28 Aug 2017 - Do You Worry?

A Practicing Christian ch. 2 - Do You Worry?

"No one knows God's reasoning and we will never understand exactly until He tells us when we see Him face-to-face. God does keep His promises by giving us heaven. He also provides for us here on earth during good times and bad.I think God was in the World Trade Center on 9/11 and I think  He was with the child lost in the woods who froze to death during the night. He has a reason for everything, though it may not be the way we want or what we think we need." (Emphasis added)

 This paragraph reminds me somewhat of Leibniz's statement that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Do we trust the wisdom of God that He has allowed certain catastrophic, bad events and situations to happen, because they were on the path with the smallest catastrophe and/or greatest glory to Him? If we believe that God is omniscient and removed from time, then we can believe that, from all the possible timelines, events like the Holocaust were the least evil and catastrophic of all potential events that could have happened had they not occurred. Frankly, it's mindblowing to begin thinking in that manner, that God allowed a lesser evil or hardship to prevent a greater one, that He allowed us to see the consequences of our ideologies in the least destructive manner possible so that He could discipline and shape us as we turn away from our sin - and this isn't just on a global scale. I can think of many times where God has intervened in my life by allowing me to suffer small consequences of my sin that would get me back on track and prevent me from committing worse sins and suffering worse consequences. We can see in the histories and prophets in the Bible that God did the same with Israel and Judah, from the beginning in Egypt through to the 400 year period of silence and the coming of Christ.

Questions:

1. What causes you the most worry?
1. The financial well-being of my family and being able to support them.
2. What does it mean to cast all your anxiety on God?
1. It means to remove the weight of attending to these stresses from myself and give them over to God - and not to try and pick them back up. It also means to trust that God will take care of the things you are anxious about.
3. What is holding you back from placing your worries on God?
1. Frankly, trust. I know the plans that I make to address my worries. I can make a tangible plan and see it in my mind. Having that plan, even if it's rough and imperfect, gives me peace. When I give my worries to God, God doesn't always make His plan known to me. He calls for me to trust Him that He will lead me by green pastures and still waters, that He will provide, but the means by which He plans to do that are usually unknown to me. Therefore, the part of me that loves making plans and feels secure in having plans panics and tries to seize control of the anxieties instead of trusting that God is good.

1 Timothy 1:12-17

"But I received mercy for this reason, so that in me, the worst of [sinners], Christ Jesus  might demonstrate His extraordinary patience as an example to those who would believe in Him for eternal life." - v. 16

Man, is God not good? Is He not merciful? That God extends grace to us, that He chooses to discipline us out of His love, deferring His wrath and vengeance for a time that we may turn in repentance - that's beautiful.

Just as a surgeon inflicts a wound to heal, so God uses discipline to bring about change and healing in us. I reflect back on the Holocaust example I used earlier. The Holocaust was terrible - a great tragedy and horror - but it also shook the Western world from a greater evil lurking beneath the surface. In the Holocaust, the evils of the eugenics movement first reared its head into the public sphere. This was nothing new, though. the ideologies of eugenics had been touted and supported in many circles in the US for decades before WWII and I wonder, if the Holocaust had not happened, would we have seen a greater tragedy elsewhere in the world, perhaps in the US, fueled by this same evil?

On a smaller scale, had God not intervened in the smaller consequences of certain sins I hadn't dealt with, what would my marriage look like today? What type of sin would I be indulging in, had I not been cut short and shown the hurt I was causing?