Caution: God at Work

July 6, 2012

“Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill brought low; the crooked places shall be made straight and the rough ways smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” (Isaiah 40: 4-5)

The essence of Isaiah’s great sermon is that when you build a highway you do four things: you level mountains, you fill valleys, you straighten crooked places, and you smooth out rough places.

Isaiah preached that God was coming into our world and when He did He was going to travel on the highway of the life of His Son.  In that life the mountains of pride would be leveled, the empty spaces would be one hundred percent filled with the Holy Spirit, the crooked ways of sin would be perfectly straight and His rough places would be made smooth by the way He responded to them.

Just before Jesus parted with His apostles He told them that in the same way the Father sent Him into the world He was sending them into the world.  If His life was to be a highway on which God traveled into this world, our life is also to be a highway for God.  I challenge you to ask God to make your life into a highway for Him to travel into this world.

If you pray that prayer when God’s bulldozers start leveling your mountains of pride, His Holy Spirit fills your empty spaces and straightens out your crooked ways of sin and then gives you the grace to smooth out the rough challenges that come into your life.

While all that is happening you can write “Caution: God at work” across your life.

I dare you to have the courage to pray this prayer.

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Posted by Dick Woodward

A question for New Year’s Eve

December 30, 2011

“Where have you come from, and where are you going?” (Genesis 16:8)

 The last days of the year are a good time for reflection and resolution.  Have you ever had a year that was so bad you could not live with the idea of another year of the same?  Are you there now? If you are, you could be ready to hear the question quoted above that God likes to ask people from time to time.

This is the consummate question of direction.  It implies that if we do not have a crisis that changes things, we are going where we have come from.

Sometimes we are the thing that needs to change. Jeremiah actually mocks us for trying to change ourselves: “Why do you gad about so much to change your ways? …  Can the Ethiopian change the color of his skin or the leopard its spots?  Then may you also do good, who are accustomed to doing evil” (Jeremiah 2:36; 13:23).

There is a big difference between trying to change ourselves and being changed by God.  Unless we are changed by God, or God changes what only He can change, we’re trapped in a cycle of going where we have come from.

With great spiritual discernment David asked God to create in him a new heart and God answered that prayer for him (Psalm 51:10).  God can do that today.  We’re not doomed to that cycle of going where we have come from.  We can be changed and God can change the things that must change so we will not go where we have come from next year.

Confess that you can’t change yourself or your circumstances, but believe God can as you enter the New Year… then watch at God work in 2012.

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Posted by Dick Woodward