God Is Near

I haven’t written much about my trip to my home town yet, and that’s a serious sin of omission because God showed Himself so faithful that all I should really be doing right now is praising Him. Instead I let the enemy come in and steal my joy by focusing on the nonsense he’s been throwing into my path to make me question the faithfulness of God. The mind is really a very mixed up and messed up place. I can be looking at victory, looking right at a miracle of God, experiencing it in the here and now, not just in the past as a memory, and the enemy comes with something to make me question and doubt and I fall for it. Joyce Meyer wrote a really great book that I’ve already mentioned here at least once, “The Battlefield of the Mind.” She’s written a lot of great books, but that one in particular really says it all to me. The battle is only in our mind – if the enemy can get us to believe that he is in charge, that he has more power than God, then we’re sunk, deep in despair, and we can do really stupid things in reaction to the fear and doubt that mess things up that were going to work out perfectly if we just let God handle it and go on our merry way.

Of course that’s easier said than done, because the devil is no joke. We try to make him one by drawing pictures and cartoons of him in a little red suit with a long red tail, but the reality of it is that he can come as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14), he can come at us in the words and actions of someone we thought we could trust, he can talk to us with convincing words that seem like they make sense and make faith seem foolish. And he’s also very sneaky. He’ll wait until we’re least expecting it and then, blammo. Or he’ll start throwing hand grenades into every area of our life so we don’t know where the next one is coming from and we just want to raise up a white flag and surrender. He’ll use our past and our present, our hopes and dreams, our mistakes, our sin, our friends and family – he’ll use whatever he can to try to get us to stop believing and just give up.

The saying goes that the darkest hour is just before the dawn, and sometimes that’s true. But other times we can be having a feeling of joy and victory and then something happens to make it seem like we were crazy to be shouting Hallelujah. My trip back home went so miraculously well, from start to finish, including the travel and the weather, that there is nothing that I should be doing right now except for thanking God. Instead I got all upset about some emails and calls I received, and got all worried about some promises that God has made when other people who are involved in those promises started acting like we were right back where we were before God ever spoke a word over our lives. I had a lot of dawn moments when I was in my home town, so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t expect that there will be an equally shining dawn for each of these other promises. And yet, the mind is truly a battlefield, and if I’m not aware of that, I can get drawn into believing that things haven’t changed and they never will. I can start believing a lie instead of trusting in the truth that I know is in the word of God.

But even in the midst of my own foolishness and doubt, even when I am forgetting to praise God and thank Him, He still shows up to let me know that He is faithful to do as He has promised. I got a call from a friend on Sunday who I’d emailed a prophetic word to back in May. He had been dealing with a lot of stuff and hadn’t read the email I’d sent, and he started telling me about what he’d been dealing with and it had to do with the word the Lord had given me for him. There was no earthly way I could have known what I had written to him – it literally came to me, into my mind and heart, from the mind and heart of God. I remember that when I was writing the email, I was talking to God and saying, if you say so, because I didn’t understand fully what it was that He wanted me to say to my friend. I didn’t have any basis in my own understanding for sending the message, but it was so strong on my heart to send it, even though the Lord knew my friend wouldn’t have time to read it. The Lord had me write it back then so that we both could know now that yes, God does speak to us, and yes, I do hear Him. You see, I’d given this friend other words from God before, and so this was a confirmation not just for me that I hear His voice, but it was a confirmation for my friend that the words of encouragement I have spoken over his life are really coming from the Lord and not just from me trying to be nice.

God is speaking to us all the time. His voice is the one that says, you’ll make it through, the bills will be paid, don’t worry about that now, take a walk, relax, enjoy your vacation. His voice is the one that says, “We are more than conquerors through Christ who loved us” (Romans 8:37), that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:38-39). It is the voice that says I am well pleased with you, I delight in you, I love you. It is the voice of God that tells us who we are, not what mistakes we’ve made, but who we are becoming as we let Him lead the way. We are becoming every day more and more like Him, and no matter how far away we may feel, He is never far away from us.

One day a few years ago when I was feeling very down and blue, I went to visit a friend in his office. He had other people visiting with him at the time – he’s a very sociable person – and a woman who was just getting ready to leave when I arrived stayed to speak to me for a few moments. Before she left, seemingly out of the blue, she said to me, “God is near. Sometimes we forget that and I just felt like saying that to you just now. God is near.” I’ve never seen that woman again, and I don’t know who she was. But as she said to me I’ll say to you, don’t ever forget, no matter where you are and no matter how you feel, that God is always near.

Blessings,

Jannie Susan