Chasing the Beautiful God

Psalm 56: 8, 9 – You number my wanderings; Put my tears into Your bottle; Are they not in Your book? When I cry out to You, Then my enemies will turn back; This I know, because God is for me.

Try this exercise. Remember back over your life. What were the low points and what were the highs? On a piece of paper draw a timeline of the highs and lows of your life with the x axis representing time and the y axis representing the high or the low. Place a dot on the timeline for each significant life event. Put the highs higher up the y axis and lows lower down. Connect the dots with an unbroken line. Your chart should look like a series of valleys and hills going from left to right across the page.

Now think back over the lows of your life. Can you identify one or two repeated themes to the way you felt during these times? For example, in my own life the key themes of every low I have ever experienced are these: fear and rejection/abandonment.

With each of these emotions will generally come a message. In the time that you feel low there is a message that gets repeated over and over again through your head. What is it? Write it down. The message that I am assaulted with in my lows is this: You’re stupid, ugly and boring and nobody would ever want to know you. 

Have you ever heard someone say something like, “This always happens to me.” That’s the message of the low speaking.

Now think back over the highs. Again, can you identify one or two repeated themes to the way you’ve felt during these times?  In my own life the key themes are: safety and belonging.

Again is there a dominant, consistent message that comes during these times? Mine is this: You’re loved and you belong and everything is going to be ok because you’re a son of God. You were made to impact a nation.

Are the emotional themes of your highs and lows closely related or even exact opposites? For most people they are. But why? Why are they so closely related? The fact they are tells me there’s a secret waiting to be discovered here.

So now ask yourself: are the emotions I feel in the time of the low and the message I receive then from God? Does God say these things about His people? (e.g. You’re stupid, ugly and boring and nobody would ever want to know you.) Does God say this to us?

The answer is obvious. And yet the truth is that we spend far more time worrying that the message of our low times might be true rather than living in the freedom of the message of the high.

And so here’s the secret this exercise is pointing to: the truth is that from the day you were born,  the devil has feared who you’ve been called to be and what you’ve been called to do. Satan has been lying to you about who God is and how He feels about you. The lie that Satan has been telling has a theme and that theme directly contradicts the calling that God has for you. That’s why the themes in our low times and high times are so closely related. There are two voices vying for our attention. There are two voices trying to convince us to interpret our reality by a certain theme. If the devil can convince us that God is distant and uncaring then we will never step out into who we’ve been called to be. We will never take the risk to trust that God will be with us when we step out on the daring thing God asks us to do.

The reason we tend to spend more time listening to and worrying about the message of the low is because we’ve become confused and equated our circumstances with God’s heart toward us. If things are going well then God must like us and then the next day when something goes wrong then God must not like us anymore. “What have I done wrong?” we ask. Yet the fact that you have had many circumstantial highs and lows in your life proves that your circumstances are actually a very poor indicator as to how God feels about you. A VERY poor indicator.

The truth is that God is so much closer and so much more involved in your life than you could possibly imagine. The truth is that God made you for a purpose. Nobody else can do on the earth what God has made you to do. You were made to be the very glory of God upon the earth. We need to get a better measure of God’s heart towards us. We need to take hold of His promises in the Word and not let go. When we do this, we can actually begin to look at the low times of our lives and see the truth of our calling and destiny as the opposite of how we feel in those times. That is a stunning reality!

The exact opposite of the repeated message of my lows is this: Actually who God calls me is a beloved son. Actually, what God promises is that He will never leave me nor forsake me. Actually, what God has called me to is to impact this nation.

You are more than who you think and you were made to do more than you imagine. It’s time for young Australian’s to arise to their true identity and destiny.

Try this exercise! It could change your life.

Psalm 16:3 – As for the saints who are on the earth, they are the excellent ones in whom is all My delight.

J. Ratcliffe