Find Your Voice, Own Your Voice
When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
Mark 10:47(NKJV)
God did not save you to go around capitulating to what makes other people comfortable to the point of denying the ownership of your own voice. That type of mindset will infect your prayers. It’ll dilute your praise. It’ll make you ask for less than what God has intended in His divine destiny for you.
But if you can find your voice and own your voice, then no matter the competitive voices around you, you will have enough courage to go for what your faith says can be yours and to ask for what God has entitled you to. Every opportunity God has for you will require your faith, but then you’re going to have to own your voice in realizing that opportunity for your life.
Now, other people have their own agendas. Like with blind Bartimaeus, others will try to silence you, and warn you, and rebuke you to be quiet. And just like the man at the pool of Bethesda, people will not put you in the water of life’s opportunities simply because you’ve been hanging around for a long time. You’re going to have to find your voice and own your voice.
The things that God has convicted you about as it relates to what He expects of your life, the integrity with which He wants you to manage your human relationships, the vision He has plainly disclosed only to you, the places where He has given you influence—in all of these things you have to find your voice in order to connect vision to reality.
Not only do you need to find your voice, but you have to own your voice as well. Your voice is always connected to your deepest burden. I don’t mean burden as an unwanted weight. I’m talking about burden as a calling, an invitation from Jesus to connect your life to His purposes. I’m referring to the heavy compulsion to work at the plans He has for you.
Your burden doesn’t necessarily have to be limiting or painful or physical, but it will always be deeply personal. What are your deepest spiritual desires? What’s your deepest compulsion? What is that thing that God has created a yearning for within you? You have to own it, because it’s the strongest connection you will have to Jesus Christ. Whatever that is, your voice emerges from there.
Find your voice and own your voice.
You’re Ready for This
"His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness."
2 Peter 1:3 (NIV)
You will never face anything for which God will not ensure that you are adequately prepared and significantly equipped.
I’m not saying you won’t get tired. I’m not saying you won’t get frustrated. I’m not saying you won’t get hit hard sometimes. I didn’t say that sometimes life won’t trip you up and knock you to your knees.
But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They will mount up on wings like eagles, run and not get weary, walk and not faint. You can be encouraged and stay encouraged because no matter how tired you are, every day you wake up, God is bringing daily bread to you. Every day, He supplies your needs according to Hs riches in glory. Every day, He’s got fresh manna. Every day, He’s got fresh anointing. Every day, He’s got fresh favor. Every day, He’s securing the hedge around you. Every day, He’s answering your prayers. Every day, He gives you wings like the eagles’ so that you can soar.
Don’t panic about the trouble you face. He’s already worked it out. All you have to do is walk it out, because He has worked it out. You walk it; He’ll work it. And if you walk by faith, you’ll discover that He’s had the plan synchronized all along. Your steps have been ordered.
God’s timing is a testimony to His eternality. He synchronizes events to make sure that nothing hits you for which you are not ready. You are always adequately prepared, as long as your faith is connected, healthy, and strong, and your convictions are deep in the soul. Your God is able to do exceedingly, abundantly above all you could ask or think.
These are perilous times we are living in, but that doesn’t matter. They are also the best of times if we live in the knowledge that our God is never going to leave us nor forsake us. He’s promised to be with us always, even to the end of age.
So live life today in the knowledge that you are prepared to handle whatever comes your way, thanks to Him.
Play Your Part
"Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ."
Colossians 3:23-24 (ESV)
What part—large or small—is the Lord asking you to play in the places where He has planted you? Do you know the role you are to take? Are you fighting against it? Do you find it difficult?
Why might playing your part in these places be so hard for you? Is it because in some of them, you were expecting to be the star, but you’ve found that you were called to be the supporting cast? Is it because in some of those spheres, it meant you were going to have to be hurt in order to prove how much God is a healer? Is it because in denying yourself, God wants the world to see that He is the one who supplies all your need?
What is so hard about having to give up some things, or walk away from some things, or think less about some things, or not love some things at the same level that you ought to love God? What can you ever possess that, if God required it, would be too hard for you to give up so that you could have exactly what God is designing for you?
How important is it that you surrender to doing your part? Would it change your perspective to know that your part is attached to redemptive and salvific plans that help to create uncluttered space for Jesus to work in?
