After the Drought Comes the Flowers!

I live in South Texas. And I love it.

I like Mexican food and cowboy boots.
I think Salsa should be considered as it's own separate food group.
I love when someone says, "Howdy!" to me.
I think the skies in Texas have their own, beautiful shade of blue.

But there is something else about living in South Texas that I don't like as much.

Drought.

Every few years, we seem to have a drought. Last year's was a doozy! It was like the faucet was turned completely off and not a drip or drop fell from the sky.

And, after a few months of no precipitation and record highs, the land looked dead. So dead, in fact, that it seemed like it could not possibly ever be beautiful again.

It really began to feel as if there was no way there would ever be life in the land again. Crops were dead. Grass was varying shades brown. Livestock was dying.

It was bad.

And so we prayed.
We cried out to God.
We petitioned the Creator of life.
We beseeched the Sustainer of all.
We appealed to the only One who was capable of bringing us relief.

And He, Who is faithful, supplied our needs.  After a year of almost no measurable rain, this is what our spring looks like:

There were rains all winter and now there are flowers. Everywhere. Blue. Purple. Lilac. Yellow. Orange. Red. Pink.

And that makes me think.  You know, while all around me was dead, dry, and desolate, somewhere, under the dust, lay the seeds of these very flowers. Dormant. Waiting. Hoping.

For the rain.

And when it came, the flowers bloomed. The fragrance wafted.  The colors splashed. The beauty abounded. What had once been dead, was now alive.

And how about you. Are you in a drought?
Do things seem desolate and does all hope seem gone?
Have you had a death of a dream or a hope?
Does it seem that all the "rain" in your life has stopped?

Then wait. And don't loose hope. Your dreams are not dead. They are just dormant.

Pray, cry out, petition, beseech and appeal to your Sustainer. Because the rains will come. He, Who is faithful, will send them.

So let us know, let us press on to know the Lord. His going forth is as certain as the dawn; and He will come to us like the rain, like the spring rain watering the earth."

Hosea 6:3

Setting our Hope in God ~Part Two

Here is the second part in a three part series on WHY God is the only One we can place our Hope in.


There are three reasons we know we can place our hope in God:

1. What God has already done
2. What God is doing now
3. What God will do in the future.

Part One can be found here.
Hope you enjoy!  Let me know what you think.

Let’s review our three reasons we set our hope in God because that determines what we will do:

1.              ~ The times He has already delivered us.

2.              ~ The acts of deliverance He presently working in our lives now.

3.              ~  The promises of His deliverance in the future.

I LOVE this.  I have nothing to do in the past, present, or future as to why I can have hope. I don’t hope in myself or anybody else. It is ALL ABOUT GOD.

So let’s set the stage:

1.  We have a special ministry in people’s lives

2.  Every single one of those people is sinners, so it is going to be hard.

3.  Since we are also a sinner, we can’t rely on ourselves.

4.  We can’t look at our circumstances to determine what to do.

5.  But, we have a God Who is at work yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

We have got to have the right attitude to do this job. 

Ministry is draining. 

Sinners will cause you pain. 

You have a fallen body along with your fallen heart and you are going to get tired. 

And your circumstances will often seem to be in direct opposition to what God has purposed in your heart.

Given those facts there is one more thing we need to establish.  And that is the attitude we will need for this daunting task.  And this attitude is vital for us retaining our hope.

       

JOY!

You may be thinking, What!  You just told me I am going to be tired, hurt, sad, and going through difficulties.  And now you think I should have joy!!!!!????

Are you crazy?

Well, maybe I am, but not because I think we are supposed to have joy!  Because I didn’t come up with the fact that we are to have joy- God did.

But don’t take my word on it. Let’s look at what God has to say about the matter.  We are going to “build a case”, so to speak.  As we go over the three "times" that is delivering us we will also look at Scripture about Joy- the joy we are supposed to have right in the middle of whatever is going on.  Let’s start with the first one:

DELIVERED:

When Paul refers here to being delivered, he is talking about perils and (vs 8) burdens beyond his strength.  Can anyone identify?  Ever been burdened beyond your strength? Let me just go out on a limb here and state categorically, if you have been involved with people, you have been burdened and you have been grieved.

But the more important question is, has God ever delivered you? Can you remember those times?

It is vital that we remember every time God has delivered us in the past.  We can never deal with what is happening in our lives in the present with a proper attitude we don’t.

