Sometimes life hits you with a side-swipe you don’t see coming. God usually counters with something equally as unexpected.

I had to leave a job recently, one I’ve done for 8 years since I came to South Africa. The business closed and I found myself out of work. My wife has not been well for some time, and this left us without any income.

Major side-swipe.

In the blink of an eye we went from where God was taking us to fighting massive health issues and having creditors from personal and business environments hammering on our door. The enemy hit us hard with a massive attack that we just didn’t see coming, and were far from prepared for.

Massive swipe.

One of my favourite phrases in scripture is “But God”.

In this case, I had my own “But God” experience.

After applying blindly to as many potential employers as I could I was getting nowhere. We were getting desperate and it felt like I was getting blocked at every turn. Then God came through – from a place I had never applied to, and might never have considered applying to. The owner of the local filling-station and store offered me a job as manager of the shop/station. More than that, he offered it on the understanding that if I got a better offer after I started he would only need 24 hours notice before I moved on! A serious “But God” experience.

There was a man once who went out to do what he fully believed was God’s will. He travelled a lot, speaking to everyone who would listen and eventually arresting, judging and imprisoning people. But God knocked him off his donkey one day. Jesus himself spoke to him and overcame the side-swipe of the persecuting ways he’d had. God’s swipe gave us nearly two-thirds of the New Testament.

Another man was excited by what God had shown him. He shared it with his family. His brothers threw him in a pit, sold him as a slave and told his father he was dead. His new owner promoted him, then the owner’s wife falsely accused him of rape, he was thrown into prison and forgotten. But God had other plans. In 24 hours he went from imprisoned slave to second only to Pharoah in Egypt and saved the nation and surrounding nations from starvation.

David, Joseph, Abraham, Paul, Peter and the giants in the scripture all experienced “But God” experiences in their lives. Wesley, Luther, Wigglesworth, St Patrick, and so many other Godly men since scripture was closed also experienced these moments.

I don’t know any God focussed people who can’t look at their lives and see it littered with “But God” moments, big and small.

Look for them. God is just waiting to surprise His children at every opportunity.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Perspective. As Christians we almost invariably need to take another look at ourselves in every situation. The most crucial however, is Warfare.

I’m not talking about joining the US Marine Corps here, but rather the Spiritual Warfare we are involved in on a daily basis.

The battles we fight are not against flesh and blood, as Paul puts it, but rather we fight against ideas. “We use our powerful God-tools for smashing warped philosophies, tearing down barriers erected against the truth of God, fitting every loose thought and emotion and impulse into the structure of life shaped by Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:5 The Message)

Ideas, philosohpies, imaginations. These are what we must fight against.

I heard someone say some time ago that they imagined King David as the shepherd boy going toe to toe against Goliath. It gave them comfort to think of David looking at this giant and being scared. Goliath was a massive figure, and dressed in full battle gear he would have cast an impressive figure, it’s true. But when I read the story I see David’s heart. He was a young man powerfully driven by the Love of God, whom he had an incredible relationship with already.

He saw a man, nothing more, who dared to defy the army of the Living God. Armed and assured by his knowledge and relationship he went out and fearlessly first stunned the giant with the weapons he was most familiar with, then finally used the enemy’s own weapon to behead him. True, the sling may have killed the giant outright, but the removal of his head certainly completed the job!

We need to look at the attacks we endure with the same attitude David had.

Firstly we must look at what we already have in our armoury. God has given each of us tools to use in a fight we are familiar with and can wield with just as deadly accuracy at the enemy as anything he can launch at us. Saul offered David his own armour. David was unfamiliar with the weapons and had he chosen to use it the story would have had a very different outcome. Encumbered with what Saul had given him and unfamiliar with the use of the weapons, David would have died quickly and Israel would have fallen. When we come under attack we must use the familiar. The World will seek to have us use other things. Often, as Saul was at this point, well-meaning people will give advice that will result in our falling, not because the weapons are inherently bad, but simply because we don’t know how to use them. David went on to become a battle-hardened warrior in his own right, and fought many campaigns with a sword in his hand. But first he had to learn.

Secondly, once our familiar weapons have felled and stunned the initial attack, we can then look at how our enemy’s own weapons can be used to ensure his utter defeat. Ill health, financial loss, even death of a loved one can be turned around to Glorify God and defeat the enemy if we look to God’s wisdom on how.

