Over-thinking or Not!

(Jeremiah 17:17) “Thou art my hope in the day of evil.”

I wonder if sometimes I over-think certain things. I am not convinced either way. What I do know it is a terrible thing to live in a state of constant disappointment. Failure in any walk or form will get us to live as a defeated foe. But we must be careful not to place our own reasoning about the Word of God, so let us now look for solid reasoning from the Word, the greatest of all books, the Bible to back up this thought.

Now as I am forced to re-think my walk with the Lord over the years, I must confess, I am very disappointed, not with our great God’s favour but the lack of my obedience to His instruction. It is one thing to be sober about a truth but when we find ourselves been beaten up about the same thing over and over, we end up walking in failure. We are often told not to base our commitment on experience, but the Word of God. This is an obvious truth, but the Word should and will shape our experience. If it is foundational and we chose to use it as a yardstick, it will them effect us, not superficially, but experientially.

Let the Word now prove this; “Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation-- if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.” (1Peter 2:2-3) – Is drinking and eating an experience or is it a necessity, the answer is both! I need food to survive but my body will either welcome the taste or reject it, as it now understands the reaction to let’s say a chilli. How then would it be any different to a life-style of a Christian, the text tells us, we must long for spiritual milk, Why? Because it is pleasant to the pallet, the Lord has been sweet to our experience we must have tasted that He is good. If that is the case we will seek Him out.

I am fond of chocolate and make it my business to always were possible throw a couple of slabs into my basket when shopping, the experience of melted creamy chocolate in my mouth is an experience that I look to replicate where and when possible. However it is not a stipulation for me to survive. But unless I understand that something is good, why would I then seek it out, I wouldn’t; now that should be obvious! I trust we all would agree with that thought. Unless I thought that by doing something I despised it would be to my benefit, in other words, all thought I did not look forward to the experience I would do it to avoid punishment. Let me explain; No let the Apostle Peter explain; He pivots his teaching on one word later on in the text and that word is “believe”; “So the honor is for you who believe, but for those who do not believe, "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone." (1Peter 2:7)   

We now have two aspects we must consider, faith as well as experience, how must we unite the two, or should we? We receive the gift of live, our eyes are opened to the truth of the gospel and we believe that God raised His son our Saviour the Lord Jesus from the dead, we either believe in the resurrection or not. If we are have found honour and we are able to confess Jesus as Lord, we then have received a gift from God Himself. I will not spend much time on this point as the Word is clear with its teaching on the subject. After our eyes have been opened to this truth, the taste is good to our pallet as we understand that we have been saved from certain destruction, hell! Now we find an urgency to want to drink the sweet milk of the Word so that we can grow and walk in victory or into salvation if you like. But along the way we are met with disappointment, we stumble and fall, this now sends us into questioning our salvation, or it should get us to at least sit up and take note. Here is the other side of Peter’s teaching; “and "A stone of stumbling, and a rock of offense." They stumble because they disobey the word, as they were destined to do.” (1Peter 2:8)

If our lives are only filled with failure, where we always stumble at the Word and it is an unpleasant grind to heed its instruction, then we are required to sit up and take note, we must! It would be wrong to pretend that all was in order if in fact that was not the truth. If I believed that I did not have HIV and but in fact I do have this virus living in my body, to pretend that it wasn’t, would be to live a lie. I agree that faith believes all things, but it must believe the truth and not a lie, it does not operate in the realm of half-truths, there is no such thing.

Let our faithful brother of old shed some light on what we something’s contend with...

“The path of the Christian is not always bright with sunshine; he has his seasons of darkness and of storm. True, it is written in God’s Word, “Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace;” and it is a great truth, that religion is calculated to give a man happiness below as well as bliss above; but experience tells us that if the course of the just be “As the shining light that shineth more and more unto the perfect day,” yet sometimes that light is eclipsed. At certain periods clouds cover the believer’s sun, and he walks in darkness and sees no light. There are many who have rejoiced in the presence of God for a season; they have basked in the sunshine in the earlier stages of their Christian career; they have walked along the “green pastures” by the side of the “still waters,” but suddenly they find the glorious sky is clouded; instead of the Land of Goshen they have to tread the sandy desert; in the place of sweet waters, they find troubled streams, bitter to their taste, and they say, “Surely, if I were a child of God, this would not happen.” Oh! say not so, thou who art walking in darkness. The best of God’s saints must drink the wormwood; the dearest of his children must bear the cross. No Christian has enjoyed perpetual prosperity; no believer can always keep his harp from the willows. Perhaps the Lord allotted you at first a smooth and unclouded path, because you were weak and timid. He tempered the wind to the shorn lamb, but now that you are stronger in the spiritual life, you must enter upon the riper and rougher experience of God’s full-grown children. We need winds and tempests to exercise our faith, to tear off the rotten bough of self-dependence, and to root us more firmly in Christ. The day of evil reveals to us the value of our glorious hope.” (C.H.Spurgeon)

There is much more to be said on this subject, Lord willing we will pick up on it tomorrow.

Signing off

Tyrone