Life On Earth Has Never Been About Us!

When God deemed you privileged enough to experience what it means to live a life on earth according to his purpose, it is something personal and powerful. I remember in 2005 when I began to go though the wilderness torments, just for a moment which even today seems a life time flashed before me, He showed me how that everything He was going to put me through had nothing to do with me and it was not about me. That was the strangest thing to see how all the pain, the loss, the hardships, and all the adversities even though they were happening to me were not about me. Of course back then I assumed that the episode that I was going through was going to last only a few months. I am glad God did not show me the whole path that I was going to go through for seven years in the wilderness. I would have been spooked and miss out on righteousness, knowledge, wisdom, patience, Agape love, intimacy, faith and all that I have found through going  forward with Him.

I still remember how baffled I was to live out the beauty of being born for a purpose, yet I was puzzled as to how did we manage to make things so much about us. This vision God showed me was not meant just for me. Through it, I understood that God was totally misunderstood by us. I felt like a human being was more like an experiment that has gone wrong. Through the capabilities He put in us, we used them to turn against Him. Each one of us was meant to be a tiny part of a much bigger picture. We are like the tiny pixels that make up the element of a digital picture. Or another comparison would be the tiny fibers of a thread that is used to put together and weave a canvas

We have nothing; absolutely nothing we can offer God that would satisfy Him. The reason is that nothing that we possess belongs to us. Every breath we take, our finances big or small, our possessions, our children, our knowledge etc, all belong to Him. Even the first commandment that is so dear to His heart, we cannot even come close to loving Him if He does not put His Agape Love in our heart, He cannot accept our love because our love is not a selfless love. The only prize possession we possess and that He is after is us coming back to Him so that we can be put back into a relationship where once again He is the Master. The only way possible to do that is through a surrender of the self back to Him.  He wants us to do it, because we recognize who we are in Him. In our helplessness we have come to realize that without Him we are incapable of taking care of ourselves.  He alone has the schematics of our lives. Anything else we create on our own is apart from Him and His vision for us.

Through this revelation, God wanted to impart to me the fact that my life was not about me at all. He succeeded. It is funny, all these years I have been so busy focussing on learning to live a life where He was given His proper place (my Creator) and role (my Master) that I forgot to look at this experience in any other way. That is until this morning when I started reading Oswald Chambers devotional

Go to my website for details on the Holiday Contest!

Oswald Chambers' "My Utmost for His Highest"

Devotional for November 5

Partakers Of His Sufferings

"Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings." — 1 Peter 4:13

If you are going to be used by God, He will take you through a multitude of experiences that are not meant for you at all, they are meant to make you useful in His hands, and to enable you to understand what transpires in other souls so that you will never be surprised at what you come across. Oh, I can't deal with that person. Why not? God gave you ample opportunity to soak before Him on that line, and you barged off because it seemed stupid to spend time in that way.

The sufferings of Christ are not those of ordinary men. He suffered "according to the will of God," not from the point of view we suffer from as individuals. It is only when we are related to Jesus Christ that we can understand what God is after in His dealings with us. It is part of Christian culture to know what God's aim is. In the history of the Christian Church the tendency has been to evade being identified with the sufferings of Jesus Christ; men have sought to procure the carrying out of God's order by a short cut of their own. God's way is always the way of suffering, the way of the "long, long trail."

Are we partakers of Christ's sufferings? Are we prepared for God to stamp our personal ambitions right out? Are we prepared for God to destroy by transfiguration our individual determinations? It will not mean that we know exactly why God is taking us that way, that would make us spiritual prigs. We never realize at the time what God is putting us through; we go through it more or less misunderstandingly; then we come to a luminous place, and say - ' 'Why, God has girded me, though I did not know it!"

Copyright Statement
Taken from 'My Utmost for His Highest', by Oswald Chambers. © l935 by Dodd Mead & Co., renewed © 1963 by the Oswald Chambers Publications Assn., Ltd., and is used by permission of Barbour Publishing, Uhrichsville, Ohio. All rights reserved.