Make Room for Your Miracle (3 page)
In the eyes of God, then, what is our greatest destiny or purpose? What makes us great? We learn from the Shunammite a number of things.
First, we are hungry for God. And as we stay hungry, we are open to God to speak to us. This is, in effect, making a welcome place for the third Person of the Godhead. The heart that is hungry for the true God will recognize and welcome the Holy Spirit.
A heart that is prideful will almost always miss the visitations of God—miraculous and “ordinary.” It is the hungry people who draw His Presence. Blessed are the hungry people, Jesus said. In every time and every nation there are those who hunger and thirst for the true God, and nothing will satisfy them except that they be fulfilled by God Himself. And then, when they welcome the Holy Spirit, it is not just an act of religion: They have a place for Him to abide.
Another thing that makes us great in the eyes of God is our love for His Word. The great ones truly treasure the Bible. There was a missionary whose path we crossed who had worked extensively in India. She told of meeting a woman who owned only a portion of the Twenty-third Psalm. The missionary offered the woman a Bible, but she declined it, saying, “Oh! That is too much. I have lived my entire life on these few verses. They are so rich they satisfy me.” A few lines of Scripture had filled this woman’s well her whole life, and yet how many people own a copy of the whole Bible and simply neglect it? If that is the case with you, your heart has likely become fallow ground.
The next thing that makes us great is a desire to honor the true servants of God. Those who are notable in God’s eyes honor the vessels that carry His Presence. This awareness starts in our local congregations. Do not let the enemy make you offended when God puts you in a body of believers. You might often hear people say, “I don’t need pastors, I don’t need elders, I don’t need church leadership and I certainly don’t need relationships with those ‘sinners’ in the church.” Too often people separate themselves from a living church body at the drop of a hat, and then in the hour that they need the double-portion anointing it is not there because they have cut themselves off from the vessels through which God intended His anointing to flow.
One more thing makes us great: simplicity of needs. We are not always wanting more “things,” because carnality does not satisfy. First Timothy 6:6 says, “Now godliness with contentment is great gain.” As we find our contentment with the Person of miracles, out of that communion He drops His words and glory into our lives.
The Shunammite faced enormous loss in her life, yet she lived out these character qualities with dignity. Scripture tells us that with all of her wealth and position, she lacked the one thing she desired above all else: children. Barrenness was a poverty that could not be appeased by human will. She faced humiliation and inner devastation, and yet she was content. She had dreams and longings, but she also chose not to let resentment or bitterness reside in her heart over what she lacked. Thus, she was never lying to say, “All is well.” She could trust her destiny because she was at peace in her true identity.
The seed for your miracle has been sown in your identity as a child of your heavenly Father. Our identity—past, present and future—is defined by the word of Someone greater than ourselves. As we enter communion with the Lord, making a place of rest in and for Him, worshiping Him, praising Him, we are transformed and become a conduit for the eternal Word to enter and redefine our temporal circumstances. We are transformed and become transmitters of the divine King and His glory to others.
In every neighborhood on earth, God wants Shunammites— men and women. Wherever you are, whether you are located in the Middle East or Europe, whether you are in North America or Africa, whether you are in India or Australia, we know that through Jesus Christ, His shed blood and the power of His Spirit you can welcome the atmosphere of His glory. Your life becomes His place to dwell. It is a life that is fulfilled, a life that is redemptive, a life that is experiencing miracles. A life that transmits His glory to others around you.
Who Am I and Why Am I Here?
In our day, the world does not lack for spirituality. Atheism is not cool anymore. Relativism is in. Multiculturalism is the new morality. Multiculturalism, essentially, is a spirit of humanism that wants to erase the clear lines of identity. Opinion polls guide many cultures rather than moral convictions. Somebody controls the world market, but most of us do not know who, and we seem to have very little say about it. Our generation is more medicated, stressed, dysfunctional, image-driven and fear-controlled than any generation in history. We believe we are what we eat. We are what we wear. We are what we tattoo on our bodies. We are what we drive. We are where we live.