And then the next question, so what is the attitude we need to have as we remember not only the past deliverances but also the past burdens and hurts?  

Remember?  That’s right, joy!  Right in the middle of the yuck!

How do we have this joy in the middle of the grief?

By remembering what God has already done.  How He has worked beforehand.  How He has previously delivered.  How He has already saved.

Neh 8:10b: “Do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

Don’t you love how God doesn’t just tell us to “be strong”?  No.       

He gives us a prescription for strength.

His joy.

Not only do we not have to have our own strength.  We don’t even have to have our own joy.  We have access to His joy and His strength.

God wants to give us His joy, and when we accept that joy we will find 

He then also has given us His strength.

Isaiah 49:5 says, "My God IS my strength."

We must remember times of deliverance in the past in order to not be grieved or over whelmed now. 

And every time we praise Him for what He has already done we get His joy and His strength.

Romans 12:12 gives us a three-fold instruction:

Rom 12:12: rejoicing in hope, persevering in tribulation, devoted to prayer.

The part that allows us to have joy as we remember how God has delivered is the first one.  “Rejoicing in hope.” 

Why can we approach every situation rejoicing?  With joy? With hope?

        By remembering.

By remembering how God has already delivered.

Neh 8:10b: “Do not be grieved, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

So the first step in us setting our hope on God is that we remember what He has already done, and we walk in the strength of His joy.

Will Deliver Us

Once we have settled in our heart and in our mind and in our emotions that God has been faithful in the past and we clearly remember when He has delivered us in the past…..

We can face today’s challenges from a different viewpoint.

Every time it gets dark at night I have hope for the light to come in the morning.  Why?  Because I remember this morning and yesterday morning and the morning before that it got light again.  Even in the middle of the darkest, most moonless night I don’t fear that morning will not come.

The same advantage comes from the “knowing” that God has delivered you before.  And when you are in the midst of dark nights with relationship struggles or growing pains or mothering challenges or financial crisis or (and you can fill in the blank here with whatever your present “school” that the Lord has you in) you can “know in your knower” that God delivers and you can confidently rest your hope in that same God Who has delivered you before.

It is not a test or even a question.  You already have proof.   God will deliver, right on time, just like He always has.

So let’s look at our joy verse for our present needs for deliverance:

Psalm 30:5: Weeping may last for the night,

But a shout of joy comes in the morning.

Hallelujah, just as morning came this morning after last night, joy comes after the weeping. Just like this:

Psalm 90:14: O satisfy us in the morning with Thy lovingkindness,  that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.

Want some more proof?

John 16:33: These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

Our Romans 12:12 portion for our present troubles is the point of “persevering in tribulation”. 

        Yes, we will have tribulation.

        But God commands us to persevere.

How do we persevere?

        By gritting out teeth?

        By grinning and bearing it?

        By being tough?  By being strong?

        By pulling up our boot straps and trudging on through?

No.  None of those things can we sustain for very long, because they all rely upon us.

No, we persevere with good cheer by setting our hope in God.  Remembering our past deliverance helps us anticipate our coming joy. 

You know how you would feel happy as a child just anticipating your birthday?  Or Christmas?  Half of the fun of Christmas is the looking forward to it!

Think about it.  We don’t have to be in happy present circumstances to feel joy, at least God’s joy.

That does not mean it will all eventually work out like we think it should.  You don’t know if your wrapped presents hold what you think you want under that Christmas tree.  But, just maybe it is something better.  God wrapped them up just for you after all, and He will give them to you in His good time.

So, we can experience joy as we remember what God has already done and anticipate how He is presently in the process of delivering us.  Whether we can perceive it yet or not.

I want to deal with one more thing here before we move on.

Some of us have been walking in a “present trial” for a long time.  We are still waiting for that deliverance and we are getting tired and weary.

        

Dear sisters I don’t understand it all, but I believe God is never late.  I want to share a quote with you:   

“If God permits in His wisdom what He could have prevented with His power, it is for this purpose: that we would bow our knees and say, “Yes, Lord, Your will be done.”

God is never late, but we have to trust in His timing.  

Otherwise we become bitter and hard and hopeless. 

The Israelites wandered the desert for forty years, but deliverance did come.  It came with and through wars and battles, but it came.  And God was faithful.  All the time.  In the desert.  On the battle field.  In the Promised Land. We can trust Him too.

Okay, so we have had trials in the past and seen God deliver.

And we have hardships in the present and we anticipate that God is already at work to deliver us now.

