You sang it, did you mean it?

There is an old hymn that says, “Have Thine own way Lord, Have Thine own way, (Do you really mean that?) Thou art the potter I am the clay (are you calling me dirt?) Mold me and make me (is that going to hurt) after Thy will(do I have a choice in all this?) While I am waiting (how long is this going to take?) Yielded and still (still?)

Yesterday I got in the car, cranked up the engine and waited for my phone to connect to the blue tooth so I could listen to music, but decided to leave it off so I could listen and see if the Holy Spirit had something to whisper in my ear, something that Champagne singing “How bout us?”would have drowned out. I began to speak first and invited Him to speak and told Him some concerns I had about myself, and things around me. Then I said “Lord, whatever you ask me to do so that I might be in the place I where I hear you continually, I will do.”Then I began to run that search engine in my mind to see what I thought He was going to ask of me. First of all that is such a stupid statement, if I’m not where I want to be in my relationship with Him, I should already know what it is that is standing in the way of our communication, and two, He shouldn’t have to ask me, it is not a bargaining chip, it is a requirement. Matthew 22:36-40 “Teacher, which command in God’s Law is the most important?” Jesus said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.’ This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself.’ These two commands are pegs; everything in God’s Law and the Prophets hangs from them.”  If we love the Lord our God with all our passion, prayer and intelligence, that leaves little room for error, doesn’t it?

Recently I read one of the posts I had written on judging others and I really sat myself down to examine what’s going on inside of me and, like the corners in my tall ceilings, there were some cobwebs that needed to be pulled down. 2 Corinthians 10:3-6 “The world is unprincipled. It’s dog-eat-dog out there! The world doesn’t fight fair. But we don’t live or fight our battles that way—never have and never will. The tools of our trade aren’t for marketing or manipulation, but they are for demolishing that entire massively corrupt culture. We use our powerful God-tools for smashing warped philosophies, tearing down barriers erected against the truth of God, fitting every loose thought and emotion and impulse into the structure of life shaped by Christ. Our tools are ready at hand for clearing the ground of every obstruction and building lives of obedience into maturity. “ So we put ourselves under the magnifying glass and our faults stand out like red blood on white satin, very obvious!

Malachi 3:2-4 “But who will be able to stand up to that coming? Who can survive his appearance?  He’ll be like white-hot fire from the smelter’s furnace. He’ll be like the strongest lye soap at the laundry. He’ll take his place as a refiner of silver, as a cleanser of dirty clothes. He’ll scrub the Levite priests clean, refine them like gold and silver, until they’re fit for God, fit to present offerings of righteousness.“

When we give ourselves to Him and ask Him to refine us, we have to be prepared to face the heat of the refiner’s fire where all the impurities in us will be burned out and we will be cleansed. We can’t give Him instructions on how to do it, this is His choice and you just submitted your will to it, didn’t you? Some have tried, but God has His mind made up! Isaiah 45:11 Thus God, The Holy of Israel, Israel’s Maker, says: “Do you question who or what I’m making? Are you telling me what I can or cannot do? I made earth, and I created man and woman to live on it. I handcrafted the skies and direct all the constellations in their turnings.”

The way I see it is instructing God would be like trying to tell Rachael Ray how to scramble eggs!