In Acts 17, Paul is speaking to the great philosophers, the great influencers of his time in Athens. He has seen an altar there set up to someone called the Unknown God, and he says, “Listen, the one you are worshiping, the one whom you say you don’t know, can be known. Let me declare Him to you, let me make it clear.”
And then Paul explains, “He is not worshiped with men’s hands as though He needed anything. He gives life to all and breath to all things. He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and He has predetermined their appointed times”—for instance, today—“and the boundaries of their dwellings”—for instance, where you live—“so that they should seek the Lord in the hope they might grope for Him and lay hold of Him. He is not far from each one of us. In Him we live and move and have our being.”
What is the purpose of this quest to discover our true identity? It is to acknowledge God as Father. This is what it means to be called human. In theological terms, it is called
Imago Dei
, the image of God. Found in Genesis 1:26–27 (the Hebrew is
b’tzelem elohim
), the term literally means “something cut out from or formed in the image of God Almighty.”
There are four aspects for humans in this doctrine. One, we have a capacity to know, to reason and to make moral decisions. Two, we are called to operate as God’s representatives on the earth by ruling over nature. Three, we have a capacity to mirror the unity within the Trinity by relating to God and other humans. And four, we are created to glorify God through making His character visible within the rest of creation. Only humans possess these qualities.
The Key to Your Identity
There was a very odd story we heard on the news about a man in England who died. When his will was read, his family and friends found that his last request was that he be cremated, mixed with fish food and scattered in the pond where he loved to fish. And then his friends were requested to go to the pond and catch the fish that ate their friend—and eat them. Eeek! That is confused thinking about identity, but it gives a little picture of the importance of knowing who we are.
And very simply put, we know who we are because He is
I AM
and we are in
I AM
. We discover ourselves as
I AM
opens the visible revelation of His character, of His nature. But most importantly as we lay hold of our adoption as His sons and His daughters, we take on His identity. The future of everyone who makes this journey rests not in the elements of the material world or the imaginations of men. It is the knowledge of God as Father that secures our destinies and makes room for His abiding Presence.
When Jesus went to the cross, He had you in mind. Remember: He thought of you before He made the world. His mission was to die. Mission accomplished. God the Holy Spirit descended to remain on Jesus when He was alive. After Jesus was baptized, showing His utter submission, His utter loss to His own identity to please the Father, the Bible says in the gospel of John that the people saw the Spirit descend in bodily form and remain on Him. Then in the tomb the Spirit came again and breathed resurrection life into that dead mouth. Psalm 29 says that “the voice of the Lord is powerful” (verse 4). “The God of glory thunders” (verse 3). “The voice of the Lord makes the deer give birth . . . and in His temple everyone says, ‘Glory!’” (verse 9).
I, Bonnie, experienced Psalm 29 in my own life when I was pregnant with our fourth child. I had a complication called placenta previa centralis, had hemorrhaged the entire pregnancy and had died twice. Finally at 25 weeks, my placenta had died and fallen out, my water had broken and the chance of survival for the life that might be in my womb (doctors still had not found a heartbeat) was grim. They took me in to do an emergency C-section. But in that time of darkness God spoke to us and said that we would have a son, that we were to name him Aaron and that he would live and not die.
I was lying on that stretcher, and they were getting ready to put me out. Suddenly, another Man entered the room. He came and stood at the head of the stretcher. And His voice, not with the words of human language but in light waves and rays of power like lightning and thunder, came out of Him into me and hit my vocal cords. I heard myself tell my doctor, “I can have this baby naturally.” And that voice moved through me and surrounded my womb. In a few seconds, I heard five tiny “mews”—like a newborn kitten.
Mew. Mew. Mew. Mew. Mew.
