Finding God In The Dark. Ted Kluck & Ronnie Martin. Bethany House Publishers. 2013.
Faith, disappointment, and the struggle to believe
Contents:
Author´s note (Ted Kluck)
+Pain is real, and it´s not necessarily unspiritual to acknowledge it. This book, in part, is an acknowledgment of pain and a reflection on what to do with it.
+Now, looking back, I am filled with thankfulness for this events because they are the events that God ordained for me to bring me into closer, deeper communion with Him.
Introduction (Ronnie Martin)
+To question His sovereignity. As we find ourselves mired in doubt and unbelief, we¨re simply grasping for an answer to the same question: "Did God really say...?"
+It´s after we find God in the dark that we realize He was already there.
1. You Gotta Have Faith
"The Struggle to Believe When Life´s Falling Apart" by Ted Kluck
"Cast all your anxieties on him because he cares for you". 1 Peter 5:7 NIV
+I knew in my head that God was real, and even believed that he loved me.
+At the time I questioned two essential biblical truths -that God was good, and that He loved me. I was refusing to cast my anxieties on Him, because Istruggled to fully trust Him not to hurt me again. I believe in His sovereignty...
+I belive that God is ruler of all, even the enemy. Though, to be honest, it would have been easier to be mad at the devil. I think being mad at God, in the absence of hope and trust, is the darkest, loneliest place of all.
+I still believed, but I need help in my unbelief. I needed to cast my anxieties on Him, who cares for me. Scripture had given me a framework for praying through my unbelief, but I was refusing to see it and use it.
2. How Soon Is Now?
"When God´s People Quetion the Reliability of God" by Ronnie Martin
+ The reason we take things into our own hands is that we don´t believe God´s hands are really at work. Or in my case, it can be like what C.S. Lewis wrote: "We´re not neccesarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be."
+I Had place all my hope in the talents He had giveb me and the indentity I had drawn from them. Like Tim Keller says, "Our need for worth is so powerful that whatever we base our identity and value on we essentially ´deify´. We will look to it with all the passion and intensity of worship and devotion, even if we think ourselves as highly irreligious.".
+There´s nothing quite like the church being the church. It´s one of the ways God restores us.
+If we take a closer look, we discover God taking painful yet drastic measures to destroy our idols, level our doubts, and show us the incomparable bluntness, brightsness, and beauty of His grace.
+ The Holy Spirit supplies us with vision of the heart to see the unseen thing of God. (Ephesians 1:18)
+ God wants us to glory in the hope of himself. He wants our eyes to be continually opened to see the evidence of His goodness. We don´t have to look far. Our lives are saturated by it, but many times it´s most visible in hinfsight.
+Most of us really believe in the partial sovereignty of God. We belive He´s doing work in our hearts and lives, but when problems and difficulties rear their ugly head, we feel it´s time to take matters into ourown hands, because God must have decided to take a break for a while. It´s in these times that we live like functioning unbelievers and experience the hopelessness that God already save us from.
+The problem was that there were barriers in my life that needed to be dismantled and destroyed.
+Paul [the apostle] changed the world while he was locked up, writting letters that have altered the fabric of Christianity. It was never so dark in Paul´s life that allowed himself to believe that God was absent. Instead, he prayed for the eyes to see God´s sovereign hand, a mind to comprehend His un ending goodness, and a heart to overflow in greatfulness.
3.How You Doin´?
4. Personal Jesus
+What I rememeber is that I had a relationship with Christ that was based more on my fear of not performingwell than a godly fear and love for a Savior who had already completed the performance for me.
+I had been taught the verse about obedience being better than a sacrifice, but nobody ever told me that there was thing called grace that transformed our acts of obedience into offerings of joy.
+My identity was so tied up in my persona as an artist that the idea that it also doubled as something I was "doing for God" simply gave me the justification neccessary to continue down my well-trodden path of self indulgence.
+Had stopped lying to myself for even a miunute, I would´ve been face with this sobering truth: My heart had grown far from God as it swelled up in glory for me.
+The rality is that God blesses us with joy so that regardless of amount of material blessings we receive in ths life, our hunger and thirst for Him is never replaced by those material things.
+When a Christian is truly immerse in the pursuit of the gospel, those material blessings function as occasions for thankfulness.
+Instead of glorifynig God for the small talents He had graciously given me, Iinstead worshiped what came as the result of that talents. Worse still, my life pursuit had become doing everything I could so others might worship my talent. The result? Anger, resentment, pride, arrogance, and a lifestyle that kept me pursuing self-worship like a drug addict searches maniacally for his next fix.
+One of the things we can count on God to do in the life of a beliver is to get really sever with our sins. Things like anger, pride, and arrigance don´t go unchecked in God´s economy forever. As a loving Father, God disciplines us and takes things away that hinder our growth, maturity, and love for Him.
+In reality, it´s only by God´s amzing grace we´re given anything at all. Sadly, our base tendency is to hoard, feed on, and become gluttons with the things god has privileged us to be stewards over.
+Instead of praising Him dor the portion He´s given us, we indulge in it because we don´t think God has been generous enough. We love our goods more than our God.
+Anytime we love our gifts more than the Giver of gifts, we eneter into a state of disharmony, dissatisfaction, and disarray, and plumge headlong into the dark side effects of those heart conditions. Becasuse we were created by a God who is above all else, we were never meant to put anything else above Him.
5. I Built My Fortress
"Mistaking Failure for Humility, and Killing Big T" by Ted Kluck
+God was leading me on a journey toward complete brokenness, but He still had a few idols left to destroy, including the praise of man.
+We often describe failure as "a humbling experience." This is the whole "At least you´re building character" argument.
