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sometimes miracles take time

[7 minute read]

I forgot to include this music video as a benediction to my previous post so I’ll just sit down (!) and write a new post. <Smile> You may recall I referenced the passage in Hebrews that has been ministering to my soul these days, “As things stand right now, we aren’t seeing all things subjected to Christ’s reign, but we see Jesus…” (Heb 2:8,9, my paraphrase). This song has been getting a lot of background play as I wait on the Lord to (how shall I put it?) unburden me from specific burdens I carry daily.

Full disclosure: the biggest burden is me. The unfinished me. The Scott who requires a lot more fine-tuning. Sanctifying. Paul prayed for the Galatians that “Christ would be fully formed in them” (Gal 4:19) and I’ve been asking the Holy Spirit to do the same for myself. It’s been a stretching season, to say the least, but Christ has been an ever-present help through it all. The ironic thing is during this burdensome season I’m also seeing a crazy amount of answered prayer in many other areas.

The Father keeps reminding me of the scene by the seashore in John 21. Jesus tells Peter that he will have a rough but rewarding life of following him, but compels the disciple to trust and follow him anyway. The Master is certainly worthy of it.

Peter turns and considers John for a moment then asks Jesus, “What about John? Is he just going to traipse off to heaven on flowery beds of ease?” Who among us hasn’t fretted about our assignments once or twice?

Why don’t they ever seem to struggle?

Why does she always get her way?

Why does everything turn out fine for him?

Why do I always have to take the high road?

Why does John get all the love?

Why, why, why. There’s probably a reason “why” starts to sound like “why-ning.” (Lord, make me/us better.)

This morning Sandy remarked that our journey has often asked more of us than others’ journeys do of them…or so it feels. [Truth bomb: faith > feelings] We know in our hearts that God is for us, his ways are perfect, and the payoff in following Christ is worth living — and suffering — for.

we know in our hearts that God is for us, his ways are perfect, and the payoff in following Christ is worth living — and suffering — for.

Sometimes miracles take time. I just got off the phone with a very dear ministry friend, a faithful reader of this blog, who is in AFib and requires a pacemaker to control his heart function. He was told by more than a few that he would “feel like a new man” with his pacemaker, but, days later, he’s still not feeling it. He’s waiting for a miracle.

No one likes being told to wait. Waiting almost feels like delaying the inevitable the same way a streetwise child hears a parent say “We’ll see.”

In Practicing the Presence of God, Brother Lawrence tells of someone who “would go faster than grace” (she was impatient to become holy) and I hear that same caution in my life today. I’m so eager for God to get everything sorted out I’m not surrendering to his meantime mercy. While we’re waiting for our miracle, God is busy doing a thousand other things for us.

while we’re waiting for our miracle, God is busy doing a thousand other things for us.

God not only has the last word, he has the next-to-last word, too. And all the words that come before that. In a later psalm of David, he praised a God who knew every page of his life, start to finish. How wonderful! This means that the Almighty is just as engaged in every minute of our days (good and bad) as he is committed to our telos (finished product).

Miracles take time sometimes. And sometimes, if we’re being honest, they may never see the light of day — at least not in the way we hoped. There are rebels who adapt to the far country just fine and never come home. Some diseases aren’t cured. Marriages fall apart no matter how often we pray and fast and hope against hope they don’t.

I don’t remember where I heard this, or read it, but I’ll tell it as I remember it. Most of us know that Charles Spurgeon, for much of his life, suffered with deep, dark depression. Sadly, he lived with depression the rest of his life. He saw himself as a lonely lighthouse, beaming the light of the gospel out to the hopeless souls lost at sea, though he himself remained in darkness. Not the darkness of being lost, for he carried the gospel light within him, but the darkness of never being healed from the oppression that plagued him. Even still, he embraced his ministry with gladness, knowing countless others were rescued and set free.

I’ve often prayed to walk again, but I will keep trusting and living onward and upward; I’ve got thousands of other healing stories anyway. I happen to be in the middle of one right now.

Sometimes miracles take time, and sometimes they get unexpected upgrades. When I, a permanently disabled man, prayed for a wife, I had no idea how blessed my life would be. My idea of a miracle was to get married at all. God’s miracle was Sandy. Yahtzee!

sometimes miracles take time, and sometimes they get unexpected upgrades.

I’ve written about this before, but my lifelong dream was to see the Grand Canyon. It would take a miracle to get me there at all, what with all my health problems and near-death experiences. But God gave me my miracle…and upgraded it to the best road trip ever…with some of our dearest friends…witnessing the grandeur of the canyon after the most beautiful snowfall…a picturesque sunset…dozens of dazzling photographs…and a thousand-and-one other grace-happy moments to relish and treasure.

And all of us born again brothers and sisters. What upgrade did we get? We didn’t just get our sins forgiven; we got eternal life, the indwelling Holy Spirit, the mind of Christ, a new spiritual family, new mercies every morning, ongoing sanctification, answered prayers, hope in our suffering, power for living, grace for dying, a heavenly Father, a heavenly home…and (drum roll) Jesus.

If I may, I’d like to pray for us, knowing a post like this affects us all in varying degrees. Each of us carries the “yes, but not yet” reality like a counterweight to our fixed eternal hope. I’d like to ask God to avert our eyes from the circumstances of our day-to-day burdens to the Living Christ who has overcome.

