Handling Your Doubters

John 10:31-39 (New Living Translation)

³¹ Once again the people picked up stones to kill him. ³² Jesus said, “At my Father’s direction I have done many good works. For which one are you going to stone me?” ³³ They replied, “We’re stoning you not for any good work, but for blasphemy! You, a mere man, claim to be God.” ³⁴ Jesus replied, “It is written in your own Scriptures that God said to certain leaders of the people, ‘I say, you are gods!’ ³⁵ And you know that the Scriptures cannot be altered. So if those people who received God’s message were called ‘gods,’ ³⁶ why do you call it blasphemy when I say, ‘I am the Son of God’? After all, the Father set me apart and sent me into the world. ³⁷ Don’t believe me unless I carry out my Father’s work. ³⁸ But if I do his work, believe in the evidence of the miraculous works I have done, even if you don’t believe me. Then you will know and understand that the Father is in me, and I am in the Father.” ³⁹ Once again they tried to arrest him, but he got away and left them.

    

            For anyone who has ever had to deal with doubters, you know how challenging the situation can be.  Most of us either know somebody who has been in this situation of being challenged every step of the way by people whose sole purpose seems to be to ridicule or to outright dismiss the authority of our role simply because they have a problem with acknowledging who we are. Maybe you’re in a leadership position at work or in an organization and there’s that one person who will seemingly stop at nothing to question not what you are doing, but the authority in which you rightfully do it. That’s the situation that Jesus encounters in this passage.  He is being attacked by a group of naysayers and non-believers who refuse to see Jesus for who he really is – the Son of God.
                Sometimes you might find yourself in a similar situation of being attacked for who you are. Here are three things that we can do to overcome these difficult situations:

1.       Expect that it will happen – This is not the first time that Jesus was attacked for who he is. In fact, this passage opens with the words “once again” which indicates that this has been on-going. Anticipate that you will encounter it and be prepared.

2.       Have an attitude of Endurance – Jesus could have easily given up, but he endured. He had a goal. He was headed to Calvary to fulfill God’s most important plan for humanity. He didn’t let their attempts stop him and neither should you. Press through the stones of name-calling, jealousy, and character attacks. Remember, the end goal is always bigger than the enemy’s goal.

3.       Look for God’s Escape Route – After a brief exchange, Jesus escaped the naysayers and the stones. We can escape our doubters by praying, studying Scripture and staying focused on God’s plan. When we know that we are doing what God has called us and positioned us to do, God will always provide a way.

Remember that the work you are doing is a part of advancing God’s plan for all of humanity. Be determined. Don’t let the doubters detour you from God’s divine plan.

From Barren to Bountiful!

Overnight this tree in our front yard started blooming. For weeks it was barren and it seemed that nothing was happening. But somewhere late in the midnight hour, God shifted the atmosphere and turned things around for our tree. It went from stark naked at dusk to these little vibrant popcorn-sized clusters of blooms.

 

This image is from yesterday's sunset. I love how the light peeks through this tree's situation and shines such a beautiful light. That's how it is with whatever you are going through. Maybe you're in a season where you feel like you are barren and not producing. It could be relationally, professionally, etc. Like this tree, we all go through those times where God has to remove some things from us. And in the process, we feel unproductive and barren. But it won't always look like that. God is preparing you to receive the bountiful blessing that's in store.

 

Think about it - how would this image look if the old, dried and crackling leaves were still on the branches as the new blossoms were coming forth? There wouldn't be enough room. Something would have to give.

 

If we can be like this tree and stand still and transparent before God, then our situations can change, too, late in the midnight hour. Get ready to bloom! Let God shine God's light on your situation and watch what happens!

Are You on the Wrong Train?

One late afternoon, I left work early to board the Metro Subway in search of the Department of Motor Vehicles on the lower end of Maryland. I had been a new resident all of six weeks and was informed by the management of the apartment complex where I lived that I was required to have  Maryland license plates and a Maryland driver’s license or risk having my car towed.

I made my way to the platform of the Metro Subway and waited for the Orange Line to pull up. It was the one I rode everyday to get to the Smithsonian Institution where I worked. I boarded it, and after listening to the operator announce the calls of what was next, I realized that I was going the wrong direction. The train was going north and I was supposed to be going south.

I got off at the next stop and headed back to where I began. When I arrived, all the other workers in DC, Virginia and Maryland also arrived. So much for leaving work early. It was crowded. Trains were full, people poured out like maple syrup and I needed to cross over to the other side of the platform to get on the right train. I did - only to miss the first one that came. I looked up and the sign indicated that the next train was coming in seven minutes. It was the Red Line and I learned that it would take me to the very place that I was trying to reach. As I rode the train, daylight began to grow into dusk. The fall season in Maryland adheres to the time change and night comes quickly. I arrived at my stop, walked two blocks to the DMV and saw the “closed sign” on the door. It was 6:05 p.m. I was tired and frustrated. It was a wasted trip.

