REPOST FROM October 18, 2008
Ok, first - I can't take credit for the idea of this analogy. My father-in-law used part of the following comparison in a conversation with my wife yesterday. Rachel and I then used the following in conversation with our son last night.... and God pressed in and saved his soul. SO I'M SHARING:
Our world is at war. Our lives are at war. God has a set standard... the commandments in the bible. We are in rebellion against His standard. (Go through each of the commandments asking yourself where you stand on each of them. You will find that you come up short every time.)
When we are born into this world, we come with our sin nature and our own agendas. As a human, you are born at war with God. We want to live life our own way. We become lord of our own lives and start to manipulate the world around us to get the things that we want. You can see it in infants: they want food, so they cry until someone gives it to them. They don't want to go to bed, so they cry to get out of bed. They are not concerned with the fact that the mother may be asleep or that there is an intense conversation going on in the next room. No one teaches a child how to lie, children start lying to get what they want, to manipulate the lives of those around them in an effort to control their "world". These efforts are weapons in your regime..you start in their skills at your first cry.... that's when you start your own battle.... your first cry: "Put me back in!". You have your own army with yourself as the general. Every time you go against one of God's standards, you are in rebellion against His kingdom, His authority.
Now, how does a nation win a war? Well, one army has to either surrender or be captured.
As John McCain knows, if you are captured, you are put into jail as a POW and punished, often torchered.
If you surrender, treaty negotiations ensue and rebuilding follows under the new ground rules of the conqueror.
As a "lost person", you are battling God everyday.... you want to stay rebellious and head of your own life. Satan is on your side. He wants you to stay rebellious as well. God is on the offensive, He sends Christians (soldiers of God) in to do His will in our lives. You are shown truth, love, joy, compassion, etc. God is sharing Himself with you as an effort to win the battle you've started and to squash your rebellion. God talks to us in 4 ways, his four branches of the military:
1. Through the bretheren
2. Through the Word
3. Through circumstances
4. Through prayer
If you can see God working in one of these ways, He is communicating with you...
Make no mistake, God will win the war. And He will do it in one of the two ways:
What we tasked our son to do is to figure out what weapons he was using in his army to war against God. What weapons did he think that he was using to battle the Lord. One was the fear of the unknown... it was keeping him away from surrender. The other was self-obsession, he loved attention and saw that he was always seeking attention for himself in everything He did. Every one has a weapon that God must over come. For me it was my self-pride. I didn't think I needed God because... well, I was awesome. One of God's assaults on my rebellion brought that weapon in to clear defeat as I was injured and all of my fame and "awesome-ness" was stripped away from me because I could no longer play the part of the rockstar in my world... God was in control, and I saw it. With Davy, we took each of his weapons and talked them out to where he could see that they were useless in his fight and that God had already defeated his tactics. All that was left was for him to retreat, having faith in his weapons or in future weapons that he might come up with. ... or to surrender.If you surrender, you are acknowledging that He is the supreme power, that He is in control and that you and all your efforts are weak in comparison. That you are a weak, dreadful sinner that have done things to offend Him...and you are sorry for it.
Next, you go into peace talks / treaty negotiation... that's "the prayer". You acknowledge that He is Lord, ruler of your life, and that you accept His terms. His terms? After realizing that you are a sinner at rebellion with God, you have to realize that God had to make a way to restore His relationship with you, with humans. Because humans are born with a sin nature and cannot have a relationship with God on their own, God came down in the form of a human... in Jesus Christ. He paid the penalty for our sins so that we could be restored into proper relationship with God. You see, the penalty for sin, is death. Blood covers sin so that God can commune with us. In the Torah, it was through a precise ritual that included the sacrafice of certain animals... this made a temporary covering (or atonement) of sins so that God could have a relationship with His people. It's all about restoring the relationship that we had (mankind) with God in Eden before the fall of man when sin entered the world (before our rebellious regimes, when we were still at peace under God's authority). When God came to earth as Jesus, He made the ultimate sacrafice... His blood covers our sins permanently.... so we can have an everlasting relationship with God and our relationships with Him, as humans, are restored. You acknowledge this truth, we call it "accepting Christ", in your peace talks... in your prayer and in your testimony to others before baptism.
After that, God starts to rebuild our lives from the inside out. It starts with setting up a new government... a new mindset. Then the rebuilding spreads into the rest of the defeated country.
Ah, good stuff! ... good analogy! Feel free to comment below and discuss...share what your weapons were and how they were proved useless against God.
(c) 2009 Reformation Productions
www.ReformationProductions.com
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.