WATCHWORD:
7 “Ask, and you will be given what you ask for. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened. 8 For everyone who asks, receives. Anyone who seeks, finds. If only you will knock, the door will open. 9 If a child asks his father for a loaf of bread, will he be given a stone instead? 10 If he asks for fish, will he be given a poisonous snake? Of course not! 11 And if you hard-hearted, sinful men know how to give good gifts to your children, won’t your Father in heaven even more certainly give good gifts to those who ask him for them? 12 “Do for others what you want them to do for you. This is the teaching of the laws of Moses in a nutshell. Matthew 7:7-12
Meditation:
The Power of Aha!
A moment of epiphany, the sudden realization that you finally knew something that was there before your eyes all along, but failed to fully understand. Perhaps a little thing and it was confusing. I had such a moment in junior high school math, trying to understand finding the square root and then an aha moment and it all came together! Just a little thing, a turn of phrase, an awareness, and the problem was solved.
In our Christian walk, we have many of those aha moments as we go through life with our Lord Savior. Maybe a final awareness that the voice you are hearing in your head is actually the Holy Spirit, pointing us in the direction of Love. Maybe it’s that moment, perhaps on Easter Sunday, when you realize that Jesus going to the cross really was carrying all of our sins. That he really was the Sacrifice that leads to our forgiveness. Maybe it was the awareness that in that moment when you accepted Christ as your Lord and Savior, you were a different person, your sin was fully forgiven, and he was there whenever you were in need. The power of aha!
The key to the aha, the epiphany, is our continued concentration on Jesus Christ through each day of our lives. We read that we can do all things through Christ who gives me strength, but we skip over the part that lays out what God would have us do, and it is those tasks that are the “all things through Christ”. We read, ask and you will receive, and here again we will come up empty if we are not asking in the name of Jesus and for those things that further God’s purpose. Our purpose in service and whatever our call is, is to see that there is nothing between Jesus and ourselves.
The aha moment can be a mountaintop experience and we want to stay there, but that is not our purpose. We are to take that aha awareness down to the valley and use it to face maybe some of the most humiliating times and experiences in our lives. We can face those times and get through them, strengthened by our faith in Jesus.
Words to Live By:
“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.” Jesus Calling for October 3.
Praying Hebrews 13:20-21:
Now may the God of peace, who, through the power of the eternal promise, brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing His will, and may He work in us what is pleasing to Him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