As it turns out, I never went back to the DMV and my car was never towed. I made a trip and headed to a place based on a “mandate” given to me by someone else, yet was still able to move through the city with the license and tags that I had from Texas. In fact, I kept them the duration of the time that I worked in Washington, DC and never once was stopped by anyone, ticketed or given a citation.

God recently brought that back to my memory as I have pondered and discerned where I am in my career. I know am in the right “subway terminal” but somehow I feel like I am on the wrong platform, on the wrong line, and need to cross over to get to the right train. Sometimes we think we are headed in the right direction based on simply being in the “subway terminal” of where God is calling us, but trying to navigate your way through the different routes of your call can easily have you on the wrong line. And in the process, it can be expensive (I went through two zones and used up what was on my Metro card) and time-consuming.

Maybe God is telling you to move around the platform and get on the Red Line because the Orange Line is taking you on a different route than what’s necessary for where God wants you to be. And maybe the very thing that is being “mandated” is not even necessary for you to continue in what God has called you to do! Are you on the wrong train? Is it time to go in a different direction? Seek God for clarity.

Relationships: Being in Direct Sunlight

    

This morning I awoke to find a bright red, blossoming flower, standing tall and proud atop my banana plant. In the midst of my excitement, I noticed that its counterpart, standing tall in the same soil beside it, yielded a scraggly, burnt remnant of a flower. It got to me wondering how can two plants that share the same soil produce something so unequivocally opposite. More than that, I wondered how within a marital relationship, if two are planted together, why is it that one seems to grow and look vibrant while the other appears almost lifeless and barely extant.
      In the fourth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus tells a parable to his disciples about plants and seeds. He tells of the farmer who planted seeds and how some fell on fertile ground and lavished while others fell on rocky ground. Still others fell among thorny weeds and choked the good plants. This is pause for reflection – sometimes relationships don’t grow as they should because they are not able to thrive on rocky ground. Like any good cultivator knows about plants, so too, is it true that relationships need nourishment and proper care, attention, ample water and sunlight to grow. 
     Remember when Jesus met the Samarian woman at the well and offered her eternal water so that she would never thirst again? Sometimes when we are in the deserts of our relationships, the hardest thing to do is to simply search for God and cry out to Him. The psalmist expressed these words in the 63^rd Psalm: God! My God! It’s you – I search for you! My whole being thirsts for you! My whole body desires you in a dry and tired land, no water anywhere.” If we are honest with ourselves, that’s how our marital relationships feel at times – like we are in a dry and tired land with no sign of water anywhere. But let us not forget that our loving and merciful God is always right there. We need only cry out to Him and he will give us the water that we need. Remember, as believers we are dependent on God, yet often times we neglect to simply call on Him for our most basic needs.
      So what about this sunlight that is required for growth?  There has to be exposure to God’s light – prayer, Bible study, and intentional time together allowing God to order your steps for a healthy and growing relationship. We can’t choose to continue to sit in darkness – that is, void of spending time with God and being disobedient to his Word - and expect there to be a transformative change within our marital relationship. Without God leading, guiding and ordering our steps, we cannot possibly thrive!
     And as for the thorny weeds in this parable – these are the seasons in our relationships when communication becomes harder, being around one another becomes a chore and simply trying to be on the same page becomes almost impossible; and, like in the parable, weeds will choke the good plants. In the instance of my illustration, it appears that two plants can indeed grow in the same soil, but one gets choked. When we spend more time quarreling, being upset, unvalidated, underappreciated and less time being loving, giving, attentive and supportive of our God-given mate, the aforementioned weeds will most definitely choke one of the plants and render it looking and feeling lifeless.
     I dare to even suggest that one plant can be sucking the life out of the other plant. While both are in the same soil, presumably privy to the same level of moisture, water saturation and sunlight, one of these plants is having a tough time adapting. Perhaps its relationship immune system has grown weaker by the frenzy of life – stresses from work, unmet goals, unrealized dreams, financial burdens and the like. It’s not that the other plant does not suffer these same things, too, but these real-life situations have taken its toll on the non-thriving plant. But all hope is not lost.

    

If you read more in the parable of Mark, you will see that in verse 26 of chapter 4, Jesus shares this truth: The kingdom of God is like someone who plants seed in the ground. ²⁷ Night and day, whether the person is asleep or awake, the seed still grows, but the person does not know how it grows. ²⁸ By itself the earth produces grain. First the plant grows, then the head, and then all the grain in the head. ²⁹ When the grain is ready, the farmer cuts it, because this is the harvest time.”  

 

     In other words, God is our harvester. And while we may not be able to explain nor understand how two (who have become one in a marital relationship), grow at different stages, or more so handle things differently, what we do know is that when we surrender and submit ourselves fully and wholly to God, we will begin to thrive and flourish again. Our season of darkness will be short and our exposure to sunlight - God’s light – will make things bright and vibrant again where they once seemed to be withering.  We serve a God who works wonders and who offers us unmerited favor  (grace) each day, nudging and prompting us to do better and serve better as we are planted firmly on the foundation that God has established for our relationships.

