"To Bless The LORD"

"The LORD liveth, and blessed be my Rock, and let the God of my salvation be exalted." (Psalms 18:46) If we try really really hard, we might just start to see things the way that God wants us to see them; that is with Him wanting to bless us with a life that is so rich and full of pleasure, that is not room for anything else! You know that saying about the glass half full or half empty? well that is our problem in so many areas of our life; looking for more to happen, and not experiencing what we have been given. If we are called of God, and if we are given eternal life in Jesus Christ, what more do we need to be given? And yet, God wants to surround us with His love, fill us with His Spirit, and place on a road that is specific to the call that He has upon our lives. And yet, we are so accustom to setting ourselves up for failure, because we gage our life by others and by what we think that God has called us into or to be about; when really, He just wants us to be what He has made us to be, which is obedient to His voice. To put this another way that might be easier to understand, we could look at a familiar passage of Scripture that everyone loves to quote when things don't seem to be going the way that they should, which is Romans 8:28, and says, "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose". We love quoting this verse as a answer for things that seem discouraging to the abundant life that we have been promised; hoping instead to see a greater good to come forth from whatever it is that we are going through. But, what we fail to realize in this effort to experience abundant life, is that God's main goal is to mold us into the image of His Son; a task that sometimes requires us to be broken and reshaped according to His design for us, not according to what we see ourselves to be. That is something that I think we get so distracted by, and place so much of our energy on trying to be someone else, instead of just letting God mold us into the image that He has prepared for us; because if we continue on in Romans 8:29, Paul completes his statement by saying, "For whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren". So then; to what good do all things work together for? And how are we assured that they are all good? All things work together to conform us into the image of Jesus Christ, and be that which God has already established in His own sight. Think of it as a sculpture being made, and the one who is making the sculpture envisions what he is making, then takes away all that is not what he has envisioned...