In the midst of the first step it may now be obvious, but as the initial onslaught stops we can often see where God is directing our steps and how we can now use the very thing that the enemy wanted to use to destroy us, be it sickness, death or financial ruin (or any combination thereof!) to rebuild stronger and more Blessed than ever before, while the enemy is utterly defeated.

Last night for 12 hours we were without water to our home. It was a hassle. I couldn’t shower, the dirty clothes needed to wait and I couldn’t have my evening cup of tea. This was an inconvenience, not a disaster.

I wasn’t well last night. I felt thick headed, my mouth was dry, I was nauseous and I needed to use the bathroom…

The little things like turning on a tap are what get to us. A few years ago I would regularly go camping for the odd conference. These camping trips were well organised with stand-pipes dotted about for supplying water and an ablutions block. But for cooking I had to fetch water. I would walk from my tent site to the tap nearest, which always felt like a trek, fill a couple of 25 litre jerry cans and walk back. That would do me for the day’s cooking, washing (don’t like to shower on camp) and drinking water. Some campers had mobile homes with fitments allowing them to drive to the tap and fill water butts with enough water for the whole weekend. Some made several trips a day because they had smaller containers.

Overnight last night I was reminded of this as I went and pumped water from the wellpoint in the garden (sulphurous and very much NOT drinking water) into jerry cans again for the toilet cysterns in the house. It struck me that this simple luxury we take for granted is an absolute necessity we cannot do without.

Water.

Jesus didn’t stand up and announce that He was the living egg and chips. He didn’t reveal himself to be the beer of life. Water. Simple water.

We cannot live more than a couple of days without water. Spiritually we need to be filled constantly with the Living Water of Jesus’ Spirit. Why? Because we leak.

Imagine taking a nail and driving it through a 25 litre container about an inch from the bottom and leaving it there. Then fill the can with water. You might not notice immediately, but the water immediately begins to flow out of the hole. The pressure from the air surrounding it forces the water out. Gradually the water all drains out until it reaches the level of the nail, and it levels off there. You can’t stop the flow on a camp site, you need to simply return to the source and top up. Regularly.

Spiritually it’s no different.

Top up or dry up. And Sundays aren’t enough alone. We don’t drive big mobile homes with enough storage space for weeks at a time. But we do have a link to the source. What we need to do is to plug ourselves into the source and we can keep going back as often as we need – that tap never dries out.

Jesus would withdraw from the disciples and go alone to pray. He needed to top up. If Jesus needed to, how much more do we.

I really get hung up these days on being single minded. It never really occurred to me that I wasn’t until the latest battle I’ve had to fight. My wife is going through the biggest fight of her life, and as a result I am as well. She’s fighting illness in a way I’ve never had to before now. If she loses, she really loses. Faith requires focus. I firmly believe that it is not God’s will for her to be going through this. I have absolutely no doubt that He will ultimately be Glorified through it, but H e didn’t cause it. So I need to pray.

Previously when I’ve had to pray for something there has been an “acceptable” alternative that I could go to when it didn’t happen how I expected the answer to come. I shifted my expectations according to what was happening in the natural world around me. As a result my experience was hit and miss to say the least. Every so often I’d hold on despite what was going on and I’d see God work in big ways. It finally dawned on my lightning fast mind that I needed to hold on to my focus and to stick to it no matter what.

I used to be a marksman when I was at school. I was a pretty good shot with a rifle, and reasonable with an air rifle. The key was to focus on a single target. I realised recently that I need to apply that same focus to my Sprirtual battle that I use when I have a gun in my hands.

I used to love the old westerns growing up where there was some old-timer with a “scatter” gun. The sawn down barrel of a shotgun that would spray buckshot over a wide area was something that made me laugh and wish I’d been around then. As I learned more I discovered those guns are only really effective up close. The scattering of the pellets diffuses how powerful the shot is and actually in a fight a pistol was far more use for bringing down your enemy.

Prayer is like being a sniper. A scatter-gun prayer sounds great but is virtually useless. We need to pick out our target and fire directly at it – kill shots only. The enemy does nothing less to us. When our health or finances are attacked we often shout at God about it. We lose our jobs and we shout at Him some more. The sickness deepens and we still just scream impotently at God.

Impotent. Weak. Defeated.

This is not what God made us.

When we pray we should do what Jesus told us. Praise first. It’s like a sniper drawing his breath out to steady his hands. It clarifies the mind and puts us into a position where we can really see the target. Line up the kill shot second. Pick the point on the enemy where it will cause most damage to him and the best result for us. Fire and keep firing until he falls. There is no point in shooting once and walking away without making sure the enemy is fully defeated.

