No Good Sense.

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The chaos cloud is thick these days.

Between experiencing it personally, reading hard blogs of fellow friends and missionaries in my area, having conversations with friends from back stateside, and watching things spiral out of control from the outside for others, I can confidently say that satan has been having a field day. He’s been reaping chaos from the seeds of corruption he’s sown and quite frankly, it’s annoying.

So many things are happening that don’t make no good sense to me.

(To all my past English teachers, sorry I’m not sorry for the order of the previous statement–you did teach me a much more gooder way to say that. Haha!)

All joking aside though, this morning I was more annoyed than I’d been lately at the seemingly never-ending cloud of chaos that has enveloped so many people I love. I just want the chaos, the questions, the struggle, the doubt, the frustration, and the bad news after bad news my friends hear, to go away. I want to see the end of it. I want the chaos of life to cease.

Ever since I did the Armor of God study by Priscilla Shirer (which I HIGHLY recommend) and when satan is being unusually annoying, I go back to an illustration of hers. I’m not a good storyteller and have a horrible memory, so repeating stories verbatim isn’t my thing so you all will just have to bear with me. She talks about going to the fair and how they have the game “whack-a-mole.” She talks about how sin in our life is like that little pesky mole that pops up. We hit it, it goes down, and then another mole (i.e. sin) pops up and we whack it. It’s gone for a moment but eventually it’ll come back up. She talked about how we’re so content with just whacking the mole and that’s exactly where satan wants us to be. So preoccupied with fighting one mole that we don’t realize there are a million more we’ll have to deal with in the near future. We think we’re victorious for a moment when one mole disappears but that is short lived because another mole is about to pop up. But if we were to draw back the curtain underneath and expose the source of the problem and deal with it, we would be victorious because it could no longer cause the moles to continue rearing their ugly heads in our lives. So when I’m annoyed by satan, I expose him, tell him I’m over him, call on Jesus, and together we send him back to hell where he belongs. He can go cause chaos elsewhere because he’s not welcome to hang out around my camp anymore because I’m on to him. Once Jesus is brought into the picture, he is forced to flee. We can take that promise to the bank, y’all.

So that’s where I’m at.

I see what satan is doing and it’s dumb. He’s got no agenda but to steal, kill, and destroy. He accuses people and tries to make them take the blame for things they have no control over. He accuses people and tells them that they should have done something differently and things would have turned out differently. He causes people to lose sleep over the “what-ifs.” He is the father of lies and there is no truth in him therefore, we can know that whenever he speaks, we can instantly discredit it because we know it’s not true. I just want his dog and pony show to hit the road jack, and never come back.

This morning I had just finished up my quiet time and was in the middle of getting my second cup of coffee and going through my extensive coffee prep (you know, getting the perfect combination of creamer and sugar), when I was reminded of Abraham and his response to God after being told he would be the father of many nations despite him being advanced in years and his wife being barren.

It says in Romans 4: 19-21 that

“He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead, or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No unbelief made him waver concerning the promises of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.”

He didn’t weaken in his faith when the surrounding circumstances seemed impossible. He was at least a hundred and his wife had been barren forever…not a good combination by our understanding. No unbelief could cause him to waver though. He dared to still believe. No amount of chaos could cause him to look elsewhere or doubt God’s promises.

Instead he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God.

Giving glory to God in the midst of chaos doesn’t seem normal but as believers we have this ability to rise above the chaos when we look to God. We cry out to the One who knows everything that is happening. He knows how we feel. He knows our thoughts. He hears our words both spoken and unspoken. He knows our inner self and He knows the struggle within. When we look to God, we look to the One who knows how everything is going to turn out. We turn our eyes and our hearts and trust in His sovereignty knowing that no matter what, His plan is a good plan because He is for us and He loves us. We know that His ways are higher than ours and His thoughts are higher than our so why try to reduce him to our earthly wisdom? We know He knows the beginning and the end and has perfectly orchestrated every moment in between for our good and His glory whether we can fully realize it or not. We, finite beings, can’t see further than the moment we are in. Sure we can have some abstract idea of how things “might” turn out, but we can’t speak with absolute authority on anything because we don’t control it. God alone does. We’ve got the past and our testimony of God’s faithfulness, we’ve got the present and the promise that He will never leave us, forsake us, and that He will be with us to the end, and we’ve got a hope for future that is good and prosperous long after the days of chaos end.

And that’s another thing.

The chaos will end. No season can last forever. No problem will be with us forever. Someday, the former things will pass away and all things will be made new. All things will be made right. All things will be as they were intended to be from the beginning before the fall of man. There will be justice. While we’re here on this earth, we will have many troubles and things will get worse before they ultimately get better, but we can take heart and know that He has overcome the world. He has overcome sin and death. He has overcome our grief and our sickness. And for those of us who have placed our faith in Christ and his finished work on the cross, we too have the assurance that we can overcome everything the world has to throw at us. We’ve been made more than conquerors. We have the assurance that even if our prayers aren’t answered how we’d like, we can trust in the fact that they are answered according to His good and perfect will. We know that His decisions are His decisions to make, not ours. And we can trust that no matter what, He will be with us to work through the hard days once He answers prayers if they’re contrary to how we think they should be answered.

Abraham was fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. So friends who might be in the midst of the chaos or on the perpetual struggle bus of life with me, let’s be more like Abraham.