Deeper Walk

Staying comfortable and not taking risks actually is more of a danger than anything else. God actually wants us to take risks.

Holding God's hand through life will alter our perspective and influence our responses. It will challenge us not to settle for second-best. It will remind us that those who continue to abide in the vine will eventually produce fruit. It will awaken us to the reality that this life, as challenging as it may be a times, is still a wonderful and precious gift.

What does Jesus desire from our lives when he asks us to become like little children? Jesus was merely revealing to us the truth about ourselves. He understood that we have grown up too fast. We have sacrificed a child like faith for maturity. Jesus desires for children of the King to cry out to Him.

Sound. Do you hear it? Do you hear the conversation of geese overhead, the distant bark of a dog at dusk, or the buzzing of a bee as it dances beside a flower one windy day? Does God hear these things too? I wonder if it is our lack of praise that causes them to reach His ears.

Because of our fallen nature, there is war and evil in the world, but there is good news. We are still considered beautiful by God because we are reflections of who He is.

Jesus came to live among us, imagining and inspiring His followers to imagine. But, missing from our modern church life is a wild imagining. I pray that we would let our imaginations go mad, smash lines to pieces and shimmy and shake this world on its head, so we might bring the proactive, agitating, yet gloriously beautiful wildness of God to the streets.

God still speaks to those who venture into nature and at times, the wilderness. Make room to hear from Him.

At one time or another, we were all like that man described in Acts 3 - crippled and begging. Whether spiritually dead or perhaps just decidedly complacent, we are all looking for something and someone to make us what we are stuck right in front of - beautiful.

Our moods and tendencies are not insurmountable. Jesus is able to transform them at the deepest levels of our desires if that is actually what we want. And if it is, then we can force ourselves into disciplines and habits even when we don’t feel like it, and they will become our delight so long as our aim is nothing less than that Christ be formed in us.

A dandelion is basically a weed, an unwanted growth that sprouts up among perfectly good green grass. What is the point for us weeds? The point is that when God looks down on us, He doesn't see the weeds we are — He sees flowers.