King David was a sniper of his day. He was skilled with a sling – deadly from a distance. He loosed the stone at Goliath’s head, hit the mark and the giant fell. Then for good measure, despite having buried a fist sized rock between his eyes, David takes the giant’s own sword and beheads him with it. The action simply states “This guy’s not getting up!”

Peter sees the man at the Gate of the Temple and fixes his gaze on him before he prays, then as if that’s not enough he drags the man to his feet. Healed.

Jesus set his face like flint as he moved towards the city of Jerusalem and kept his focus on the Joy set before Him… Us.

Single focus. Single target. Kill shot. Victory. Hallelujah!

Change happens. We can’t stop it. In fact, whoever it was that said “change is the only constant” first really knew what they were talking about.

But do things change?

Life moves on at an ever increasing pace, yet on a global scale nothing changes really. A Roman historian I remember studying 20 years or more ago in school lamented the breakdown of the family unit, the lack of respect children showed to their parents and the growing problems teachers faced with disruption and bad manners in the average classroom – 2000 years ago!

Even in our lives we have change that merely makes us more the same than we are different.

We diet to lose weight, yet the more we change our eating patterns, the more that final pound needs to be attacked. We go to work to make more money to buy the new things we “need” to survive, only to find they are obsolete, but just a little more and we can get the latest version, wich will then be obsolete.

I recently found myself in the detestable position of having to get a new cell phone. I’d rather have to find a new kidney. I liked my old phone. I knew how to work it, it didn’t use a lot of airtime to receive email and check the odd website online. But it was 3 years old, so the manufacturer has stopped producing the software updates it needs to function and now it is a paperweight.

And so I find myself back at the store being confused by the promises of wonder and hope that each new model brings. I finally pick one, a Nokia – perhaps a bit big, but it comes with the software and hardware I prefer to use (a qwerty keyboard instead of a touchscreen). I tell the assistant my choice and he tells me it’s not available on my package. The ones I really like are all not available on my package.

The worst thing in the world to me is to be shown something, convinced it is what I need and have always wanted by the sales department, and then told I can’t have it – or that there’s a hefty pay-in you don’t know about until you sign the paperwork.

So now I sit with my new phone beside me. It’s not one I wanted – in fact I distinctly and expressly stated I did NOT want this phone. Repeatedly. But it was what I could afford, and actually now I’m using it I find it is quite a good machine – and even is saving me money because I was able to get everything I need on a cheaper package!

Life sure can be complicated. I look back at this little event playing out over the last couple of weeks and remember 3 years ago I went through much the same before I got the much lamented and very deceased paperweight I mentioned. It happens to be one of those things that doesn’t change.

We resist change, but it is forced on us sometimes. But change defines who we are – how we handle the changes in our lives demonstrates to us and the world at large who we are and what we stand for.

Recently we underwent some major changes because of ill health in my family. We will have to make more as a result in a few weeks time. Yet the changes only make us more the same where it matters. On the surface much changes. Jobs come and go, houses rise and fall. Even friendships are transient. I have only occasional contact now with some of the people a few years ago I believed would be major players in my life for ever – even people I have lived with and my own family have drifted away from me as a result of changes, yet at my core I remain the same.

I am, in essence, a fallen man, redeemed by the Grace and Mercy of God through His sacrifice on the Cross, who has been raised to Son-ship and is a joint-heir with Christ in the Kingdom. No matter what cellphone I carry, what job I do or what happens to my family’s physical health THAT will never change.

I’ve recently been going through a lot in my life. Sickness has struck my family in a devastating way, our finances have been assaulted in a hard way and our hopes for the coming year and our future in general have been attacked and on the surface it has looked as though much is no longer possible.

It has been difficult to bear the issues we’ve had to deal with. Physical loss hits hard, the apparent loss of dreams and hopes hits even harder. The Bible tells us “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Proverbs 13:12a), which suggests depression, and that we should “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life” (Proverbs 4:23).

The trick above all else, however, is to retain our perspective.

When our focus is on self, the things of this world will grow massive. They weigh us down and leave us desolated by the sheer enormity of them. Our inability to see past them because of our perspective cripples our ability to move on and beyond the initial pain.

Focus on God, however, allows us to overcome the issues we face in any circumstance – and I do mean any circumstance.