I pointed my finger at my doctor and said, “It’s a boy, isn’t it?” He looked ghastly. The doctor did. He was holding death in his hands. I said, “His name is Aaron, and he will live and not die,” and then I passed out.
Aaron did live. Today he is a university graduate, healthy and brilliant. The voice of the Lord is powerful. The God of glory thunders. He is the beginning and the end and everything in between. When we understand who we are and why we are here, we can begin to make room for His miracle-working Presence.
So who are you? You are an eternal child of God Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. Why are you here? That you might seek and find Him and be fully conformed to His image. When you have Christ, you have the key to your identity. You have something worth living for because it is something worth dying for.
In the first chapter of John’s gospel, Peter’s brother has seen Jesus revealed as
I AM
. He runs to get his brother and says, “We have found Him whom we were seeking.” When Jesus sees Peter He comments, “So, you’re Simon, son of Jonah?”
With that question Jesus is basically saying to Peter, Do you know who you are? And then as though He were answering His own question, Jesus gives Peter a new name. But notice that in Peter’s life from that point on he is called Simon Peter. It is not until the end of his life that Simon Peter finds himself in
I AM
and is called simply Peter.
There was a transformation of the man—his identity and his image. And we know the story of Peter’s weakness. When Peter denied Jesus, he was not yet sure who he was. Maybe he also was not totally convinced of who God was. But Jesus said, “Oh, I have a plan for you! I am going to take that clay and mold it to be like Me, the Lamb who overcomes, who triumphs.”
And when we see Peter at the end of his life, we know that he was willing to die for what he believed. Church tradition holds that Peter was crucified upside down. He did not want to be crucified in the same image as the Lord. He now knew he was Peter, the rock. He had found his identity in Christ when his enemies threatened to kill him; he was immovable.
There was a news report from California that a son of the highest Hamas leader in Gaza had found Christ. Yes, he had to flee his country, his family, his people. He had to leave the identity that had him covenanted with death. He was quoted as saying that this means a break with his father, but that he was praying that his father would also come to know the truth, to find Jesus.
Identity begins with fatherhood. Every soul is born into the identity of a corrupted father, Adam, and into a covenant with death. But Christ has come to break the covenant of death, bind us into God the Father and give us the Kingdom with an inheritance.
Would you be great in God’s eyes? Then let the great
I AM
draw you to Himself like a little child and show you who you really are. Your quest begins here.
As they pass through the Valley of Baca, they
make it a place of springs; the autumn rains
also cover it with pools.
Psalm 84:6, NIV
The Shunammite Speaks . . .
One night my father made my dreams come true.
I stood on our rooftop one calm evening after sunset, leaning against the stone parapet that circled its perimeter. Our roof, like everything in our lives, had boundaries. Our Law prescribed a low wall around the roof so that you might not bring the guilt of bloodshed on your house if someone fell from that height.
I gazed out over many dwellings and the darkening countryside beyond. A few oil lamps flickered through windows. One watchman’s lamp shone orange in a tower beyond the city gate, and another glowed in the vineyard along the outcrop. Overhead a silver sliver marked the beginning of a new month, rosh chodesh, the new moon. A wisp of a smile in the heavens, like the Creator winking from His lofty perch.
A hound yowled somewhere from the streets below, letting out a long lament calling for company. I sighed and sympathized with the lonely heart: I was sixteen and not yet betrothed. Most of the young women my age were already coddling their newborn infants.
Three years had passed since the celebration marking my coming of age. Mother had made me a beautiful new tunic of finely combed wool for the party—Mother and Aunt had spun and woven the wool themselves, working one after the other at the loom for the space of three months. Under their expert hands, the soft creamy wool had then been dyed an exquisite color— the deep violet of early morning just before the sky takes on the promise of dawn. They told me many times that this was the same dye used for the curtains of the Holy Place, a hue that comes from sea mollusks the Phoenicians use in their textiles. The extravagance was touching to me.