Quick Note – John 3:30 – Giving it all to God – Both Glory and Obedience

John 3:30 – “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

I’m sorry for not posting in a long while.  I have been quite busy with a lot of things going on in my life from preparing applications to graduate school, planning and traveling for interviews, and dealing with relationship growth pains with friends and family.  All these good things in my life caused me to lose focus of what was really important and made me think that I was bigger and better than I was.  I was becoming proud, self-centered, and self-reliant, and God has recently taken a lot of these things away from me to help me to realize that I needed to humble myself before Him again.

To help you understand the context, the year of 2015 started out so great in that I had what looked to be a blooming relationship, interviews at top schools, and a good relationship with family, friends, and church members.  The Sunday school group I was teaching seemed to be growing.  My friendship with a dear friend seemed to be progressing into something more.  I had graduate school interviews lined up with Harvard, Yale, and UPenn.  Life seemed to be going my way.  All things were go.  Blessings seemed to just keep pouring in.  And as these blessing poured in, I became proud and idolatrous of the blessings rather than grateful and dependent on God.  But recently, each of these things seemed to be slowly stripped away.  My friendship seems to have soured due to my pride and my inability to be compassionate and understanding.  Now, I feel that all she sees me as is another failed friendship in her life and another mistake.  My ministry seems to have gotten hurt from my inability to reflect Christ in that friendship.  Some of the additional interviews I expected to receive from Stanford and Caltech did not come in.  Things just don’t look so bright anymore.

After having multiple talks with multiple people, it has become obvious that what was clearly happening was a growth in my pride and independence from God.  With the friendship, I began to idolize that relationship and would no longer allow God to do what He must with it.  In my desire to be “Prince Charming,” I ended up fighting against God’s will, which was to let go.  With my ministry, I began to think that I had every ability to show the character of Christ all the time and like 1 Corinthians 10:12 says, “Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.”  My unloving attitude and anger led to me not living up to the standards God had set for me.  I was no longer the example I should have been.  With my graduate school interviews, I began to think that every school would want me, but I began to realize that I was nothing without God’s blessing.  It was only because He granted me these interviews that I had these incredible opportunities.

These past few weeks have been hard, because I want to be mad at God for taking all the blessings He laid out at the start of the year away from me.  But I am starting to realize that God is doing this for my best.  He saw my pride, my idolatry, and my self-centeredness and called me out on it.  And as I continued to refuse to listen, He began to take them away until I could see the utter corruption that was taking place in my heart.  I needed to decrease, and He needed to increase.  I needed to decrease in my leading my life, and He needed to increase in the place of Lord.  I needed to decrease in how I wanted people to view me, and He needed to increase in the sight of others.  I needed to decrease in people looking to me, and He needed to be pointed to by my life.  As hard as this has been for me, I am grateful that He loves me enough to chastise me.  I hope that one day I can fix the problems that I started by refusing to listen to Him in the first place.  Just remember that as disciples of Jesus Christ, God needs to increase as we must decrease.

Update:

I wrote the above blog post (on January 21, 2015 in the morning).  Today is January 22^nd, and God has done some amazing things.  By relinquishing my life to Him, He has given me peace in my heart about so many things.  With the friendship, we may not be in the same place as before, but I feel like I can say that right now we are back as friends.  With the interviews, just today, I was offered a chance to interview for an MD-PhD program at UC Irvine.  With the ministry, I have yet to see what will happen, but God will definitely work accordingly.  It is interesting how God can work, when you just give it all to Him.  When you seek His will and obey Him and give Him the glory.  Amazing work He does!  Just amazing!

Genesis 18:1 – Meeting God in the Ordinary

Genesis 18:1 – “And the Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day.”

We often think that we can only meet God in situations that are “spiritual” or “extravagantly special.”  We go off on retreats to escape the noise and hear from Him.  We go to conferences specifically designed to teach us new lessons about our Christian life.  We go to revivals to be renewed by the Holy Spirit.  We set out these events so that we can meet with God.  These are definitely not bad things; they are all actually wonderful things, but oftentimes, we start to believe that we need these “engineered” events to grow closer to God and to hear from Him; but that is not true.  We can meet God anytime, anywhere as long as we are ready and willing to hear from Him.  He is not some distant entity that can only be met at one point in time.  He is not some limited being who can only be met in one temple in the entire world.  He is not some unapproachable king who requires you to perform a number of tasks before you meet him.  He is an available and loving God, who loves to spend time with each and every one of us.

In our passage today, we find that Abraham was going about his normal business in the day.  He wasn’t doing anything special.  He was simply sitting at the door of his tent during the heat of the day, likely around noon or early afternoon time, probably trying to avoid the sun.  But it was during that time, that the Lord met Him to remind Abraham that he was going to have a son.  The context does not mention him offering a thousand sacrifices or fasting for days without end.  It simply mentions that Abraham was doing ordinary things on an ordinary day, when God met him.  The same situation occurred for Elisha when he was called to be the successor of Elijah the prophet.  Elisha was simply working the fields, when he was called (1 Kings 19:19-21).  Peter and Andrew or James and John were simply doing their jobs as fisherman, when Jesus Christ also called them to follow Him (Matthew 4:18-22).  God met and called each of these people in the ordinary situations of their lives.  The important thing was that each of them was willing and ready to listen to God’s calling and to respond.  Abraham when he saw the Lord hurried to meet Him and prepared a meal for Him.  Elisha immediately stopped his work, said goodbye to his family, and followed Elijah for training.  Peter, Andrew, James, and John all immediately left their nets to follow Christ.  Although they were about their usual ordinary day, they were always ready to meet with God.

As God’s children, we need to remember that God can meet us anytime, anywhere, as long as we are faithful, available, and teachable for Him.  In other words, we need to be F.A.T. for Jesus as my Dad would say.  So don’t think that just because you aren’t at a revival meeting or a retreat that God can’t meet you.  He can meet you right now.  Oftentimes, He uses the simple, ordinary things in life to teach us extraordinary lessons about Him, if we are just willing to listen.  Think about how God asked Jeremiah to use the illustration of the Potter to depict how He shapes our lives.  Think about how Christ used the illustration of a shepherd to show His care for us.  These were everyday jobs of everyday people, but they were used to illustrate important spiritual principles.  God is ready to meet us in our everyday lives, are you willing and ready to hear Him?