What else do we need to know?

Tune in to Part Three and find out!!!!

In the mean time, take the time to remember the times God has already delivered you.  Write them down.  Talk about them.  Make them a part of you.  They are some of the reasons WHY you can set your hope in God!

Setting Our Hope in God ~Part One

I had the joy and privilege of sharing this message with the ladies from my church this past week in honor of Mother's Day.  Since this is a long message I will break it up into several parts.  While this is a message to Mothers, it is not only about mothering, but rather about our hearts as we go about doing whatever God has called us to do.

The Lord gave us a very special job as Mothers.  We have a unique road into our child’s heart.  When a child is sick, who does she want?  When a football player waves to the camera, who does he say hi to?  It is universal and it doesn’t go away with age.  Almost everyone can identify with the occasional feeling “I want my Mommy.”

As Moms we have a special privilege and role to fulfill in our lives. There is a great deal of ministry and discipling and teaching and dispensing of justice that are required in mothering.

But I want to encourage you all, even if you are not a Mother yet.  As women, we often have the opportunity to minister to the people around us, whether in our own family or in the people God brings into our lives, in a caring, responsive, and spiritually encouraging capacity.  What is true in the ministry of Motherhood is true in all ministries.  God’s truth will apply outside of just the role of “Mother”

Today we will not talk so much about Motherhood as we will talk about how we approach and walk in the ministry He has given us.

There is one problem with being a minister in people’s lives though. You have to minister to sinners.

Shocking, I know.

But the reality is that the only people we can turn to are sinners. And the only people who turn to us are sinners.  And the only people we can pour our lives into, whether in or out of the church, or in or out of our families, are sinners.

And sinners are messy.  And sinners’ messes can get very messy.

I know, I know, we all think our children are wonderful and amazing and talented and special.  And they are.

But they are wonderful, amazing, talented, special sinners who desperately need a Saviour.       

One danger we can fall into as Moms, in our special heart relationship with our children, is we can take on too much responsibility and emotion in their lives.  We hurt when they hurt.  We worry when we don’t know where they are.  We advise, even when they haven’t asked for it, when we see bad choices.  And then when something bad happens……..well, then.  Look out.

I want to talk with you today about a lesson that God is teaching me.  I have been learning to not take on too much. And I have been learning how to remember, learning how to trust, and how to hope.

We are going to be looking at parts of a letter Paul wrote to the Corinthians, who were people he looked on as his own children.  So, even if you do not have children, like Paul, these words can still be used in your life in how you maintain a ministry with the “children” and the ministry He has given you.  This is not a “how to” minister talk but a “how to maintain” our own heart talk.

Here is our foundation verse from which we will build today:

(God) who delivered us from so great a peril of death, and will deliver us, He on whom we have set our hope.  And he will yet deliver us.  II Cor 1:10

So let me ask you something:  What have you set your hope on?

Let’s look at a definition of hope:

According to the Holman Bible Dictionary:

Trustful expectation, particularly with reference to the fulfillment of God's promises...hope is the confidence that what God has done for us in the past guarantees our participation in what God will do in the future....The Bible bases its hope in God and His saving acts.

Or in other words:  He On Whom We set our Hope. This is not a feeling. This is not what we want to happen.  We can have hope because of what and Whom it is founded upon. 

What we really need to have hope is have a new set of glasses.  Now these days I need glasses in different levels for different things.  I need one strength for close up and one for far away.  And then there is that sort of inbetween spot that is just sort of fuzzy.

These new glasses are not for our eyes though.  They are for our heart to look at the sinners and their messes and our trials and our difficulties and they help us see and therefore have hope in three things:

1.                             What God has already done

2.                             What God is doing now

3.                             What God will do in the future.

  

Listen to our verse again:

(God) who delivered us from so great a peril of death, and will deliver us, He on whom we have set our hope.  And he will yet deliver us.                                                               ~II Cor 1:10

We are going to build on these three layers:  what God has done; what God is doing; what God will do in the future.

This pattern is repeated over and over again in the Scripture:

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today, yes and forever.

Heb 13:8

So we will use these to build our faith and thereby increase our Hope.  Our Hope in Him.  And our hope must only be in Him.  Because....

Our circumstance will often not support our hope. 

Our “sinners” may not deserve our hope. 

That is why we don’t hope in them.

We HOPE in the only One Who can act.

