Christmas is coming right up! We all
have lists of things we want to get done and need to get done and how will it all get done? I hope this series will be that deep breath, the pause that refreshes, the quiet and slow side of
Christmas.
Slow
One of the things that emerged from my time of studying this
word slow was an acronym that I want to share with you:
When we have a heart posture of slow before God, it starts
in coming to Him with surrender.
This is another word that may make us cringe, just the idea
of letting go is hard. Yet it is also beautiful in keeping a soft heart before
God and allowing Him to be at work within us.
There are probably multiple versions for the sign language
for surrender, but the one I learned is like this – holding a bucket in each
hand and setting them down to lift my hands heavenward. God knows about
whatever is in my bucket and He is still there caring about it – He just wants
to know that first we are willing to be still before Him and come to Him with
the things that burden us.
A natural next step is to listen. We have surrendered our agendas and now we listen to the one thing that God is laying on our hearts first - and as we are listening - we transition to a place of action. We obey. Obeying is our chance to respond to God - we've given Him ourselves and strained our ears to hear and now is the time to get moving.
After obeying, we come to a place of worship. A gratefulness for the opportunity to serve, a beauty in
the provision of time to do just exactly what God wanted us to do at that
moment and often a multiplying of time to accomplish more because the posture
of our hearts was soft and slow.
This is really the process we walk through when we ask Jesus
to come and live within us, right? For those of us who have received Christ, we
came to a point of surrender – we needed to admit that we had a need and our
need was for forgiveness and salvation from our own sin. We teach our children
that sin is anything we think, say or do that doesn’t please God, right? And
sin cannot exist with God, so God came up with this great plan that if we
surrendered our sin, listened to His Word which says, “believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” {Acts
16:31} or the beloved John 3:16, “For God
so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in
Him will not perish but have everlasting life.”
We simply listen to God’s Word and we believe that it is for
us, it is for now and it is for eternity. We ask Him to come and live in our
hearts, to forgive us our sin and we acknowledge that we are placing our faith
and trust in Him. Please notice that the action comes after the believing. Our
obedience follows after we have
listened. In this same way, we do not earn our salvation by good works – they
are a natural overflow or by product of gratitude in what God has done in our
lives and in who He is. We don’t obey every single command ever given all at
one time all in the first days of this life change! As our pastor frequently
says, “Obey what you know.” As God
shows you something in His Word and/or opens your eyes – start there and obey
for today.
And we worship Him, we purpose to spend the days we are
given with Christ as Lord in our hearts and lives. We know our place before Him
and we honor Him for that. When we live
out who God made us to be we are living a life of worship, when we live for His
glory and not our own we are living a life of worship, when we encourage a
friend and point her to Christ we are living a life of worship and when we pull
these little children He has given to us into our arms and point them to Him –
we are doing holy work that worships our Lord.
Surrender
Listen
Obey
Worship
Today I want us to look at these four words in light of a
very special woman and the season of the year that is upon us.
Just like her, we are women, we are mothers, we have the
voices of others around us some of which we will want and need to embrace and
some of which we will need to close out and ignore. Just like her, we have
circumstances thrust upon us that are less than ideal, we have busy from the
world around that we will have to learn how to temper with slow. We want to follow
God and we have a desire to do what is right.
Will you join me in looking at the life of Mary in Luke
chapter 1? Read verse 26-56.
Isn’t that a beautiful picture of a slow heart?
What was Mary planning to do the day the angel came to her?
What plans were interrupted by the announcement? Her wedding plans changed for
sure. And while we don’t know every thought of Mary’s heart, the view God has
given us of her is so at peace, so willing, so humble.
Tomorrow we'll look at what we can learn from Mary's heart of slow!
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