Dear People Who Keep Company With God,
When I graduated from high school, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church my parent’s attended gave me a book titled Mistaken Identityas a graduation gift. It is a book of poems about mankind’s failure to know God as He really is. I completely forgot the book existed, until I found it recently as I was looking through a box of photographs, newspaper clippings, etc. from my childhood that my parents kept for me.
As I looked at the book and some of the photographs from that time in my life I was in awe of how good the Lord really is. It is the devil’s most successful strategy to paint a picture of God in our minds that is totally not true. The basic lie is this: God is not good. He did that with Eve in the garden (Gen. 3:1-5) and does it to this day. When we buy into the lie that God is not good, then we also buy into a lie that we are not good. If God is not good, then His creation (and we are the crown of His creation) is no good.
I remembered what I felt in my heart about myself in those days. It wasn’t good. As I looked at those photographs with the eyes I now have, I see myself completely different and the reason I see myself completely different is I see God completely different. I see Him as a loving and good Father.
It stood out that God has always been speaking to me even in my most rebellious moments. The problem was I did not have the eyes to see, the ears to hear, nor the heart to understand what He was saying (Matt. 13:13). It was hidden from me. If we do not believe that God is good then much of what God does and says remains hidden. Yet He still spoke to me because He loved me and saw my future. He saw this very day when I could hear, see and understand, so He kept the book hidden for me for thirty-seven years.
In the book was a hand written message from the pastor; God was revealing my life’s destiny to me.
“Life is more than we see in a mirror, dimly. You have begun to see life as it is – but always remember, YOU are here to help make life what it should be.”
It is only in the past few years that I began to see what life should be. For many years as a believer something hindered me. I finally discovered what it was; it was my thinking, reasoning and understanding. It was always an argument with God, I was always asking how and because I could not understand I struggled. It was only when I more fully discovered the renewed mind of Christ that my life really began to be transformed (Rom. 12:1-2). Only the renewed mind can see what life should be.
There is a thought of Christ that has been circulating through my mind for months now, “It is time to become the dream of God.” That thought has captured my heart. I do not want to ever go back to being who I once was. Not even who I was three years ago. It is not that any of us have arrived, that is not the point; it is time for all of us to lay hold of that for which we were laid hold of by Christ Jesus (Phil. 3:12). Someone recently said, “I am not claiming, but I am aiming.” That is a great way to say it.
It is amazing that thirty-seven years ago God spoke to me and told me, “You are here to help make life what it should be.” That is the dream of God for every believer. That is why we are on this earth. That is what Jesus did when He was here. That is our true destiny. He also revealed to me the key to the dream – our Father is a good and loving God and His creation is good, and we are the best of His creation. You can crush the enemy with that.
Many Blessings, BW