning. In Matthew 11:29, Jesus invites us to join Him in the adventure of learning. "Take my Yoke upon you and learn of me", He says. The fundamental meaning of the Greek word disciple, used in the Bible is a learner. Being a disciple means you are in a lifelong learning process. The King James version says "learn of me". There are some versions that say, "Learn with me". The idea is to get in harness with me (Jesus); join up with me; come along side with me and learn from me, about me. Learning is a lifelong task and all one has to do is to look at the life of Jesus, and it is plain to see. In Luke 2:26, we see Him, at the age of twelve, sitting among the teachers in the temple, listening to them, and asking them questions. (Sometimes questions are essential to learning.) Later, in Matthew 24, at the peak of His ministry, we see Him telling a group of His disciples: "Learn this lesson of the fig tree." And then, we see Him in the final painful hours of His life on earth, when He learned obedience from the things He suffered (Hebrews 5:8). Jesus was a lifelong learner. So what's my point? It seems like the older we get, the less we push ourselves to learn. If you are over thirty, how long has it been since you have acquired a new skill or adopted a new attitude? Whether it is religious, social, or otherwise. Have you become so set in your ways that are not willing to change and grow in different areas of your life, or are you learning something new everyday? Jesus said that "I have come that you may life and that you may have it more abundantly, or some versions say have it to the full. If you are not learning, you are not living the way God wants you to live...to the full. |
 AuthorPastor Earl Goings shares his thoughts on everyday concerns. 
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