I must have read these words a hundred times: “Trust God no matter what” and “Thank God for everything (even if the circumstances are horrific)”. My normal human mind rebels against thanking God in bad times or when something bad happens. But it has been my experience that all someone has to do is take the same concepts and rewrap the package and present it in a different way for the LIGHT to go on.
A dear friend gave me this book for my birthday entitled, “Jesus Calling”. It is in that book that the concept gets presented in a different light by the One Person who can qualify to do it. Jesus. I will quote what He says: “When many things seem to be going wrong, trust Me. When your life feels increasingly out of control, thank Me. These are supernatural responses, and they can lift you above your circumstances.”
Supernatural responses! So what Jesus is saying is that by trusting Him and thanking Him, it automatically lifts you out of the physical realm into His Spiritual realm, where the physical doesn’t matter. It’s like walking through a door from one reality to another. He also says in that book that He is more REAL than our physical surroundings. Well isn’t that something to make you pause and think! He….in the invisible…is more real than our visible. How can that be? This alone is a work that will stretch you. I’m still working on that one and will report back when I have a glimmer of what it might mean and how to present it so others can understand. That’s actually really important.
I remember watching this show a long time ago called Joan of Arcadia. In it the teenager, Joan, has encounters with God in many different forms. In one scene (and I forgot how God came to her. He might have been the janitor in that episode) Joan complains that her life is a mess. God replies, “It looks fine from where I am.” That one sentence stayed with me because I realized no matter how things appear to be through my earthly eyes, they are totally different in God’s eyes.
Jesus is also good at getting very intimate. He says in that same book (which I recommend to everyone!) that He can read me like a book with large print! When I read that my cheeks felt flushed. LOL!! 😮
I sometimes stop and think about all this. About Him. I don’t think we fully appreciate what we have here. Here is Being who just isn’t powerful…HE IS POWER…coming to reside within us Christians. He is trying to teach us how to live, not just in this temporal life but in the permanent one, in the supernatural realm of where He is.
So what happens if we dare to pursue God relentless, to live in His realm while being in this one? How will our entire perspective shift and how small will our physical world become? In what fantastic ways will we change and what will we become? It is a dream of mine.
And by doing this we will really get to know, to understand what it means to be a citizen of Heaven right NOW, while living in on earth. I think God gets all jazzed up when we decide to do this and actually pursue Him. He gets on Fire, too! 😀
What will happen is that we will really be trusting Him and thanking Him no matter what our circumstances. And we will thank Him from the heart.
warrriorforchrist 
Yes, indeed I have heard so many sermons about making God, and the kingdom big so our problems seem small. I have even “preached” that message myself, to myself and to others. But I think it always had a hollow ring to it. But things have been happening in my life lately that make that message seem a little more real. Maybe some people “get it” right away but maybe it takes longer to sink in with others, or sadly not at all. I say sadly, because I have experienced enough to know that it is real, at least on an intellectual level (head knowledge) but it is slowly working its way into my heart as well. And you (warriorforchrist) have communicated that message very well here. Well said!
Yeah well….I think the reason I am writing what I do is because God is using this blog to prepare me for something that makes me nervous to think about. LOL! The thoughts that come into my head that spur what I write comes from Him. I KNOW that I have to get closer to Him to be able to withstand whatever it is in the near future. I have to literally be standing in God’s realm while in this realm. Hard to believe, but true. It’s an entirely different way of living and it means being intensely focused. Not wallowing in the past, present guilt or any other distraction. It’s like this weight loss coach, Janice Taylor, said: “All is forgiven–move on!” It means don’t think about it, don’t analyze, just get up and keep going.
And this is because we are going to be entering the last stretch of the race. We don’t have time for anything else other than to be solely focused on God. This is when the virgins trim their wicks and buy more oil because the Bridegroom is COMING!
Hebrews 12:1 KJV – “Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,”