What is the Lord doing in you today? Better yet, what are you allowing the Lord to do in your life today?
Take a few minutes as you are reading this to stop.
Yes, stop. Be still as the scripture tells us in Psalm 46:10: “Be still and know that I am God.” That means literally in the Hebrew “do nothing/be quiet and know.”
The Psalmist was likely talking to the surrounding nations of Old Testament Israel for them to stop “promoting chaos and needed a rebuke.”[i]
This is what God is ultimately doing through Jesus Christ and his work on the cross in drawing the nations to him.
This verse also includes you on a very personal basis. Whatever chaos is in your life, he wants you to desist and focus on him. Chaos does not necessarily suggest evil. It may be that, for whatever reason, disorder and confusion have come into your life.
Anything that distracts you from following God’s will in your life brings the potential of spiritual disorder and confusion―chaos, spiritual chaos. If you are not fully submitting to God’s will in your life, whether you know it or not, or whether you want or face it or not―you are being controlled by spiritual chaos at one level or another.
My point is that the only way to have a fully ordered life, a healthy, balanced spiritual life is to fully submit to his will.
And don’t forget that when circumstances around you are getting chaotic, that does not mean you are out of his will, it just means the world and Satan are trying to thwart his will in your life.
It sounds counter-intuitive, but it is true that a person that is following God’s will in their life does have chaos―but it is like the eye of the hurricane, you are empowered and sheltered and led through the storm in peace and the chaos cannot penetrate your life, even though it is there. It you slip from the empowering of the Holy Spirit, away from his will, you risk being controlled or even decimated by the surrounding storms. And when overwhelming things like illness, financial issues, grief come into your life that are no fault of your own is when we need to hold on to him the hardest, for even those situations can cause us to doubt him.
A follower of Christ does in fact live in the storm, in the eye of the hurricane.
It may be that your life is a storm. It may seem like to worst time to examine your heart and spiritual life, and stop and follow his will.
But remember, it is the same Lord that is with us in the middle of the chaotic storm that is the one who can say to the storm “Peace, be still.”
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“Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!”
Psalm 46:10 ESV
©2018 by Ben Bounds. All rights reserved.
[i] See translator’s note 34 on this verse in the NET Bible.
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