This Earthly Life or a Heavenly One Living by Faith

[Ramez5]

All these great people continued living with faith until they died. They did not get the things God promised his people. But they were happy just to see those promises coming far in the future. They accepted the fact that they were like visitors and strangers here on earth. When people accept something like that, they show they are waiting for a country that will be their own.

If they were thinking about the country they had left, they could have gone back. But they were waiting for a better country—a heavenly country. So God is not ashamed to be called their God. And he has prepared a city for them. Heb. 11:13-16

I have to say that this week has been one of the most puzzling, exhilarating, and yet disconcerting weeks I have had in a long time. It has been a week of amazing blessings and significant choices to be made.

I smell a test to be honest.

Jacob, my 21 year old, has now moved home, a new granchild was born just yesterday, and my guess is a daughter will be wed before the year is over. We've spent the last week moving rooms around to make room for Jacob. Now I have something I've dreamed of most of my adult life--a sewing room!

On top of that, Tim and I have our own little apartment now (near the house and on the same property), so we have privacy from the now grown up kids for the first time in our lives. It's like a little honeymoon 'get-a-way'. And this week Tim gave me his old mac book pro with a 17" monitor. It's a better lap-top than most of us could ever imagine buying--I've always had the cheapest possible laptop. (He now has a replacement due to unforseen benefits.)

I walk in the apartment or the sewing room or look at that Mac which I never thought I'd ever own...and am a bit blown away. It's like the floodgates of heaven just opened up and dumped on me.. personally.. at least in terms of temporal provision. I think I am experiencing just a tiny bit of a taste of what Abraham and Issac must have felt when God kept raining blessings on their heads.


The question is.. what am I to do with all of this? The old dream of having a sewing business has come to life again with Tim's heartfelt blessing. He wants me to do something with years of hard won skills with fabric or get a job just to get out and be around people more. We need money for future events this year and this would be a way to help out. My teeth need a lot of work and Christian needs braces so yes it would be very helpful.

If ever this earthly life looked like the garden of Eden to me, now would be it. Births, weddings, home businesses, fabric (how I love fabric), and a snazzy computer...

How easily I could be dazzled by these.. and I feel the siren call of wanting to immerse myself in ordinary earthly pursuits.. so satisfying to my nature.

Are these things sinful? No, of course not. Just earthly life at it's best.

Yes I will sew baby blankets, nursing covers, wedding favor tote bags, and quilt. And I will enjoy doing it. The Lord was a carpenter and I'm sure he liked making beautiful things too. He had to work and deal with earthly life, just as we do.

But those things have the potential to cause us to want to 'settle down' to a pleasureable earthly life or indulge and just take it easy and be careless about the things of God.

Just ask Lot or Esau.

You have become weak, so make yourselves strong again. Live in the right way so that you will be saved and your weakness will not cause you to be lost.
..... And be careful that no one is like Esau and never thinks about God. As the oldest son, Esau would have inherited everything from his father. But he sold all that for a single meal. Heb. 12:12,16

Every day we have to make choices about which we are going to love, pursue, and be focused on--our earthly life and pleasures and happiness.. or the next.

Lot chose this life and it eventually cost him his wife, home, extended family, and the moral purity of his grown daughters. He liked the good life and enjoyed prestige, wealth, and comfort. When you read Genesis 19-21 you see a man who knew God and was righteous and just, yet became enchanted with this world and it's many benefits. His life never benefited anyone after he was gone--in fact quite the opposite. His daughters' children, fathered by him while drunk, gave birth to the children of Israel's enemies.. the Ammonites and the Moabites.

Abraham chose God and let God choose when and if he would receive any blessings at all. He chose a life of Faith and a life of unsettled temporary living as regards this earthly life. The only land he owned was enough to bury his wife Sarah, and himself.

Abraham refused to make this earth his home because he was waiting for the promised one. He died never seeing that promise come to fulfillment. And we are his children when we follow his example. I'm sure he enjoyed his earthly life, but his heart was set on a heavenly one.

