"Milking It!"

"It is time for thee, LORD, to work: for they have made void thy law." (Psalms 119:126)

  Just for the record, if we pray about forgiving someone, what is it we are praying for? Is it that He might soften our heart so that we are able to forgive? If so, then prepare to have your heart broken! Not that God can't simply touch you in the heart and say, "You now have a soft heart," because that is not how He usually works. If you are asking God to change you in any way, whether it is for peace or faith or love or patience, or even the ability to forgive others, then you are going to experience whatever it takes to make you more like Jesus Christ. Okay, so you doubt my theory on the way God works? Well, if this were a class on sculpting; the artist sees the finished work in the stone or object being sculpted, and then clips and breaks away everything not part of that finished work, until whatever he is working on matches the image within his mind. If you were that rock or piece of wood, and if you had the kind of feeling that you have right now, would those pieces and parts taken away from you cause a little pain? In other words, prepare to hurt a little if you are asking God to change your heart! You might not realize this, but He already has changed your heart; it is your fault for the hardness and the calluses that have occurred on your heart. Moving on to other things, more or less, I wanted to draw our attention to the word "work." There are so many different ways to look at this, but the way I feel today, it makes the best sense to examine how random this thought is compared to the previous verse. I want to try an experiment in the law of gravity; you know, what goes up, must come down. Imagine for a second that we need to have more understanding in knowing God's testimonies; as testimonies are the things that are actions accompanied be reactions. Say, for the sake of time that we needed God to speed up the process, especially when it came to giving us the ability to forgive. Where might we go to see a way of realizing how urgent our need really is? Don't you just love how patient God is with us! If you might recall the parable of the "Ungrateful Servant", found in Matthew 18:21-35, Jesus shows us how important it is for us to forgive one another. It is beyond being an obligation, it goes more towards appreciation. Think about what law I said this was representing, the law of God's judgment, and then ask yourself: What side of God's judgment do I want to be on, that of forgiveness or that of condemnation? We are not to feel like we are obligated; we are to be living it, because we are in it, to be in it...

"Can we boast, then, that we have done anything to be accepted by God? No, because our acquittal is not based on obeying the law. It is based on faith. So we are made right with God through faith and not by obeying the law. After all, is God the God of the Jews only? Isn't he also the God of the Gentiles? Of course he is. There is only one God, and he makes people right with himself only by faith, whether they are Jews or Gentiles. Well then, if we emphasize faith, does that mean that we can forget about the law? Of course not! In fact, only when we have faith do we truly fulfill the law." (Romans 3:27-31) NLT