"Those who wait on the Lord..."

One of my favorite passages from scripture is out of Isaiah 40:28-31.  We sang it as a song when "growing up in church" and the band U2 even did a version of it back in the day...

Do you not know?
    Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
    the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
    and his understanding no one can fathom.
29 He gives strength to the weary
    and increases the power of the weak.
30 Even youths grow tired and weary,
    and young men stumble and fall;
31 but those who hope in the Lord
    will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
    they will run and not grow weary,
    they will walk and not be faint.

It's a chapter written long before Jesus came along and it points to what he would do when he showed up. 

It's a picture of life with God, through Jesus, and with his Spirit.

For me it means some powerful things.

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Peace not panic - We live in a time when people regularly use the fear of missing out and just plain old fear to get people to buy something, sell something, take someone's side, be against someone else, and so on.  And to be fair, anyone who has ever lived could say the same about the time they are living in.

Earlier in the chapter, it reminds us to see things from a different point of view - God's point of view.  It reminds us that as big as things might seem right around us in our day and time, there's a much larger and much longer scene we are living in.  Yes, if our focus is on the immediate, it can be scary.

We can choose to focus elsewhere entirely.  I am not one of those "just hang on till Heaven" people where it's all about the afterlife.  It's about now too.  God is now and we are good with him now.  There is a different way of being right now that comes through learning to see differently.

Forgiveness not fear - One of those things we can learn to see differently is that we are forgiven.  Completely and totally forgiven.  God did this through Jesus on the cross.  As far as the East is from the West, that's how far your sins have been removed - completely and totally.

Yes, some people say, "Well, you gotta stay prayed up and ask for forgiveness for each and everyone one of your sins."  I've covered this in detail in earlier posts, so I'm not gonna do it all again here.  I'll just say, that's not something you see in scripture unless you copy and paste a lot of things together.

You are forgiven.  When God sees you, he's not writing down sins he's holding against you and erasing them as you pray and say you're sorry.  Sure, he guides us away from anything/sin because it ruins us, keeps us from trusting and depending on him, and is a waste of time.  But you are completely forgiven.

Grace not gotcha - When you do "mess up" and sin, he's still loving you as much as he did before you messed up and/or sinned. The letter to the Hebrews reminds us that when are in times of need, like when you've messed up or sinned, we can always come to his throne of grace and mercy and get just that.

There's something about how we handle each other's mistakes, terrible choices, accidents, offenses, and more that we turn around and project them right on to God and think, "Because this is how we handle each other when we mess up, this must be how God handles us too".  We like to control each other, honestly.

That's not how God is with us. We are not the example for how God behaves or thinks.  Jesus is the example of how God behaves or thinks about us - it's not the other way around.  He doesn't require us to mope around and be sad for a certain period of time after we've messed up.  Shake it off and move on.

Relationship not regret - If we're honest, all the above is a hard pill to swallow. Many of us have been trained to automatically feel awful and to turn tail and duck our heads for a long time.  I'm not suggesting we "blow off" bad situations and act callous or arrogant, but we need to take forgiveness seriously.

God is calling us to himself constantly.  He's not "putting us in time out" so we can learn our lesson from a human point of view.  He knows we're his children, not spiritual super heroes.  He knows we'll get tired and mess up.  He works with us in and through all our junk as we walk with him.

He gives us strength when we are weary and weak.  This means he knows we will have times when we are weary and weak.  He will strengthen us and give us power to move on and we will soar - seeing things from high above we didn't see before.

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I know that sounds like a lot of hooey to some people.  We like results and we like them right now.  We like for people to get what's coming to them.  We like dealing with each other in ways that we don't want God to deal with us in.  And that's hard.  We want the best of both worlds.

And God knows that about us and walks with us at a pace that we can handle, even if we think we can't and that we're at our wits end.  We can't handle a lot of things alone, but he certainly provides what we need for the journey.  Over time, we see the difference between our needs and our wants.

May you know that God loves you more than you can possibly imagine.  For real.  People will try to tell you differently, but that's because they're still stuck in fear themselves and are only able to share what they know so far.  Be at peace.  Know you can trust and depend on God.

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I don't know who that is for.  It's been stuck in my heart and mind for a few days now and I've felt that I needed to share that in case it was for you...