Day 3 - "Cause we have all we need in you"

For those just joining us, read Day 1's caveat.

For those who have not heard this idiom before, "The Refiner's Fire" suggests trial, stretching and pressure that someone endures in hopes of refining them to be better. The hard part is that as Christians, we all want to be better but we don't want to be improved. We want to be refined, but we don't want to go through being refined.

Whether it is trying to calculate how you will pay $100 more in bills than you have money, feeling like one of your best friends is mad at you (or even feeling like you're losing one of your best friends), feeling like you are a corporate pawn, feeling completely alone or looking at your life and having no idea where it is going, there seems to be something always in our way (and those are specific examples from my life and others this week).

I don't do well when friends and I aren't on the same page. So when this song came on directly after 2 different people either said or showed that my input in their life was neither wanted nor appreciated, it immediately penetrated my heart.

The main reason it penetrated my heart is how much faith I put in people. We don't think of ministry, "Christian music", or people who point us towards God of idols. We think, "I trust this person's opinion because they point me to God". We eventually get to the point, however, where we turn to that person for comfort, advice, or solace and not God. We think that we cannot get through the fire without that person. In all reality, we cannot get through the fire with anything but God.

My biggest prayer is that I would trust that I am taken care of. That He is truly ALL I need. After all, Jesus is better than the waves.

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? - Matthew 6:25-27 (NIV)

Everything!!

The beatitudes. One of the most challenging parts in all the Bible. How exactly are we supposed to live up to the standard of being poor in spirit, mournful of evil, humble in spirit, thirsting of justice, merciful, pure, peaceful, of light and of salt, and neither angry nor lustful in even our thoughts?

It's funny that I would never think to look for an answer guide to this passage. With all these commands, a map almost, you would never think to search for where Jesus is really trying to bring us. It's hard to focus on fourteen thousand things of God when your mortgage is due, you can't find the time to go grocery shopping (so you eat out all the time and spend more money), or you're too busy to pray over small and large things for yourself let alone others.

Jesus clearly gives us the directions, but the destination seems almost hidden. Anyone searching at the end for the answer clearly has read too many math books. He almost hides it in the middle of his sermon. Most people would say the golden rule is the destination "Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you (Matt 7:12). I would disagree.

There's a common saying among Christian women. "A woman's heart should be so lost in God that a man needs to seek Him in order to find her." Anyone who actually takes this to heart is understanding a fundamental that many, myself included, have missed. Matthew 6:33: Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.

As a very wise friend of mine once said, "If you don't have it, then you don't need it yet." All you need is the fervent desire to search for the things of God. Everything is second place.