Come expectant. Proclaim that which isn’t, into being. Speak it until it happens. We’ve all heard some of these phrases and probably a whole lot more. It’s kind of ridiculous how much of these are going around.

As I’ve tried to navigate all sorts of new and old things, it’s become clear that my heart hasn’t been in the right place. I’ve always been against seeking God’s hand first, because lets face it, He is not Santa and life isn’t Christmas. (Personally, I don’t celebrate all that, but it draws a nice picture. You do you.) As I write this there’s pain going through my body, throbbing, it’s like my arm has its own heart. The only way it will stop is if God puts His hand on it. Pills don’t work and I’ve tried alcohol, that only numbs the pain if I drink excessive amounts, and that’s “frowned upon”. As I’ve searched my heart and checked my motives, I’ve realised that I’ve been worshipping the expectancy of what God MUST do instead of God Himself. I’ve been worshipping the wanting of a miracle instead of the miracle Worker. I’ve been seeking His hand instead of His face. I’ve been so focused on the fact that I want to be healed of whatever is causing this pain that I’ve forgotten that it’s my heart that matters the most.

When Pain Isn’t A Bad Thing
Every time I step out to ‘go get my healing’ and I don’t get healed, I’m disappointed. I feel like a failure, I’m doing something wrong. I’m not praying hard enough. I’m not proclaiming loud enough. That’s quite a selfish view, isn’t it? As if I am somehow responsible for my own healing. As if God isn’t the axis of everything. I made His blessings and the expectancy of what He can do the axis. We won’t ever understand the magnitude of what happens in the spiritual when we pray, and the magnitude of what happens in the spiritual when our prayers are selfish and focused on us, instead of the will of the Father. We’ve gone to press, proclaiming that pain and discomfort is bad, that Jesus never meant for us to have pain and convinced those that do have pain that they are infested with demons or bound by sin. And then we quote the famous, “Jesus came to give us life and life in abundance”. But maybe, just maybe, we’ve pulled that out of context. The very thing Jesus went through to give us life and life in abundance was excruciating pain and discomfort, not to mention the fact that His Father turned His back on Him. Out of pain and discomfort came life. Shouldn’t that say something? I’m really just thinking out loud. But what if through pain and discomfort we learn to worship, because we know the only way we will ever get better is through worshipping Him. That no matter how much pain we’re in, we will still proclaim, ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do’. Or somehow through all that we find a way to lift up our hands in surrender to His everlasting life and proclaim that He is King above all kings and that no matter the feeling or the cost I will worship.

The T’s And C’s
Instead of looking at it as a disability and wanting to get healed for MY sake and MY comfort, I’ve slowly been having a mind shift that maybe out of this pain there would come some life. That somehow through all of this discomfort I can see God clearer. I did some introspection to see what my heart looks like. The condition of my heart reflects that which I worship. I worshipped the expectancy instead of God, therefore my heart is in a constant state of disappointment. Nothing will set your heart up for the feeling of failure as much as worshipping the wrong god does. See, the Bible says, ‘seek first the Kingdom and His righteousness and the rest will be added unto you’. It also says, ‘delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart’. I often forget that having the rest added unto me is conditioned upon seeking the Kingdom and His righteousness first, that if I want the desires of my heart I have to first delight myself in the Lord. Everything, except love, is conditioned upon something else. Finding God is conditioned upon seeking Him.

There We Find Jesus…
Somewhere along the line the Christian subculture has taught us that God responds to our every beck and call and with that the fear of Him has fallen by the wayside and we enter His gates with arrogance and His house with this entitlement chip on our shoulder. Because Jesus died for US, did He not? And in this madness of turning God into Santa we forget that all of this is by grace. It is only by grace that we get to enter His gates and His house. And there we find Jesus, His back turned toward us pleading with the Father to show us mercy. The things of God are not God. God is God. Expecting God to do something does not mean He will. I want the condition of my heart to be in the right place before I can even care about being healed in the physical. The physical will pass, the condition of the heart lasts for eternity. And as I’ve said in a previous post, I want to live a life that makes sense in light of eternity.

What We Need Is The Touch Of Jesus
Instead of getting a miracle and wanting Him to heal me for me, I want to get healed for Him. For His glory, for His will. Get healed for His sake, because He is good. I heard a story based on true life events a few years back, it’s about this author guy that had terrible pain in his body and doctors, bless their hearts, couldn’t find out what was wrong. It went on for months, it wouldn’t go away. By the ninth month he sat at God’s feet, exhausted, and asked God what was going on and God’s simple response was, “Do you think it’s not painful to die to yourself?” Now, I’m not saying God doesn’t heal, He does, I’ve been healed and have seen amazing miracles myself. What I am saying is that it’s okay to wait for the miracle to happen. It may take years, in the waiting I pray that those of us that are waiting for His miracle to happen to us, that we will take heart. And I’m not saying that lightly or as a cliche, but that we stare Jesus in the face and see that He is good, no matter our physical state, but that our hearts are right there beating according to His heartbeat and His will. You see, Lazarus that guy was dead, and Jesus brought him back to life. A bunch of other people were sick, blind, lame, deaf and Jesus healed them. Later on in life they most probably got sick again and all of them died, that is if the natural cycle of life is anything to go on, so why heal them in the first place? Because, what they needed wasn’t so much the healing but it was the touch of Jesus. Way more than healing we need the touch of Jesus, so that not just our physical but more importantly, our hearts, can be transformed.

It’s not our miracle it’s His miracle, and His grace that enables us to experience that. Without Him there is no miracle. Without Him there is no life. May we seek His face more than His hand, when we seek His face His hand will always be open.

It’s always been Him.

https://youtu.be/3kxWMq7gGF8