 

Upgrade Your Faith - Wait on God

One of the hardest things arguably in following Jesus and being on this spiritual journey is having patience to wait on God. I think one of the reasons that it is so hard is that we live in a culture that promotes a mindset of quick, fast and in a hurry. We rush in and out of fast food eateries, complaining if we have to wait longer than five minutes for our meals. We take our clothes to one-hour cleaners. We want faster Internet service. We grow restless in the grocery store, standing in the 15 items or less lane. Nearly everything about the American culture instills in us this sense of having what we want when we want it. It has created a nation of impatient people. When we find ourselves in prayer, waiting for God to take action on something, we sometimes grow tired, weary and frustrated waiting for things to change.

Who has the patience to sit around and wait to see what God is going to do in a situation when it’s just so much easier to leave the scene and do your own thing?

We do. Christians who are faith-filled and faithful should have the patience to do so. The Bible is filled with stories of people who waited on God. Abraham waited to have a son. Moses and the children of Israel waited to get to the Promised Land. Job waited for his life to be restored. Ruth waited with her mother-in-law Naomi for things to get better. In each instance, waiting brought the person closer to God and upgraded their faith, making them dependent on God.

That’s what patience can do for us. When we stop being impatient with God and learn to simply be still and know that God is working, that God has a plan and that God has our best interest at heart, we end up with a finished story like Ruth or the fulfillment of a blessing like Abraham. And our story becomes an inspiration and a testimony for others of the goodness of God. If we stop allowing our American culture to control and dictate our level of patience, steadily condensing our threshold for waiting on God, then we will emerge as more loving and kind people – the way that we were created to be – and God’s plan and purpose for all of us will become evident.

The opening verse in Ecclesiastes chapter 3 talks about everything in its season and everything in its time. Yet somehow this very concept seems to elude us today because our American culture has carved out this sense of entitlement of unearned right to have something when you want it. How would this have worked for the shepherd boy David? How would it have helped him to build strength and character, and more so reliance on God? When we become so set on self and our own needs and wants, we unknowingly are removing God from the equation.

What about the level of patience that Jesus exhibited? Don’t you know there could have been countless times when he could have been fed up with the doubting disciples and said enough? But Jesus’ impatience would not have advanced God’s plan for us. That’s right – for us. All of what Jesus did was God’s plan for us and thank God that Jesus had the patience to endure.

So what we can do. What steps can we take to restore the patience that God intends for us to have? First, we have to be willing to walk in God’s timing. Secondly, we have to understand that God is growing us through our waiting experience. And thirdly, we have to trust and thank God for what God is doing. God can and will create in you a clean heart – if you just ask Him. God can and will reveal plans for your future – if you trust Him. You might be saying “well I get tired in my waiting and it leaves me fidgety and impatient. Remember the words of Isaiah in chapter 40: they that wait shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles.”

See the Bible is not just about “them” it’s about us. It’s not just stories for us to read or listen to on a Sunday morning or Wednesday evening and then forget about and go on with our lives as if we’ve never heard them. These stories are for us to learn how to be patient and walk in God’s timing.

The other day I was taking my niece driving so she could practice parallel parking. How many of us with driver’s license remember learning how to parallel parking. She’s 17, recently graduated from high school and is a college freshman at a four-year university. She said to me, “I’ll be glad when I get my license because right now all I have is my driver’s permit.” She went on to tell me that when it came time to take her driver’s test, she passed the written part, and all of the driving part, EXCEPT when it came to parallel parking. Now don’t get me wrong – she is a good driver. She can handle the car pretty well, but driving, as my mother always says, is more than just getting in the car and hurdling along and putting gas in it.

For my niece, until she learns how to parallel park, she won’t be able to get her driver’s license. She’s getting anxious and impatient. I told her this: “you won’t always be going places that require you to just pull ahead, turn or back up; sometimes you’ll find yourself in a situation where the only parking space is one that requires you to parallel park. And if the department of motor vehicles went on and gave you your license today, they’d be doing a disservice to you and a disservice to the people whose cars are either in front of or behind that parking space that you need. You just have to be patient.”

That’s the same way it is with us. There are some things down the road in life that we cannot see with the temporal eye where we’ll have to pull up, zig zag in and back our way out of, but if we don’t have the patience to wait for God to prepare us for those situations then we’ll be doing a disservice to ourselves by trying to go on ahead of God.

If you don’t have the patience to wait on God you never get to know God for who God is. Without patience you’ll never know God as Jehovah Rophe, my healer or Jehovah Jireh, my provider. Instead you’ll hear other people talk about God in these terms and have no idea what they mean because you didn’t have the patience to wait through these experiences.

While you are learning to be patient, use that time to pray. Prayer changes things. As you are praying about your situation, God is increasing your level of patience. And in the end, you learn how to walk in God’s timing and to stop being impatient with God.