Okay, so my next thought came to me as I was lying in bed one night. I was having a conversation with a friend who is having a hard time right now. Finances, love life, job, etc, you name it and she was dealing with it. Now, as a Christian, I am supposed to listen and give encouragement. Now it is very easy for me to say to her, ‘be patient, God is going to work it out, just wait on Him”. That sounds right doesn’t it? Does it? Well certainly it is good advice and in a perfect world that would be easy to do. But what about someone who has waited; maybe they have been faithful. They have waited and waited and nothing seems to change. Nothing seems to work out. What do you tell them then? Psalm 27:14 says “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; Yes, wait for the Lord.” But how do you do this when nothing seems to be going right? How do you explain this to someone who is new to the faith? I mean people who have been believers for years still struggle with this. John 14:1 says,”Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.” It really is according to the level or abundance of your faith. It’s like that concept of the power of positive thinking. As long as we think negative or expect negative things, that’s what we will continue to receive. But for a child of God it goes a lot deeper than just thinking positive. Further in that same chapter of John at verse 21 it says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful.” There is power in taking things to God and leaving them there. How do you do this? It goes back to the scripture that talks about being transformed by the renewing of your mind (Romans 12:2). Now the first part of this verse says do not be conformed by this world, now most of the time when we hear this we think about sin, but let’s look at this in a different way. The world today, has the mentality of self-reliance, the “it’s-all-about me” syndrome. I think what this scripture is saying is don’t think like the world. The world will look at a crisis and see no way out or being at a point of no return. We as believers should see things differently. We have to get out of the worldly way of thinking. We can’t mold our way of thinking to what the world or society says. Take someone who has lost a job, the world may say, this is devastating, this is really bad. But a believer would say, God is in control and somehow (even though I can’t see it) this will work out for my good. Now, I know this isn’t easy it’s not an over-night realization. But that bring be to my next point. The next part says but be transformed, which signifies change, by the renewing of your mind. To get to this point in faith there has to be a transferring or transforming from the old (worldly) way of thinking to the faithful way of thinking. Some other words for renew are, repair, restore, replenish. Each of these words begin with the prefix re- meaning ‘again’ or ‘back’, so another way of looking at the word renew is to be new-again or back to new. When we first began our Christian walk we were new and excited and had faith beyond belief. Some where along the way we came down off of our mountain of transfiguration and started seeing things through human eyes. We have to go back to the new and become new again with our mind… the way we think. Make our mind fresh again, revive our faith. Faith is like our spiritual eye contact. It helps us to see things clearer and correctly! And lets go a step further, when you where contacts you have to have the solution or the drops…the drops represent the word of God and the bottle (that the solution comes in is the Holy Spirit). When we squeeze that Holy Spirit, it releases drops of the word in our faith contacts and helps us to see better…To be continued!!!
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