All I’m trying to tell you is this: play your part. Somebody else’s role won’t fit you. Only yours.
The only way you advance your life is to accept your calling, to appropriate your gifts, and then to spend your life playing your part. Epictetus was wise in saying, “Remember, you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the Author chooses…. For this is your business—to act well the given part.”
God has a role for each one of us to play. He gives gifts to each of us to do it faithfully and to make a difference and to share and spread His glory. Part of the excitement ought to be in the fact that God even chose us to play a part in His divine drama, that He’s equipped us to do it in order to make a difference in this world.
So live with gratitude, master your lines, find your place on stage, and play your part.
Trusting God’s Timing
So he said, “These are the horns that scattered Judah, so that no one could lift up his head;
but the craftsmen are coming to terrify them, to cast out the horns of the nations that lifted up their horn against the land of Judah to scatter it.”
Zechariah 1:21 (NKJV)
Faith in God is not just appreciating God’s sacrifice of His only Son, His adoption of us into His royal family, and His redemption that brought our salvation. Faith in God is also trusting His timing.
That timing often includes burdens before blessing, silence before speech, ambivalence before revelation, struggle before success, and “not enough” before “more than enough.”
God’s timing is eternal and not reactive. God leads our lives with precise and intended timing. But part of that right timing can include growth, maturation, and the receipt of power only on the back end of severe threat, challenge, conflict, and confrontation.
Zechariah the prophet had a vision of four horns symbolizing nations that attacked Judah and scattered her. But before there was a chance for the threat of these strong horns to sink in, the prophet also saw four craftsmen. These craftsmen are used by God to overthrow the horns that have threatened and scattered Judah.
I suggest that this text is attempting to teach us that there are times when you have to see threatening horns before you witness defending craftsmen. In other words, we need to be reminded and become convicted of the truth that there are times you can’t fully appreciate the power of God to deliver without the feeling of—and the experience of—the pain of being scattered.
Judah can only appreciate the deliverance from 70 years of captivity because of how hard those years were and what those years demanded. But in the end, to watch God deliver, to watch God destroy every enemy and every threat and return them to their land, restore them to their history, resource them for their protection, and revive them so that they are renewed—it all points to the fact that God rightly defines the timing for everything.
The question that all of us have to wrestle with is, do we trust that God is better able than we are to define right timing?
Trusting the timing of God is strongly linked to our knowledge of—and faith in—His person, His goodness, His power, and His protection.
Will you trust God’s timing in your life today?
Unselfing Self
"And [Joseph] did not know her till she had brought forth her firstborn Son."
Matthew 1:25 (NKJV)
Famed hymn writer and theologian Frederick Faber is right when he says that holiness is “unselfing” ourselves. To me that explains this text in which Joseph wouldn't touch Mary until God finished delivering Jesus through her.
Shrouded in suspicion around the community, with lives interrupted by divine invasion in human affairs, Joseph had his mind made up to divorce Mary quietly. He thought, “Whatever this thing is that she has going on with God, who am I to interfere?” It seems to me like a selfless and noble plan on Joseph’s part.
Joseph goes to sleep firmly settled in his plan to quietly divorce Mary, and while he sleeps, he discovers how much he himself is an intricate part of God's plan for human redemption. God edits his dreams, telling him not to divorce Mary, but to physically father this human Gift that would bring redemption to an otherwise condemned creation.
Joseph awakens the next morning to immediately obey God's plans. And verse 25 gives us insight into the selflessness he took upon himself in being part of the greater plan. It simply says this: “And [Joseph] did not know her until she brought forth her firstborn son.” That means they had no deep intimate connections spanning the time from conception until after it was safe for her post-delivery.
Here is the point: Joseph bought into the dream. He accepted his role in it and also accepted the fact that part of that role was to live in a strange space where his faithfulness was measured by denying his natural passion. Restraining what was a part of his intense love for his new bride, his response to the invitation to offer God his life in service was stewarded for a season by self-denial.
Today, God is calling you to “unself” yourself as part of His bigger plan to bless the world. When you deny yourself (which can take a thousand different forms at any point in your life), take up your cross, and follow Jesus, you are participating in a master plan that is so much bigger than you imagine.
