Wednesday, June 17, 2015
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I was in Arizona taking the opportunity to spend a little time with my son and our daughter-in-law. And since I'm the early riser of our family, they showed me where all the breakfast food was.
Now, breakfast isn't breakfast without a bagel or an English muffin, right? Well, they had some. So I popped a bagel into their aging toaster oven. And after rounding up the rest of my breakfast, I looked through the oven window to see how my bagel was doing, and I quickly opened the door to save it from burning, only to find out it was nowhere near done. I repeated that exercise two or three times. You know why? The window on that toaster oven had gotten clouded and murky over the years. So everything you looked at through that window looked darker than it really was.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "Discouragement and Your Dirty Window."
Jonah - remember him? He was a man of God with a dark window. God had called him to go preach to the most ungodly city of his day, Nineveh. And Jonah took a ship the other way to Tarshish and ended up paying for his disobedience in the belly of a great fish.
He gets his second chance to do what God wants him to do in our word for today from the Word of God, Jonah 3:1, "Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time. ‘Go to that great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.'" And so he does. It's a message of God's judgment if they don't repent. Here's the result: "The Ninevites believed God. When God saw how they turned from their evil ways, He had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction He had threatened."
Great news, huh? Not if you're looking at the Ninevites through Jonah's window. No! Chapter 4, verse 1, "Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry." He goes on to tell the Lord, "Listen, I want to check out, man! I'm sick of this." But the Lord answered him with, "Have you any right to be angry?"
What's going on here? Well, God is doing a great and mighty work and Jonah's missing the whole thing. Why? Because he's looking at it through a dark window. He had written off the Ninevites as hopeless sinners that should only get one thing - judgment. And when they finally did the right thing, Jonah couldn't even see it. That is the dark window syndrome.
Maybe you've been looking at some person or some situation through your dirty window. Life is so discouraging, it's so depressing, it's so negative when you're seeing everything through a window of anger, or jealousy, or self-pity, or pessimism. Even when God's doing something good, you may not be able to see it because you've gotten used to seeing only what's wrong.
Maybe there's a relationship in your life right now that's strained, at least partly because you've made up your mind about that person and you interpret everything they do, even the good things, even personal growth in them through your perspective. You can't accept the good. They don't even have a chance to change. It could be a child you've struggled with and they're always the problem child to you, or your mate, a spiritual leader in your life, a friend, maybe a coworker. This is just wrong! It doesn't leave any room for the activity of God in their life. There's only room for bad news. It's pre-judging and it's just wrong.
I know that every time I looked through that dark window everything looked darker than it really was. Maybe you've been making that same mistake with someone around you. Instead of writing them off, or trying to fix them, why don't you clean your window? I'll bet things will look better.
Jesus made a promise. He said, "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows Me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life." Something amazing happens when you take what Jesus did on the cross for you, allow Him to take down the wall between you and God and ask Him to come into your life to be your Savior from your sin. It's like the lights go on! And suddenly everything that has looked so dark, now you can see through the eyes of God himself.
The Bible puts it this way, "If anyone's in Christ, he's a new creation. The old is gone; the new life has begun." Truly life looks different when Jesus is driving that life. If you have never surrendered to Him and given Him the wheel, let this be the day that He turns on the lights in your, what may have been too dark soul. You tell Him, "Jesus, I'm yours. Based on what you did for me on the cross."
Visit our website and find out how to be sure you belong to Him - ANewStory.com. This is the day when the lights come on in your heart.