Common man Christianity

I sat down at a blank canvas the other day, and just stared at it. Wondering what I wanted to paint on it. It can be quite a feat to try and bring something out of your mind that you want to paint on the canvas. But after a few minutes I loaded some blue paint on the brush and started painting the sky. I worked the brush back and forth over the canvas and as the blue mixed with the white underneath a beautiful blue sky started to emerge before my eyes. Then I added some mountains, first one in the background, then one a little closer. Then a forest, a lake, some grass and bushes, and right there on a blank white canvas came a beautiful picture that had once been in my mind. It is amazing how that works.

When I paint I often think about how God must feel. He looks at us, His creation, and what He sees in our saved souls are a blank canvas, a place to work, a place to create, a place to bring life. Our lives are brush strokes of God, beautiful works of art that He is creating out of His mind.

I love watching Bob Ross, and one of the things that he says as he paints is that, “We don’t make mistakes, we have happy accidents.” What you do when you have a “happy accident” is scrape the paint off and go right back over it.

I don’t know about you, but I have had plenty of “happy accidents” in my life where I have made the wrong decision, but the wonderful thing is that God can scrape that off, and put something new there, and we can live as if it never even happened.

God is a wonderful God, He is the “Author and Perfecter” of our faith. He is creating in us a new life, a life of beauty, a life of wonder, a life that looks like Jesus. The question that I have to ask you today is this, are you giving Him a clean canvas to work with? And when you have “happy accidents” are you letting Him scrape them away and repaint you according to His will? Let God work in your life and I promise you He will make something in you that you never knew could be.

I want to be transparent about something here, and I may be the only one that feels like this, but I don’t think so. I feel like my days are filled with mostly trying to please other people. Like I am bound by the expectations of what others want of me. And I don’t mean that they are trying to manipulate me, although some of them are, I mean I am just trapped by the desire to please people. Am I alone? I don’t think I am.
It is the human condition to want to be liked. It drives us. And then there are some people who say they don’t care what others think about them, but then let someone not like them and see what happens, they may say it does not bother them, but the way they deal with it is to push said person out of their life altogether. That is just another way of controlling those who don’t like you. The bottom line is we all long to be liked, we all want to belong, and when we are not liked or wanted we do what it takes to get away from that feeling of not being liked or not belonging. This is why gangs and organizations that require membership thrive, the human being wants, no needs to belong.
But this morning I have been thinking, what if I lived to please God every moment of every day the way that I live to please others? What if I went out of my way to make sure that He is pleased with me the way I go out of my way to make sure one of my friends is pleased with me? I ask myself this question to test my motives and my love for God. Because, after all, God is the Savior of my soul, He is the Alpha and Omega, He is my everything, He wants me because He loves me not because of what I can do for Him. On the other hand, most of the people that tug at my sleeve every day want me for what I can do for them. Sure they may love me, I don’t doubt that, but what is their motive? It is not like God’s, I promise you that.
If someone manipulates you or me because they know our need for being liked, do they truly love us or do they love what we can do for them? But then look from God’s standpoint, He created everything; there is nothing that you or I can bring Him that He cannot speak into existence on His own! For instance, if God wants a double quarter pound cheeseburger, (I realize the theological implications of that but I am making a point) He would just speak it into existence. God does not need you to love Him, He is love, God does not need to feel acceptance, He is acceptance, and there is no reason at all for God to need you or I. But here is the kicker, He wants you and I. And not only that, He wants what is best for you and me.
So here is the deal, I want to live every day to please God. I don’t want to worry about anyone else, but Him and out of that everyone else will be taken care of. But in order to please Him I have to keep in touch with Him. I have to talk to Him. When those times of the day come and I have decisions to make I have to stop and ask Him, “God, does this please you?” He will answer, I promise. It may be through your conscious, it may be the still small voice, but He will answer if you and I will listen.
Together, today, let us all live to please God.

I am not much on living in the past. As a matter of fact, I am a proponent of the school of thought that says the past is the past and we cannot change it, therefore live for today. Or another one I like is, “Yesterday is history, and tomorrow is a mystery, live for today”. I love these saying because they bring me hope. They bring me hope because I know that Jesus has washed away my mistakes, and gives me the strength to live another day in hope that I can live the righteous life He calls me to.

However, the past also provides us a road map of faith. Many times in the Bible God would tell folks, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”. Why would He say that? I can tell you why, what God was saying was, “Look at what I did in their lives, I worked miracles in the lives of these men, and I can work miracles in your life too.” It brings me so much comfort to look at the doubt of Abraham when God told him he would have a child in old age. His wife laughed and Abraham doubted. God came through. It also brings me hope when I see Abraham’s faith as he walks that promised son to the top of a mountain to sacrifice him in total commitment to God, and God came through again. It brings me hope when I read that Paul had a “Thorn in his flesh, a messenger from Satan” that God would not remove from him. Why do these things bring me hope? Because I realize that I am not alone. The greatest men in the Bible had failures and God used them anyhow.

And then there is my own history, every day that I walk through life with Jesus I am making a history that I can draw from for years to come. When I pray for one of my children when they are sick I can draw from a strong history of when God healed before through my prayers. When I pray for God to help me financially I can remember the time when two thousand dollars just showed up in my Bible. When I am in doubt about what God would have me do in a situation, I can remember when He made it clear what I was supposed to do through the word of another. My history, and the history of others, strengthens my faith.

This is one of the reasons why reading the Bible and journaling are so important to our Christian walk. These are records of the history of great men of God, and a journal is a record of our own history. When we feel our faith getting faint, these are places we can run to in order to remember those times when God came through, and therefore create great patience while we wait for Him to come through again.

I woke up this morning and came downstairs for a time of prayer and just being with my Lord. I looked down at my feet and noticed I had a hole in my sock. I tried and tried to pray, but my O.C.D kept kicking in, and that hole was driving me crazy. It was then that God spoke to me in my heart. What i heard was this; I am so worried about the small things in life, what I will eat, what I will wear, what people think about me, and fail to notice the things in life that matter. How many times do I neglect seeing God work in my life becuase I am so busy worrying about things that i cannot control, or that can wait? I would think more than I would like to admit.

Through a hole in my sock God spoke, I hope He used it to speak to you today as well.