Every day, we get up and make a choice.. between the world and earthly pursuits.. or Heaven and the kingdom of God and the pursuit of righteousness.

Which we choose will affect not only our life, but the lives of generations who of children, grandchildren, neighbors and friends. We are to live in the world, but not of it.

The Lord has set before me some beautiful options for pursuits. Like Esau who loved hunting and good food, I could easily embrace those things, but I might grow careless of my real calling as a Christian and God's child.

I might fall in love with the gifts.. and forsake the giver. Like Abraham, I feel the Lord is calling me to lay what I love most on the altar.. to be perhaps gone forever, or perhaps returned but then used for sacred purposes rather than selfish ones.

I can sew and make money.. and not have a 'sewing business'. I can have a honeymoon getaway.. and share it with my kids.. and minister to them and their friends like the mom I have always been. Or I could insist that they leave me alone and decide that I've 'done my job' and now it's time for some 'me time'.

I heard myself describing this whole scenario.. and I didn't like what I heard. A sewing business and the fact that the kids are grown and we are a 'retired' couple, could easily become my identity. I could start insisting on my 'rights'.. and stop walking by faith and seeing daily circumstances through the eyes of faith.

But the Lord, is warning me, I feel, not to do that. To keep choosing Him as my only portion and my exceeding great reward. He doesn't need a sewing business to provide for our needs. And my rights are no more valid now than they were a year ago.

I am servant... His servant. And this world.. is not my home. My blessings are to be shared.

The Lord wants to be central now with the blessings as much as he was before. My prayer is that nothing will change just because my circumstances have changed.

Here's what Oswald Chambers said about Abraham and where he chose to live...

Jan 6 Choices
He moved from there to the mountain east of Bethel, and he pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; there he built an altar to the Lord and called on the name of the Lord —Genesis 12:8

Worship is giving God the best that He has given you. Be careful what you do with the best you have.
Whenever you get a blessing from God, give it back to Him as a love gift. Take time to meditate before God and offer the blessing back to Him in a deliberate act of worship.
If you hoard a thing for yourself, it will turn into spiritual dry rot, as the manna did when it was hoarded. God will never let you hold a spiritual thing for your self, it has to be given back to Him that He may make it a blessing to others.

Bethel is the symbol of communion with God; Ai is the symbol of the world. Abraham pitched his tent between the two. The measure of the worth of our public activity for God is the private profound communion we have with Him. Rush is wrong every time, there is always plenty of time to worship God. Quiet days with God may be a snare. We have to pitch our tents where we shall always have quiet times with God, however noisy our times with the world may be. There are not three stages in spiritual life - worship, waiting and work. Some of us go in jumps like spiritual frogs, we jump from worship to waiting, and from waiting to work. God's idea is that the three should go together. They were always together in the life of Our Lord. He was unhasting and unresting. It is a discipline, we cannot get into it all at once. ~OC

So today, I am committing to keep running the race.. to not grab an identity as the 'runner of a small sewing business' or a 'blogger' or anything else.. but just a saint.. sanctificed by God's grace, to help those the Lord brings along for me to help and hopefully, like Abraham, to be a friend and servant of God.

Like Mary, I want to pursue the one thing (loving Jesus and learning from him) and trust that the dishes will get done in His time.

Let us run with patient endurance and steady and active persistence
the appointed course of the race that is set before us,
Looking away [from all that will distract] to Jesus, Who is the Leader and the Source of our faith [giving the first incentive for our belief] and is also its Finisher [bringing it to maturity and perfection]. He, for the joy [of obtaining the prize] that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising and ignoring the shame, and is now seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Heb. 12:1

Dear Lord, Thank you for all of your many blessings this year and for your loving hand that rescued me from the pit last year. Don't let my healed and stronger self (only by your grace) tempt me to quit relying on you or cause me to misuse my blessings for selfish goals. Help me lay it all on the altar and receive back only what you give me.. for you to use for your purposes. May we love and trust you and live for you no matter whether in abundance or in trials. Amen