On the night before he was crucified, Jesus took his disciples on a “crash-course” of what they would need to get through the loss of everything they had placed their future on. In the course of the next 24 hours they would face loss and grief, the possibility of arrest, torture and even death. They would apparently lose the hope they had placed in Him, and everything they had built their entire future on.

Jesus took them through His teachings, but the first thing He taught them was to maintain perspective – “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me” (John 14:1)

That perspective alone was enough to keep the disciples strong. In the years after the resurrection they endured much that when we look at it now seems almost unendurable. They were persecuted and executed for their faith in horrific ways, yet their perspective kept them strong – and it can do the same for us. Paul lists some of the things he endured in his life after his conversion en route to Damascus, and then describes them as “our light affliction, which is but for a moment” (2 Corinthians 4:17)

Our perspective is paramount. In the end, everything is about God. We were created to worship, and we all worship something. When we direct that worship where it was designed to be directed – at God – we can deal with anything and everything the world can possibly throw at us. When we direct at self, or anything else for that matter, we inevitably cannot cope when things go wrong because we have no support for our hearts.

It’s all about Jesus at the end of the day. We cannot live without Him and we cannot hope to move forward without His perfect guidance in our lives.

We all dream. It’s natural. God gave us imaginations and the desire to use them. Without dreams we would stagnate and eventually die. It is our imaginations that allow us to look to the future and plan. The longings of our heart spoken of in Proverbs are possible because of our imagination.

Imagination gives us hope. We live in an imagined world all the time, it’s just that we don’t see it that way. When we give directions, or if someone tells us to describe an elephant, we see in our mind’s eye the thing we are describing. That requires our imagination.

Without imagination Donald Trump would never have built Trump Tower in New York, Bill Gates would never have developed the Microsoft organisation, Mozart would never have composed his Great Mass, the Wright Brothers would never have left the ground, and Jesus would not have gone to the Cross.

That’s right, Jesus used His imagination in Gethsemane. He used it to see the joy set before Him. He imagined the resurrection – saw it’s conclusion and what it would achieve – and it gave Him the human strength to go on through the crucifixion. He encouraged the disciples to use their imaginations the very night He was betrayed. He encouraged them to think about what was to come in His Father’s House. We cannot be troubled when we focus on eternity, and that really requires an Eternal perspective – which we cannot have without our imaginations!

Dreaming of the future is something we all do. It is these imaginings that allow us to develop our lives. A God-centric imagination will result in us moving (more-or-less!) in His direction, where focussing on ourselves or the world will draw us away from Him.

In the 1990’s I went to a lot of Bible conferences in the UK. There I saw some amazing works of God, from salvation to healing to financial provision. I watched in awe as one of the leaders at one conference prayed for a young boy who had one leg over an inch shorter than the other, and at the prayer the short leg grew to match the length of the other. It sparked my imagination, and I began to pray more for healing, finance and so on. For a while I saw it too. Nothing as dramatic as the young boy’s leg, but small healings, finances provided where it was seemingly impossible, hardened atheists joining churches with tears. Then my circumstances changed and I gradually went to fewer conferences and although I still had the memories the imagination I had was not fuelled in the same way and what I began to see was less spectacular than back then.

My imagination had become less potent because I did not feed it in God’s way. I studied for 8 years towards a commerce degree which required me to watch the news reports and read the newspapers where I had previously been able to spend that time in more spiritual study, and as a result my thinking became more worldly and I began to expect the world’s results – and that’s what I started to get. Now I am more concentrated on my Spirit again, although not as much as when I was younger, and the answers I see are more expectant of God showing up and seeing results.

When Peter prayed for the cripple at the Temple he must have imagined him walking. Paul imagined planting a Church in every city he set foot in, and those places he went almost all had a Church when he left.

We must be wary of what we imagine. Books like “The Secret” will make seemingly incredible promises based on using this same concept, and the world will indeed provide some very convincing counterfeits for God’s dreams for our lives. I’m not talking about any “law of attraction” or such nonsense. These would be the very things we are told by Paul in 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but mighty before God to the casting down of strongholds, casting down imaginations, and every high thing that is exalted against the knowledge of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ”

What we listen to will affect our imaginations. We inevitably burn less brightly when we are set away from the rest of the coals. But we were made to dream, and to dream BIG. But we must go to the one who dreams a dream for us. God has a dream for us. He places it in us whilst we are still being formed and gives us every chance He can to live it. But dreams are risky things to follow. They can cost us everything safe and secure, and most people never leave home in pursuit of our dreams, we rather sit in our comfortable chairs and read articles, blogs or watch tv shows about people living out their “dreams”.