Father of mercies, we confess that we are often so focused on our predicaments we miss the importance of waiting. We find ourselves in the waiting room once again and ask for grace to prove faithful in this uncomfortable season. All our fountains are in you, Jesus, and we eagerly wait in hope for your promised outcome. It will be glorious, we know, because you are an Artist and everything you do is perfect. May you receive all the glory from us and in us in this season and always. In the name of Jesus, we say Amen.

Selah, beloved.

finally, a hallelujah

After this I heard what seemed to be the loud voice of a great multitude in heaven, crying out,

Hallelujah!
Revelation 19:1

“Hallelujah” appears twenty-four times in the Bible. Only four of those times is it found in the New Testament and Revelation 19 lays claim to those. Think of that for a moment. The first time the word “hallelujah“ shows up in the New Testament is at the very end.

One could imagine a hefty hallelujah following the huge buildup in the previous 256 chapters of gospel and epistle. Like the swelling of a musical piece to its finale, ‘hallelujah’ hits just the right note.

I spent a little time grousing to the Lord this morning about unanswered prayers. After finishing out my little pity party, I opened the Word and picked up where I left off yesterday. The first words I saw are what you just read in the quote-box above.

For the 247th time this year, I mentally threw my hands up and said, “Okay, God, I get it. You win.”

I’m sure you can’t relate to that at all.

Laura Story sang about such things in her single, “Blessings.”

What if my greatest disappointments
Or the aching of this life
Is the revealing of a greater thirst this world can’t satisfy
And what if trials of this life
The rain, the storms, the hardest nights
Are Your mercies in disguise?
—Laura Story, Blessings © Capitol Christian Music Group, Capitol CMG Publishing

If you’re out here struggling against unanswered prayers, hard labors, injustices, and dark nights of the soul, don’t lose hope. We’ll all sing “hallelujah” when all is said and done. Few are fortunate to get vindication in this life; most have to wait till it gets nearer to the end of the book.

Let’s say it again — louder — for the people in the back:

Once more they cried out,

Hallelujah!
Revelation 19:3

Amen. Boy do I feel that.

This “hallelujah” is for all whose theology is outpacing their doxology. For everyone who lived righteously and didn’t receive their reward in life but were rather hated and jeered and despised, this hallelujah belongs to you.

It’s for all the smoldering wicks and bruised reeds. The ones Paul Simon called “the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on.” It’s for the publican at the door of the temple who can’t possibly know he’s been justified until the book comes out.

For every parent who trained up their children in the way they should go but whose child departed from it anyway, this is your hallelujah.

For the followers of Christ who were promised they could “reign in this life” but were crushed by it instead, you get this hallelujah too.

Those who prayed and believed for healing in this life but you still had to carry it like a thorn in your side anyway, your hallelujah is coming.

For every survivor of rape and physical and sexual abuse who was told to keep quiet about it ‘for the good of the church,’ or, worse, not believed, this hallelujah belongs to you.

To the saintly ones who’ve been silenced, canceled, vilified, and shown the door by the mob, here’s your hallelujah.

When you opted rather to bless than retaliate, God sees you and invites you to own this hallelujah. All who were crushed by oppression but held to Jesus anyway can take your place in the choir. To the one who seemed to have the devil on your back all the way to heaven, this hallelujah’s especially for you.

Spoiler alert for those still not sure about how it ends:

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.
🔸🔸🔸🔸
And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”
Revelation 21:4,5

The page is turning; we’re getting closer to the end of the book. 2023 fidgets around the corner. For those who have made Jesus their Life in spite of every human reason not to, perhaps this is this year we finally get our hallelujah.

Even so, Come, Lord Jesus.

I’ll close out with the video to Laura Story’s song I referenced earlier. Hallelujah is not found in the lyrics, but it expresses a hallelujah heart better than anything I could say.

So for now I’ll be waiting to sing that Most Holy Hallelujah with you in that off-in-the-distance-yet-to-be Day when all the dots finally connect and all those unanswered prayers make perfect sense,

Pasture

Laura Story, Blessings

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Worst Of Times, Best Of Times

Being called to a life of ‘abnormal’ suffering has taught me a few things. For one, my rear-view perspective tends to run rose-hued, as I harbor a near-romantic blush, a satisfying kinship, with past seasons in the Refiner’s Fire.

Mr. Spurgeon, no stranger to dark days himself (he suffered lifelong bouts with depression), wrote and spoke often on the nature of suffering’s grander good.

Take this, for example. Here, he adds an epistolary of hope to the chronicles of the suffering Church and hits the proverbial nail square with typical eloquence and heart:

* * * *

“I bear my witness that the worst days I have ever had have turned out to be my best days. And when God has seemed most cruel to me he has then been most kind. If there is anything in this world for which I would bless him more than for anything else it is for pain and affliction. I am sure that in these things the richest tenderest love has been manifested to me.

Our Father’s wagons rumble most heavily when they are bringing us the richest freight of the bullion of his grace. Love letters from heaven are often sent in black-edged envelopes. The cloud that is black with horror is big with mercy.

Fear not the storm. It brings healing in its wings and when Jesus is with you in the vessel the tempest only hastens the ship to its desired haven.”

– Charles H. Spurgeon

How about you, friend? Do you bear witness to these things also?