How?

So after reading yesterday’s blog post, you might be asking yourself, “How?”  How do I live the kind of life that is a live stream of my Christian walk?  Paul seems to have answered that question in chapter two of I Thessalonians.  In verse thirteen he told his readers: “Here is another reason why we never stop thanking God: When you received God’s word from us, you realized it wasn’t the word of humans.  Instead, you accepted it for what it really is --- the word of God.  (and) This word is at work in you believers.” (God’s Word ©)

These believers simply took the gospel they heard as the Word of God and acted accordingly!  They lived their daily lives in accordance to the truth of the Word and the results of that lifestyle were very evident to all that they came into contact with.  Our current age of reason, intellectualism and “seeing is believing” tends to counteract the simplicity of the gospel for many people, including more than a few believers!  God in His wisdom and foresight has told us that victory in this life comes from the opposite understanding that “believing is seeing!”  And it is His Word that we are to be believing in before the necessary results of our faith come into fruition.

It reminds me of the time when my wife was pregnant with our first child.  She was on medical leave from Hewlett Packard and we were trying to decide if she was going to return after the baby was born or not.  Our joint desire was that she be a stay at home Mom when the kids came, but I was self-employed and work had not been real steady.  I had recently applied at HP but was waiting for an interview before we made our decision.

One day soon after Josh was born I had a revelation tha I was putting the cart in front of the horse.  The Lord spoke to my heart and told me that I had it backwards and was waiting to see so that I could believe.  I realized then that we were needing to believe that God would take care of us before we saw the results of our stand of faith.

So with that my wife resigned her job, but not before we took our new son to visit her friends at work.  As we walked through building number one on the way to number two where she had worked, we stopped as we heard a voice behind us calling my name.  It was one of the representatives from personnel who had spotted us on the way in.  He declared that he had wanted to call me when he spotted us in the lobby.

Well, the rest is history!  He set up a couple of interviews with me and a few weeks later I was hired!  Coincidence you say?  I don’t think so!  I believe that our step of faith opened the door for God to work in our behalf.  I had no electronics background, but was hired mainly due to my photography skillset and thereby worked part time in the Printed Circuit Process Shop and part time in the darkroom developing negatives that would eventually be used as part of the silk-screening process in the PC Shop.

At that point in our lives we decided to take God’s Word for exactly what it is, and have never looked back!  Sure we’ve taken some heat through the years, but all in all it has proven to be the best decision we ever made!  How do you take the Word of God?  Do you see it just as a word of encouragement or counsel, or as the spoken truth directly from God?  What do you do when the newspaper, the doctor’s report or your bank account say something that is contrary to the Word of God?  Whose report do you believe in?

The church at Thessalonica always sided with the gospel they heard from Paul and his team and it showed through the exemplary lives that they lived and that others copied. What will you do?  Have a good day.  Stay in tune to His Word, and keep asking yourself… “What am I expecting today?”