+But I wasn´t becoming humble; I was becoming embittered and cynical- My heart, gradualy, was being hardened. I was seeing the doctrine of Total and Inherited Depravity on full display in my own heart. As Tozer writes in The Pursuit of God, "There is within the human heart a tough, fibrous root of fallen life whose nature it is to posses, always to posseee."
+We sin because we fundamentally distrust that God´s plan will be enough to bring us the hapiness (or esteem or comfort) that we crave the most. So we look to the world to provide those things. And many times, from Christians, we´re just implored to sin less.
+I was sinning by doubting in three specific areas: One, that God is sovereign. Two, that God is working all things for my good. And Three, that God is good.
+In The Joy of Calvinism, author Greg Forster writes, "The Bible commands us to rejoice all the time. God says that if there is even a tiny fraction of a split second when we´re not rejoicing, that´s disobedience."
+In America we sometimes call that competitiveness, but in reality it´s just sin (jealousy, envy), and it makes a person (read:me) the worst kind of jerk at times.
+David´s greatest strengths were his greatest weaknesses.
+"Confession and repentance is where the power of Christianity is." That´s wisdom that, of course, applies to both men and women.
+He [David] remind us that God does not delight in burnt offerings. He doesn´t want our money or, necessarily , our impressive spiritual résumés. He wants brokenness and contrition. That, David writes, He will never despise.
And oddly, out of the brokenness and contrition, comes joy.
6. Blue Monday
- Because God is sovereign, it means that every event that unfolds in our lives is under His watchful eye and within His careful design.
- Maturity in Christ is when we remember God´s goodness when life is less than good. The problem with maturity is that by definition, it´s something that happens over time, not instantaneously.
- The ruequestion of doubt is always a question of who over what. Is the who you are doubting a liar or a truth teller? If we believe the who, we never need question the what. I never think what my wife is telling me is untrue because I believe with every fiber of my being that she is someone who would never lie to me.
- Unfortunately, Eve´s doubt about who God was led to her pride over what he commanded, and all of earth and creation is still reeling, from the aftereffects.
- Temporary blindness is just that. Temporary. We can trust that God will be faithful to pierce through the darkness of our doubts and continue to build and strengthen our belief in Him.
- At the heart of doubt and unbelief is the unwilligness to submit and yield to Jesus Christ, the creator of the universe. The difference, though, is that doubt is a temporary condition that can lead to greater belief, while unbelif is the condition that condemns a person.
- Knowing that God is grater than our doubts give us greater hope in Him.
7. My Father´s Son
"Praying Through Unbelief by Ted Kluck
✔I think it´s an ocassion to question our own tendency toward hero-worship. If we say that we worship the Author and Perfector of our faith, why then do we have an almost insatiable and semi-embarrassing drive to create heroes in other walks of life?
✔I was listening to an old Tim Keller sermon recently that suggests that the quality of our sleep can sometimes be a barometer of how well we´re trusting God. Sleep is a gift from God. And David wakes up determined, in the Lord, to not fear the tens of thousands who assail him. W can pray, and sleep, with the same confidence.
✔When we doubt, we´re left with two opinions -curse God and die, or continue to pray, hope, and believe through our doubt.
✔Repentance is the only way to true joy becasuse it´s such a fundamental part of the Gospel. "Repentance", wrote Puritan Thomas Brooks, "is the vomit of the soul." John Piper writes in Future Grace, "But if you would turn from self as the source of satisfaction (=repentance), and come to Jesus for enjoyment of all that God is for us in him (=faith), then the itch (for human glory) would be replaced by a well of water springing up to eternal life."
✔Repentance, and receiving grace, has allowed me to give grace in abundance. We give grace out of gratitude, and we live our lives in a passionate pursuit of Christ because of what He did for us, the worst of sinners.
8. The God Who Finds Us
By Ronnie Martin
☆There are few stories in the Bible more heartbreking than the story of Adam and Eve.
☆Running caused Adam and Eve to invent ways to cover their own sin, which for them was breaking out the thread and needle and getting drerred as soon as posible.
☆Our in always causeds us to have to DO something when we move in any direction other than God, which by the way, is exhausting and fruitless.
☆Adam and Eve experienced no rest as they started multitasking their way toward covering their indiscretion.
☆We enter into doubt and despair because at some we belive a lie instead ot the truth. At some point we believe that God´s goodness wasn´t so good and that His greatness wasn´t so grand.
☆Somehow, in the shallowness of our minds, we believed that we´re the ones who should have control over destiny of our lives.
☆In fact, we can see God mold and shape our hearts in more profound ways when they´re hurting than they´re not.
☆When God calls us to do a faithful work for Him, He also provides the results. We act, but only the Holy Spirit can active.
☆He handles the activation. It means that we can take rather large anvil off our shoulders knowing that every move we make, every emotion we feel, every defeat we experience, every doubt we harbor, and every disappointment we carry is all under the sovereign control of God. All of it.
☆Her´s a stork yet beautifully liberating reality: We don´t control anything. We never have, we never will. Because God is sovereign. He has perfect control over all things. No boundaries, no limitations. All-knowing, all-loving. Theres is no place in this universe where His presence does not exist. There is nothing that can happen in this entire universe without His knowledge and consent.
☆So breathe a sigh of relief. He has this thing. He´s our only hope from losing hope.
☆When we as believers struggle to belive, it´s not that we´re misplaced hope, it´s that we misplaced God, who is our hope.
☆He consumes the darkness with His light! He illuminates those areas in our lives so that we are not hidden under darkness any longer but "hidden with Christ in God"(Colossians 3:3). He wouldn´t be God if He did anything less.
☆He will show us mercy in the dark solitude of our storms and become the great refuge for our sorrowful souls when we repent of our self -sufficiency and return to the shadow of His wings.
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