If you build it… your built it.

The more we get to know God, the more we live by faith.  This trust, this faith, becomes increasingly in “who God is” and not what we understand God to be.  All those rules we have made to make God manageable in our mind, are deserted in order to lovely embrace who God actually is.  Our best Bible studies are enhanced by our actual living with God.  What we could not see in Scripture in our 20’s is clearly seen in our 40’s.

I am not saying that you need to be old to know the Lord rightly.  I am saying that the longer you know the Lord the more you will know Him rightly.  A maturing relationship is the way of the Lord.  I personally believe that my relationship with God will be maturing throughout all eternity, and that is a long time (sort a).

Here are some of the rules that I have believed about God that effected the way I understood Him.

• God always gets His will, His desire
• If you pray it and it is God’s will, it will happen
• God overlooks internal sin if you have external actions
• You can have a little sin as long as you also have signs and wonders in your ministry/life. (Was your first thought “everyone sins”?  Why did you have this thought and not “be perfect as I am perfect?”
• God was angry at “stupid” evil people and I can join Him in that emotion.
• I wanted God to be mad at people who disagreed with me so that I could justify my anger with their rejection and difference.
• God’s emotions have limits.  God gets “fed up”.
• Deep down I wanted God to reject me and get fed up with me because I was fed up with myself.  In this way I was making God after my own image.  I was making a God I agreed with, even if this God of my making was not the real God.

OK, that is enough for now.  There are more because I have lived a few decades on the earth now and I have had time to think.  Now you see why I argue for a maturing relationship with God.  If you are the same now as you were when you got saved, you may not agree the same way.

Here is the main point I wanted to make.  You cannot give up on a life of prayer once you realize that God will not get all the things you are praying for.  You and I (if you are called to it) will spend years crying out for God’s will and kingdom to come to earth.  It is His hearts desire that His will would be done on the earth.  But it may not happen in certain specific terms.  And on this point, this point of unanswered prayers, you cannot be discouraged.

When Jesus, the God/man walked the earth, His desires for the earth were not always accomplished.  Jesus desired Jerusalem to allow Him to embrace her, but she did not.   God desires all men to be saved, but they are not.  God wills that all His leaders and ministers be holy, but all are not holy. 

I have encountered some people, people of prayer, who are sweeping some tough issued under a rock and making a rule to cover up their insecurity in their relationship with God.  Don’t do it.  Jesus is the main reward of our intercession and do not shove Him under some rock just so you don’t feel the pain of a maturing relationship with God.  Did we make a rule that “knowing He who is unknowable” would be easy?

Here are a few more rules that I have faced recently, I wonder if they are partly true,

• God is love and has no wrath
• If you declare a thing it will happen
• This is not the same as declaring a thing so that it happens
• The more passion I express, the more truth I walk in.  Zeal trumps wisdom
• The best way to serve the Lord is to put your life on pause and join the prayer movement. 
• I wonder who would fund the prayer movement?

To live under the whole counsel of God is humbling.  To live a life that is truly ever learning who the Master is, is both rewarding and full of insecurity.  Insecurity, because we cannot control the relationship and must depend more on His love for us than our ability to be lovable.

Here is a link to some old books.  I don’t want you to think I agree with everything written in these books.  I don’t agree with everything I have written.

http://www.catholicspiritualdirection.org/catholicclassics.html

If you have some time in the rest of your life you may want to read about the intimacy and prayer movements of the past.  What revelations did they know that we now call “new”?  What did they lean that we can learn from them without making the same mistakes?

The 1300’s were a time in history when a lot of stuff happened.  Google a time line of the 1300’s and look at the death, despair, disaster, war, Church conflict and weather.  Why did God raise up a prayer and intimacy movement then?  What did they learn that we should know?  How do you survive with hope when half the world dies around you?