Pat Stark
God’s Ways Are Higher
What I want to share with you comes from a long journey of struggle with God and His ways that have not always been my ways.
“He made known his ways to Moses, his deeds to the people of Israel.” Psalms 103:7
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8,9.
My struggle with God’s ways being different than mine all began many years ago when I had cancer. My pastor who was well known internationally and been used mightily also had cancer at the same time. God spoke to me the words that one of us would be sacrificed for greater purpose. Because he was so valuable to the Body, I believed it was me and wrestled to surrender to God. As you can see, I’m still here and he is not, but it caused me to wrestle with something deep inside me regarding God’s ways and purposes that we often can’t see or understand. God also used scriptures like Isaiah 45 in the process.
The painful events of life can cause us to wrestle with things we have never struggled with before regarding God and his ways.
Things like when life doesn’t make sense
Like when believing for healing, but it doesn’t come
Like when there is a death and we were believing for healing
Like when we feel the scripture says one thing and God seems to do another
Like when we have “pictures” we have created that we felt lined up with scripture but they don’t come to pass the way we had thought
When God seems uncaring, silent, absent, or different and we feel confused, forsaken, and alone
Times when we are forced to ask with great sadness, “Who are you God? I don’t understand you.”
Oswald Chambers in his time tested devotional, My Utmost For His Highest,”points out:
“There are times when God cannot lift the darkness from you, but trust Him. God will appear like an unkind friend, but He is not; He will appear like an unnatural Father, but He is not; He will appear like an unjust judge, but He is not. Keep the notion of the mind of God behind all things strong and growing…therefore you can rest in perfect confidence in Him.”
I’ve met with many people who have been unwilling to wrestle with all those uncomfortable feelings and they’ve just buried those emotions deep inside. Without realizing it, they have buried their anger and resentment toward God, but it displays through their feeling distant from Him, shut down inside, or with anger that comes out sideways, wounding others around them.
I used to shut down inside and then wonder where God was, and why He seemed so distant. Then I realized that God hadn’t moved, I had just shut Him out by closing my heart. I’ve had to wrestle through some of my misunderstandings of God and scripture. Some of my interpretations were even correct, but my timing was wrong. How many times I had been driven by fear instead of trust in making decisions.
One was the timing of selling our house in New Jersey. God clearly said to put the house on the market in January of that year. But houses were selling slowly, and out of my fear, I talked my husband into listing it in November. The house sold in 2 weeks. Between November and January housing prices increased by $30,000 and we lost out by having to accept November instead of January prices. Fear driven decisions are bad decisions.
God’s purposes are often higher than ours and His ways are often mystery, but we want to know, and that knowledge can be our trying to control things the way we want or need them to be. Without even realizing it we are eating from the wrong tree in the Garden. The Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil instead of the Tree of Life (who is Jesus). We often try to bring God down to our way of thinking, but He says, no, you come up here and see from My perspective. (Revelation 4:1) Even my prayers at an earlier time in life were to get God to do things in the way that seemed right to me. That way, Proverbs 16:25 tells us, is not life producing.
Surrendering to God’s ways first allows us to eat from the Tree of Life. “God, what are you doing here, what are you saying?” When we have owned our fear and shared it truthfully with God and when we have truly surrendered it to God, not just with words or intellect, but through our fear, and from the will and heart, the result is always the same — His peace that passes our own understanding.
However coming to terms with loss of any kind, or the fear of loss, is so difficult. I believe it’s because we were originally created for the Garden and for delight, not for loss, and not for “deaths” of any kind. Loss is not “natural” to us in the way God created us prior to the Fall of Man. That’s why we must learn to grieve our losses.
Mourning our grief is God’s way for us to handle loss of any kind. We have to face the reality of our pain, allow ourselves to feel the hurt, and enter the struggle of our loss. We have to allow God to be our Comforter. We then walk through the loss and pain by holding His hand. (Isaiah 43:2)
“Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their FEAR of death.” Hebrews 2:14-15 NIV
There are many different kinds of “deaths” we can fear.
Fear of aloneness
Fear of emptiness
Fear of change or of the unknown
Fear of Loss of security which can include jobs, finances, relationships, our health and our loved ones health or even the fear of their wrong choices
As I’m getting older and I’ve had to face the reality of approaching death myself, and I’ve come to view death very differently. I see death as an event on the journey of life much like a graduation or marriage. I see it as a transition into a greater season, more than we could ever imagine or hope. However I often have to wrestle more to get to the place of surrender and peace with the present lesser losses.
We are already living in eternity according to Jesus.
“Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” John 17:3 NIV
We can tend to think of life as life on this side of eternity and life on the other side instead of realizing we are already in eternity and are in the process of training for reining on the other side of the veil. Because of Jesus’ death, our lives don’t end in death ~~ the next phase just begins and we get to cross over. But in the process there is a mourning of the old, a releasing and letting go. It requires us to walk through into unknown places, trusting God that he is enough to walk us all the way through.
Life on the other side of the veil is bigger than this small world. It is the fulfillment of purpose, not the end. It is the beginning of a season of living fully alive!
Pat
Pat Stark is the author of Born to Fly: Pursuing the Life You Were Meant to Live…Free; Lost Heart: A Guide to Living From Your Heart in a Broken World, and The Story of Life: The Life We All Try to Find,” available on Amazon, as well as The Covenant Center bookstore. Her message brings freedom and hope in the midst of a world of uncertainty. Her desire is to see people restored to who they were originally created to be before they were wounded by the hurts of life. She is gifted in dealing with root issues lying beneath the surface that have kept people trapped and unable to experience true freedom. Pat has worked with people for over 40 years in the area of deep spiritual and emotional healing. She is an ordained minister through The Covenant Center, Lakeland, Florida.
Contact: info@thecovenantcenter.com
*Oswald Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest, Discovery House Publishers, Grand Rapids, Michigan, c.1963, Oswald Chambers Publications Association, Ltd.