Maybe your dream is to sing, or act. If it is God’s dream for you then ask Him to make a way for you to do it. Maybe your dream is to be a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher. Whatever God’s dream is for you, seek it with all your heart. Don’t let the world draw you away with shiny baubles that will rob you of the real treasure you will find when you live your real Big Dream.

For further reading on the concept of dreams in a Christian perspective, I recommend Bruce Wilkinson’s excellent book “The Dream Giver” ISBN: 978-1-59052-201-1

There’s a guy wanders around the place near my home in Cape Town putting up posters he’s made himself. They are simple, hand-written messages I’m sure he intends to encourage people. The trouble is, they only tell half the truth.

On these posters he’s written “Resist the Devil and he must Flee” along with the James reference.

It’s all well meaning, and most people just shrug it off or ignore it completely. Then yesterday I was driving past a church building in the same area with an official notice board outside proudly proclaiming “Belief in God will not get you into Heaven – Obedience will”

This trend worries me. With the increase in number of false prophets proclaiming the end is near – or that we missed it a couple of weeks ago – it is worrying in the extreme that churches and their members are proclaiming half-truths in print like this.

Yes, we must resist the devil and his schemes. But it is fruitless to do that in our own strength. The whole concept in James states “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded”(James 4:7-8) Before we can resist the devil effectively we must submit ourselves to God. Doing otherwise is fruitless. We must draw close to God. His power is what we must use to defeat the enemy of our souls.

Even blind obedience is pointless. That way leads to legalism and religion rather than a living, breathing relationship. It is the difference between expectation and expectancy. Religion places expectations on us. “We must be obedient or God will not bless us” is the attitude. Paul wrote and spoke against such things by criticising those members of the early church who were insisting new converts be circumcised and follow the teachings of the law. The Truth sets us free, it doesn’t tie us to a life of concrete rules with some transcendental Shylock sitting on his throne muttering “you’re all going to Hell, directly to Hell, do not pass ‘Go’, do not collect 200 sheckels”. Rather we are yoked to a living Saviour who seeks to lift the burdens of this world from us and free us to be the people He created us to be. Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and all the other “paths” the world would have us look at to learn the ‘right’ way to live and find God all set out rules from what to eat, to what direction to face when you pray to how your body must be positioned. Christianity must differentiate itself from these religious ideas or it becomes the very thing it was created to destroy – dead!

Our faith is one of Life, not death. We serve a Living and Loving God who presents Himself to us where we are, He doesn’t wait for us to be worthy of His love, for to do so would condemn us all! Paul writes in Romans 5:8 “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us”. God is on our side. The world will seek to tear us down and imprison us in itself, “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31)

That is the real Truth. God is on our side. God is for us.

We all have times when we feel down. Depression hits without warning apparently, and we can be left feeling drained and hollow by the circumstances we find ourselves enveloped by.

The real issue, however, is where we draw our strength fom on a daily basis. What do we treasure most?

The Bible teaches us “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.”(Proverbs 4:23) This is a particularly true statement. We give our hearts over to all kind of things during the time we have. As young men and women, it is often to a partner. Our whole being becomes wrapped up in that individual, and if the relationship breaks down we are left feeling desolate. Many teen suicides are attributed to this.

As adults we are not exempt from this folly. We put our hearts into getting the corner office or the house with the pool or the Ferrari, then Bob, the 29 year-old newbie gets the promotion, the pool is cracked or the car is stolen and we are left feeling cheated and forgotten. Our hearts get crushed, bruised and beaten.

Sometimes we build our hearts on the hopes we have made for ourselves, hopes and dreams like children or continued health. Then the news comes: “I’m sorry but it looks like you’ll never have kids” or “It’s cancer”, and we are devastated because that’s where our hearts are.

We also find irrelevant issues all consuming because of where our hearts lie. I know people who can tell you the names of every player who has put on a Manchester United shirt and kicked a ball in the last 40 years, but can’t tell you what their children’s favourite food is. The focus of our heart is what will determine the kind of men and women we become. If we focus on the irrelevant then we can never be relevant ourselves to the people who matter.

