I Need Jesus: Step Three

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by:  Staci Stallings

We are working our way through the 12-Step Program which I believe is a great roadmap to follow if you are trying to learn to put your life in God’s hands rather than trying to handle life on your own.

So far we have looked at Step One, which amounts to:  I can’t do this anymore.

And Step Two:  There is a God and I believe I need HIM to come into this mess and help me.

Today we look at Step Three:

• Step 3 – Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God

If you’ve ever said The Our Father, you’ve at least given lip-service to this concept.  The line:  Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven says in effect, “God, I want Your Will in my life.”

The problem is, too often, lip-service is about as far as this line goes in our lives.  Oh, it sounds good.  “Yes, I want God’s Will,” but do we really?  How many of us have a secret fear of God’s Will?  I mean what if I want to be a lawyer, and God decides He wants me to be a doctor?  Where does that leave me?

Further, what about when bad things happened?  A tornado rips through a town, a hurricane levels 100-year-old houses, someone close to us gets sick or dies.  Where is God’s Will in those, and if those are God’s Will, then honey, truth is, we want no part of it.

I think the bedrock of this step has to be a firm belief in the declaration of God in Jeremiah 29:11-12:  “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. ¹² Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. ¹³ You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”

In short, we have to believe that God is good.  Bad things do happen, but they are caused either by the world that we were banished into after Adam & Eve–a world that is not kind and loving toward us OR that they are the product of direct evil in the world we have chosen.

For example, let’s take an earthquake that damages and kills.  Earthquakes are fundamentally a product of the tectonic plates that make up the earth shifting.  They shift because of orbital pressure in our universe.  If the earth was solid and the plates didn’t shift, the earth would not hold its orbit and would go flying out into space, disintegrating into trillions of pieces.  So, yes, earthquakes are bad, but the alternative to them would be worse.

And there are thousands of examples like this.  Fire is one of them.  Fire is a natural phenomenon that when used properly can heat our homes and cook our food.  It’s when fire destroys that it becomes a bad thing.  But fire, in and of itself, is not bad.  Same with water.  We drink it to stay hydrated, we water our plants and animals with it.  But when a child falls in it and drowns, it seems a bad thing.  So many of the things we rail against God for “letting happen” are simply the by-products of things that can also be very good.  It’s a matter of the world we live in not being a perfect place.

What about disease and death?  Again, God didn’t chose this for us.  He created the Garden of Eden.  That was HIS plan, but first Adam and Eve and then wechoose not to live there.  In the Garden, Adam and Eve were perfectly reliant on God.  They CHOSE to follow Step 3 until Satan came in and convinced them that God wasn’t to be trusted.  It’s the same lie we are falling for when we choose to not follow Step 3 and put our lives in God’s hands and let Him care for us–no matter what the world and evil try to throw at us.

So, I guess as I stand here, I ask you to look with me–being grateful for how far God has brought us, and with anticipation and excitement, seeing farther than we ever knew existed!

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You believe, but do you really trust #Jesus? I NEED JESUS: Step 3 http://t.co/hi4rjPJxdS #Christian #PositveTweeters

— Grace & Faith (@GraceAndFaith4U) December 5, 2013