like dust in the wind

“Just as you cannot understand the path of the wind or the mystery of a tiny baby growing in its mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the activity of God, who does all things” Ecclesiastes 11:5

He showed me a picture the other day, when I was listening to Him, of dust in the mighty wind. Being swept away to wherever the wind wished to take it. He showed me I was to be like the dust and Him like the wind.

To be like dust it takes a breaking. In our lives this “breaking” is of our self or our pride. Then when we are completely broken down and willing to yield everything over to God, everything we have been holding on to… then we are ready to be swept up by the wind: Him.

It is like this picture God gave, in Jeremiah 18, about the potter and the clay.

This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD : "Go down to the potter's house, and there I will give you my message." So I went down to the potter's house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him. Then the word of the LORD came to me: "O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?" declares the LORD. "Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.

We have to be like clay before he can mold us into what He desires. We have to first realize we are the clay and not the Potter. I think pride sneaks up on us and before we know it we are the clay trying to be the potter, trying to fix ourselves or tell the potter what we would like to be made into… like we know best. He has been showing me lately that is what I have been doing and that I need to give in, give up trying to be “in control” and just be the clay…soft and moldable.

God is a magnificent Potter! Even look at the nature around(Psalm 96:11-12). We must believe He is who He says He is. We must trust our magnificent Potter!

But I am trusting you, O Lord, saying, “You are my God!” My future is in your Hands. Psalm 31:14-15

YOUR plan is better than my plan.

What is the one thing that separates us from communion with God? I would have to say pride. It is the root to every sin. It was Lucifer’s folly, the fallen angel that once was the leader of all God’s angels. It is what separates me from having the communion with God that I want, the pure relationship that God designed us to have with Him. It is pride that makes us think we don’t need God or our plan is better than His.

The sad part is that like most sin, it seeps into our lives unnoticed until it has clogged enough arties to cause us some major heart problems. Sadly , for me an arm has to go limp before I see it.

God has been showing me for a long time that there has been something between Him and I, but my pride kept me from being teachable enough to accept what He wanted to reveal to me.

Basically I have had a mindset… a lie that is in my mind that effects the way I see almost everything. This mindset is “my plan is better”. Often I think “my plan” is God’s plan… talk about pride… to assume I know the deep plans of God…

“Just as you cannot understand the path of the wind or the mystery of a tiny baby growing in its mother’s womb, so you cannot understand the activity of God, who does all things” Ecclesiastes 11:5

I had been thinking my plan is right without asking God what His plan is. I say that I am yielded over to Him, I will even pray “what is Your will?”, but ultimately I have been assuming that my plan is better. When something doesn’t go the way I think it should have I get upset. I assume that it didn’t go God’s way because it didn’t go my way. Now if you asked me if I had all the answers I would of course say no.. but yet I still keep assuming that I know God’s perfect plan for so many things that I really don’t. To sum it up: Pride.

I think about Gideon, in Judges 6 – 8, who God asked to rescue the Israelites from the Midianites. First of all this wasn’t Gideons plan… he knew the task and he knew, being the least of the least, he couldn’t do anything about it, his plan would be to keep threshing wheat and hiding from the bad guys, no one was going to listen to him anyways, if this is God’s plan he needed to pick someone more influential..somebody people would follow.

But God’s plan was to use him. He ending up obeying and at first had around 32,000 to help him defeat the Midianites but then God said no. After God’s plan was said and done Gideon only had 300 people to help him. Now from most people’s perspective… it doesn’t look like a great plan… in fact it looks pretty dumb, but God saw the whole picture and it wasn't just about defeating the Midianites that were picking on His people. It was about bringing glory to His name so that the whole world would see God’s amazingness. So it was the right plan and bigger than Gideon or anyone else could see. End of the story: God of course defeated the bad guys and this piece of history has changed the way countless people have seen God.

There are so many other testimonies in the bible where people tried it their own way or thought their plan was better than God’s and, being the mighty one He is, God put everything back into perspective.

So that is what He has been teaching me.

1 Corinthians 1:25 “The foolish plans of God are wiser than the wisest of human plans, and God’s weakness is stronger than the greatest of human strength.”