In the book Faith Like Potatoes, Angus Buchan tells about a time when he was looking at the dry land of his farm with his farm manager, Simeon, a native Zulu:

Buchan, “Everything is so dry.  The other farmers aren’t doing any planting.  There’s no sign of movement on any of the other farms.  What are we going to do?  We’re losing time.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t matter:  Simeon, this is serious!”

“Look,” he said, ”let’s go and plant the crop.  We’re late already.”

“Simeon, you don’t have to be an agricultural graduate to know you don’t plant seed into dry ground!  You wait for the rain to fall first.”

The big Zulu looked me straight in the eye.  His voice was filled with authority and complete conviction. “Brother, you have just come back from a mighty revival, and you have seen God move with signs and miracles every day.  Can you trust Him to bring rain on our maize crops?  Why are you not prepared to plant in the dust and believe Jesus to bring the rain?”

And so with us, if our circumstances determine our actions, we might never plant.

What is our response to droughts, “trials,” that come to our families or our lives?  Should we be surprised that there are difficulties when we go where God tells us to go or when we do what God tells us to do with the sinners He places in our life and the sin in our own heart?

Eccl. 11:4- “Whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.”

~Okay, there is the end of part one.  There is more coming in a few days.  In the meantime-  Put your hope in God!

Got Weeds?

There are several good reasons my yard needs to be mowed, but hasn't been:

1. The riding lawn mower is broken.
2. We can't afford to buy a new one and our old one is not worth fixing.
3. My sons, my resident "lawn men" all moved out.
4. When looking at the myriad of chores that need to done, mowing the yard, the big yard, with a push mower, never seems to move to the top of the list. (Gee- I wonder why?)

As a result, there are quite a few interesting plants growing in my front yard right now.  You have to understand, we have a BIG yard (hence, the need of the riding lawn mower).  It is really more of a field than a yard.  And while I don't have any anticipation of it looking like a golf course, but I do want it to look neat.

There have been these big green weeds growing all over the field, getting bigger by the day, and I think they look terrible from my vantage point of the living room window.  They look like gangly, and ugly, and out-of-control.....and well....like weeds!

And I am not over-fond of weeds.

My general standpoint on the weed matter is they need to go.  Not picky on the methodology.  They just need to go.  Mowing them out of sight is perfectly acceptable.

Today, though, God taught me something through those weeds.

I was walking through the field- just a sort of "mental health" walk.  A few minutes in the wind and sun to clear the cobwebs and produce some vitamin D.  As I got closer to the weeds I noticed something.  They are about to burst  forth in bloom.  Lots and lots of blooms.  They are the native Texas wildflower "Mexican Hat", which is actually one of my favorite flowers. I just think they are so cool looking. 

And they are growing everywhere.  In my field.  In my un-mown field.

But if our mower had been working....

If everything was groomed and orderly....

If things were as "they are supposed to be"...

I would miss out on all the little "hats" that are just waiting to burst forth in glorious yellows and reds.

And as I walked around the field, and found the first anxious little flower that had bloomed, I wondered.  

I wondered how many times I looked at the "weeds" in my life, from my limited vantage point, and wished for them to go away.  OR maybe even MADE them go away, and the whole time I never got to see the beauty they could have produced.

If everything in my life was according to the "plan", if it all lined up with the "vision", if things were ever "normal"....

To borrow a phrase from Anne Shirley, "Oh, how much I would miss."

Isn't it just like God to hide beauty in a weed.

To hide a king in a shepherd.

To hide a prophet in the wilderness.

To hide Eternal Life in a manger.

So why do I doubt?  Why do I look at my life weeds and not see them knowing they will produce something good?  Why am I not hoping and believing in the flower that is sure to come?

It is like the story of the little boy- the optimist.  When rushing into the barn and seeing a bunch of manure he gets so happy and excited.  His friend, confused at his joy asked him how so much manure could make him happy?.  "Well", the young hoper and believer states, "If there is this much manure, there has to be a pony in here somewhere!"

So here is to my weeds. (I like talking about the flower analogy better than the manure one.)  To the weeds in my yard and the weeds in my life- let me just say, "Welcome."

And welcome to the beauty and the flowers and color and the life that is to come. 

Almost ready to bloom.

My first "hat".

More flower lessons seen on the way back into the house:

Honeysuckle: blooms for VERY short time, but makes
the most of it by filling the air around it with amazing aroma.

Iris: can only bloom if it is cold enough and harsh enough
in the winter.

Cactus Flower:

It is a beautiful flower amidst the thorns.