One of my personal favourite teachers, Andrew Wommack, can quote hundreds, even thousands of scriptures from memory. His heart is focussed on what matters, and this is demonstrated by his expression of his faith, the way he talks of his family and the way he relates to others. I had the priviledge many years ago of meeting him a few times and chatting to him. He struck me then as a man who has a simple faith, uncluttered by caring about people’s opinions. “Only Christ matters” was the message I got from the conversations I had with him over a few days in 1997 at a bible week in England. He, Dave Duell and a few others were real and present. They had hearts which radiated love. A wellspring of life which was clearly not their own but was fuelled by something far greater than a mere man could hope to have in his own strength.

This may seem like a shameless advert for these teachers, but it is intended to be an example. I hope that one day people will see that same love and commitment in me, and in you. There is something powerful in a guarded heart. The life in it is not our own, rather it is given to us by a God who sees what we are in ourselves and loves us anyway. He places His own Spirit in us to guide us and speaks to us through our hearts daily if we will only listen.

“Today, if you will hear His voice, Harden not your hearts” (Psalm 95:7b-8a) If we will hear His voice. If we are going to hear God speaking to us, we must keep our hearts fixed on Him. King David understood this and kept his heart inclined towards God so that even after he had tried to hide his sin with Bathsheba he was sensitive enough to God that when the Prophet came to him he immediately repented and humbled himself before God.

We must guard our heart today. There is so much in this world that seeks to depress and destroy our life, but the Good News is “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

God is for us, and with that as the food for our heart we can live with a wellspring of life in our core being at all times, anduring the light afflictions of this world and moving beyond them by keeping an eternal perspective.

As we walk life’s path we are forever changed by the experiences we ecounter. Sometimes these are easy and incremental, sometimes they are massive and painful.

Change is a constant, which is not a contradiction. The only thing we can be certain of is that we do not leave this day the same person we were when we entered it.

In the last few days I have seen friends experience joy and sorrow. I have seen myself experience much life changing as well as a result of their experience. Every life we touch is changed. One friend has a new love in his life. Another has suffered the breakdown of a relationship where a child is involved. Still another has begun a new life in a foreign country.

These are actually minor pieces of information to me that represent major upheaval to them, both for the good and the bad as they experience it.

Business may be good, health may deteriorate. We cannot know what the world will throw at us this day. There is no constant but change…

…and God.

To give us hope and an anchor in the storm of this life we have a God who is an absolute constant. His love for us is the same yesterday as it will be tomorrow. His desire for us is constant. For God, everything is now.

I believe Einstein surmised that at the speed of light there is no passage of time. Everything is now. Jesus declared Himself to be the Light of the World. “God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all” declares 1 John 1:5. It makes sense. Everything is now.

There is no change outside time. Time exists within God, rather than the other way around. We tend to forget this. It’s easy to do that. We get caught up in what’s happening in our lives and we forget that God is outside it all. He’s bigger than our problems. He knows the beginning from the end. He is the beginning and the end!

What would life be like if, just for a moment, we could perceive it through God’s eyes? How would we change things? Would we change things?

Should we change things? What we should perhaps rather do is to understand.

Paul had an eternal perspective, and his life gradually became a constant movement towards God as a result. The world threw everything it had at him and he just kept his heart guarded and followed his path.

“Keep and guard your heart with all vigilance and above all that you guard, for out of it flow the springs of life. Put away from you false and dishonest speech, and willful and contrary talk put far from you. Let your eyes look right on [with fixed purpose], and let your gaze be straight before you. Consider well the path of your feet, and let all your ways be established and ordered aright.” (Proverbs 4:23-26 Amplified)

I love that “consider”. We move in response to circumstance. Paul considered his path. We are tossed about by the changes in our external conditions. Paul fixed his heart and moved towards Jesus with an unswerving course.

I would love to be like Paul, keep my eyes fixed on the prize and not be swayed by the troubles of this life. But I’m not. I have my moments, we all do, but generally I’m thrown about by the troubles of this world. Changes overpower me and I wrestle with decisions I need to make and those I already made. Only where I have actually cut off the possibility of change do I have peace about staying the course – my Faith in Jesus and my marriage. These areas are the strongest in my life. They are also suffering the greatest attack. I am challenged to change what I believe about both by circumstances daily.

My Faith is based on a secure and unchanging foundation – the person of Jesus. My marriage is built on this same foundation – the person of Jesus.

Change in our external circumstances is inevitable. This life brings troubles and sorrow with it much of the time, especially if you choose following Jesus as a life to live. But we must guard our hearts against being undermined by circumstances.

We must be single minded and focussed if we are to survive the constant onslaught of the changes in the world.