Forgetting What God Hasn't Done
In my preparations for the Revive event, I was reflecting on some of what God has been doing over the past 12 months, and more broadly my past 11 years here in Omaha. It’s been an amazing journey in so many ways and I am truly grateful for the life transformation that we have experienced together. God has revealed truth, manifested His love, healed hearts, and set people free from demonic oppression. He has also taught us to bring encouragement to the body of Christ by sharing a timely word that reveals God’s heart and His desires for our futures. Truly we have experienced the goodness of God and the resurrection power of Jesus Christ.
However, that is not to say that there haven’t been disappointments or other hard things along the way. There have been difficult surprises, plans that haven’t worked out, unanswered prayers, deep and irretrievable losses and a variety of other things that seemed out of sync with what God had promised. In other words, life happened, for me and for everyone else. Probably none of this is new information for you and you could fill in your own personal examples from both sides of the journey, the amazing ways God has blessed you and the events that are not only difficult to understand but have caused you some level of emotional pain.
The reason I am writing about all of this today is God revealed something to me recently that I believe is holding us back from experiencing more of the abundant life Jesus speaks of in John 10. It is also limiting our ability to access the Kingdom authority and power God has given to us as His followers. Specifically, I believe we are many times conditioned by, and form beliefs, based on our experiences. It is the belief expectation cycle that we talk about within the context of Restoring the Foundations ministry. We have an experience and out of that experience, we establish a belief that governs our expectations and subsequent behavior. What we don’t always recognize is how these experiences shape, or work to diminish our faith when it comes to believing God for the supernatural. If we are not careful, we end up in a place of unbelief regarding the humanly impossible situations that are subject only to manifestations of God’s Kingdom authority and power.
I have spoken many times about a word I received in 2006 from Isaiah 43:18-19, where Jesus promised He was going to do a new thing. A little over a year ago God revealed that we are in that season of the new thing and because we are in this season of the new thing, we are not to recall the former things or ponder things of the past. The part that I have always understood about that is we are not to look to the past, what God has done, as a way to guide our present or our future. The part that is new to me is that neither are we are to allow our experiences of what God hasn’t done to determine our expectations of what He is doing now or might do in the future. Practically this means that we are not to allow the non-answers to previous prayers for the healing of cancer, financial provision, restoration of relationships, etc. to poison our hearts with the belief that God doesn’t’ or won’t answer those prayers. Rather, we are to choose to inform our hearts with the truth of what God has promised, and is doing right in front of us, as we pray and minister to others. We are to fix our eyes, physically and spiritually, on Jesus the author and perfecter of our faith.
Admittedly, this is much easier to understand than it is to pull off, especially when you are praying for someone with cancer and you have never seen God heal anyone of cancer before. I would further suggest that most likely it is humanly impossible to do this and I think we need to be careful we don’t take on ourselves something that can only come by a divine gift, a supernatural working of God’s grace in our lives.
If you would be willing, ask the Holy Spirit, “have I allowed my past experiences to influence my belief in what You are able and/or willing to do in and through me today? And even more specifically, am I allowing the disappointments and unanswered prayers of the past, the things God hasn’t done, to displace my faith and push me toward unbelief? Because of our human limitations and imperfections, I believe the heart position we are looking for is modeled for us by Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, when threatened with the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, “our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire, and He will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But even if He does not… (Daniel 3:17-18a). God is calling us to believe He is both willing and able to do the impossible things He has spoken over us.
If the desire is there but it sounds too challenging to get there on your own, we are beginning a small group coaching experience on how to Study the Bible for Life Transformation, beginning Saturday morning January 25, 2020. To make room for the Word in our hearts we need to clear out all of the disappointment, hurt, anger, frustration and anything else suppressing faith and propping up our unbelief. And we must focus our eyes and our heart upon what God has declared and His ability to fulfill His Word. We will move beyond a traditional Bible class, or even Bible study, that focuses on accumulating knowledge and stops at understanding. Rather, this experience will focus on developing the wisdom and skills required to experience spiritual transformation on a daily basis. We also will identify and remove the obstacles that keep truth from moving from our heads to our hearts. All of it will be spiritual transformation under the direction of the Holy Spirit. I am super excited about what I believe God is going to do for each one of us here.
I hope you will take advantage of this opportunity.
If you have questions feel free to contact me at bruce@godslivingstones.org or visit our website at godslivingstones.org.
Author
Pastor Bruce is the Executive Director of God's Living Stones. He lives in Omaha, NE, with his wife Barb. They have two adult children.
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Comments (1)
Bruce - I just now got around to reading this. It is so good!! Even after talking with you about it, I found myself reflecting on the ways I have and sometimes still do allow what God hasn't done to determine both my faith and prayer life. My head knows the truth but my expectations are so often effected, and thus my prayer life is greatly altered. We see this so much in others but we need to see it in ourselves so thank you!
February 15, 2020 at 3:21pm