Cut it Out God!!!

Has the thought ever occurred to you that perhaps the trials you are experiencing can be used by Him to help you fulfill your best  and highest work?  Ever stopped to think that God prefers to wrest beauty out of ashes?  It's easy to think such things when we are at the bottom looking up.  But what about when we are fired up and ready to work for God?

Ever had a vision?  Not necessarily like the prophets of old.  But a vision of what you could do for God.  Perhaps it is even now burning within your heart and you are anxious to lay plans to go after it. Happens to me all the time.  But I tend to forget that God is more interested in who we are rather than what we can do for Him.

In his book, An Unhurried Leader, pg 68, Alan Fadling writes: "We assume the next step after receiving a vision is to get moving and get working.  But I've found that often God wants first to make the vision real in our actual lives so that we can live the vision and then see it realized through out work."

Oswald Chambers, in his book, My Utmost for His Highest (July 6 reading) sheds more light:
"Every God-given vision will become real if we will only have patience.  Just think of the enormous amount of free time God has!  He is never in a hurry. Yet we are always in such a frantic hurry.  While still in the light of the glory of the vision, we go right out to do things, but the vision is not yet real in us.  God has to take us into the valley ands puts us through fires and floods to batter us into shape, until we get to the point where He can trust us with the reality of the vision.  Ever since God gave us the vision, He has been at work.  He is getting us into the shape of the goal He has set for us, and yet over and over again we try to escape from the Sculptor's hand in an effort to batter ourselves into the shape of our own goal."

I might not like the language of "battering", but it is part of sculpting.  And if I have asked God to use me, I need to submit to His shaping hand, so that He can fashion me into the tool of His best use.

Photo by JAFAR AHMED on Unsplash

And so there are parts of me that He needs to cut away.  My temper, perhaps.  Or my sharp tongue.  My judgmental attitude or my air of superiority.  My need for attention or maybe even my reticence to be speak out and be noticed.  Whatever it is, there are parts of each of us that must go if we are not to inhibit God's plan for us, nor have our lives stand in the way of someone else seeing and seeking God.

If I am to reach my best use and potential for God, I must first allow Him to make me ready for the job He is calling me to.  So whatever it is, Lord...cut it out.  Whatever needs to go...and my humanity would cry against this...but cut it out.  Prepare me for the vision that you have already implanted in my heart...and all that stuff within me that gets in the way...well...cut it out Lord!