God is not a hostage taker; He’s a son and daughter maker. He will not keep you against your will, or force you to live out the rest of your days in a cage while your every waking hour is spent plotting your escape. He will not force-feed you His word, or chain you to a radiator so you spend a little time with Him. He knocks, and it is our duty to open. He calls, and it is our duty to answer.
Strangely, the argument regarding man’s desire to know more
of God is never presented in such a way wherein man has the wherewithal and
agency to take action and make himself available to facilitate a relationship.
It’s always about how if God really wants me, He’s going to have to chase me
down and twist my arm until I cry uncle. But that’s not love; that’s imposition
and forced compliance.
God commands that we consecrate ourselves so He may sanctify
us. As wise servants, we obey His command and see the benefits thereof in real
and practical terms. We should know the nature and character of the God we
serve well enough to know He is a good God. He’s not commanding consecration
because He doesn’t want to see you happy, but because until you come to the
point of surrendering your all to Him, you only thought you knew what true
happiness was. You were living an illusion, filling the void of your heart with
things that only served to expedite your destruction while telling yourself
this was true happiness in real time. It wasn’t. It was a lie perpetrated by
the devil and all his minions, the same minions who decades later, after stints
in rehab, six divorces, some botched plastic surgery, and a painkiller addiction
finally fess up and confess they’ve lived an empty existence, pretending to be
happy while in their hearts they wept bitter tears.
They couldn’t risk being honest with themselves, never mind
the public, because they had too much to lose, and had convinced themselves that
the things they would have lost had they come out and confessed their misery
were the things that really mattered in life. It’s a vicious cycle that keeps
playing out over and over again, and the thin veil of forced smiles and fake
jubilation has become so transparent as to be glaringly obvious.
We have the blueprint, but we choose to ignore it. We have
the user’s manual, but we think we know better than the One who perfectly
fashioned every cell, atom, tendon, fiber, and joint together and breathed life
into us.
It’s like buying a new car, throwing out the owner’s manual,
putting gas in the oil pan, oil in the gas tank, and then sitting by the
roadside wondering why it’s falling apart. Sure, we can blame the manufacturer
and insist we got a lemon, but maybe, just maybe, if you hadn’t tried to put
diesel in a gas engine, or failed to get an oil change after a hundred thousand
miles, it would have functioned the way it was created and engineered to.
We can’t walk in rebellion and disobedience, then turn around
and blame God when everything falls apart. We can’t ignore His command to
consecrate ourselves to Him, then get angry and bitter because we’re not
growing spiritually, and never received the things we were promised.
The word IF appears in the Bible some sixteen hundred times,
give or take a few. Every time the word IF is present, it presupposes conditionality.
If this, then that. If you hear His voice, do not harden your heart. If you
love Me, keep My commands. If we died with Him, we will also live with Him.
Did we die with Him? Did we hear His voice? Do we love Him? These
are the questions to which only you know the answer, as pertains to you. If I
love Him, then the desire of my heart won’t be to circumvent His commands, or
do the bare minimum I can do in order to make it to heaven by the skin of my
teeth. It will not be some burdensome thing, wherein, every time we sit to read
the Word, or spend time in prayer, we roll our eyes and think of a hundred
other things we’d rather be doing.
Every few months, new buzzwords appear as if out of the ether
and become part of the everyday lexicon. For the past couple of years, you’re
likely to have run across someone talking about either working on themselves,
bettering themselves, or optimizing themselves. It’s all the rage, apparently,
wherein more and more people are acknowledging they are broken, but the mistake
they make is thinking they can put themselves back together and make themselves
whole of their own volition.
You can’t make whole something that was never whole to begin
with. Absent God, the most crucial piece will always be missing, but because
pride and arrogance are strong opiates indeed, men will spend decades going to
therapy, talking about their childhood, repeating daily affirmations until they
become a mantra, adopting some new identity they believe will revitalize their
joie de vivre, and all for naught. At the end of their journey, they are just
as lost, empty, hopeless, bitter, and joyless because they rejected the One who
gives peace, fulfillment, joy, and purpose.
On the surface, God’s offer is simple, but its implications
are profound. If you surrender yourself to Me, I will transform you. If you
surrender yourself to Me, I will give you joy. If you surrender yourself to Me,
I will give you peace. If you surrender yourself to Me, I will make you
fruitful. If you surrender yourself to Me, I will fill you with My Spirit. If
you surrender yourself to Me, I will give you eternal life. Not a bad trade for
a lump of clay that is one day closer to returning to the dust of the earth with
every sunrise.
Romans 12:1-2, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”
With love in Christ,
Michael Boldea, Jr.
Posted on 19 April 2025 | 11:29 am
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