One of the stories that has captivated us for thousands of years is the creation story. We mull over how it builds from the opening lines in Genesis when God speaks light into existence. That alone boggles the mind − in the midst of vast darkness, He spoke and light was born. But of course he didn’t stop there. One thing after another that we take for granted and barely notice is spoken into existence. His final creation was to “make” man and set him in the midst of the wonders He spoke into existence.

Most of us know how that story continues with his creation of Eve and all they are blessed to experience and do. How staggering the privilege of naming the animals. Did the naming process include naming the trees, flowers, and other vegetation?

After the upending of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden when they disobey God about eating from just one tree in the center of the garden, we tend to think the creation story ends. Perhaps it is a bit like the “fade out” a director creates in a movie.

But it didn’t stop back then.

How could this be a truth we miss?

While reading a commentary by Douglas K. Stuart on the book of Exodus, my attention was arrested with these words:

“The common but incorrect notion that the creation story is to be found only in the first chapters of Genesis misses the fact that the biblical picture of creation is one of ongoing creation, starting with Adam and Eve, continuing with human society in general, continuing further with Noah and the patriarchs, then with the nation Israel and many of its institutions, and culminating in the new creation (Isa. 65:17) in which all who truly place faith in Christ are recreated.”

After reading this I can be tempted to say that of course that makes sense, but somehow it never resonated even if it crossed my mind at some point.

But don’t we miss it in so many ways along the way to that day Isaiah speaks of?

In the northern hemisphere autumn is approaching and harvesting of many of the latest crops is taking place. When those seeds and plants were placed in the ground months ago and began to spring into life, did we miss that it was creation in action?

Did we miss it in the spring when the robin’s eggs cracked open with new life?

You may be thinking that nothing new has been created, but consider that each human being is a unique creation. Each litter of puppies or kittens is a collection of mixed new creatures. Identical twins are still unique even though sharing the same DNA.

Add to that the truth that when God works through any human He created and some new thing is discovered that He left for us to stumble upon, it’s an expansion of creation. His imagination is evident every time a new star is discovered, a new cure is developed, or a new musical composition is written.

He designed us to be creative because He made us in his own image and He is arguably the Creative Genius behind all of creation.

We do not speak worlds into existence, but every time we speak our words bring life or death.

What are we creating?

Imagine all that lies ahead until God’s final masterpiece:

¹⁷ “See, I will create  new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered,  nor will they come to mind. ¹⁸ But be glad and rejoice forever  in what I will create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight  and its people a joy. ¹⁹ I will rejoice over Jerusalem  and take delight in my people; the sound of weeping and of crying  will be heard in it no more.

²⁰ “Never again will there be in it  an infant who lives but a few days,  or an old man who does not live out his years; the one who dies at a hundred  will be thought a mere child; the one who fails to reach a hundred  will be considered accursed. ²¹ They will build houses and dwell in them;  they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. ²² No longer will they build houses and others live in them,  or plant and others eat. For as the days of a tree,  so will be the days of my people; my chosen ones will long enjoy  the work of their hands. ²³ They will not labor in vain,  nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune; for they will be a people blessed by the Lord,  they and their descendants with them. ²⁴ Before they call I will answer;  while they are still speaking I will hear. ²⁵ The wolf and the lamb will feed together,  and the lion will eat straw like the ox,  and dust will be the serpent’s food. They will neither harm nor destroy  on all my holy mountain,” says the Lord.

Isaiah 65:17-25 (NIV)

Twice this week I was delayed on my way to meet someone. Traffic, construction, getting lost and missing a turn, and once leaving a few minutes after my plan of action were the reasons. But I really don’t know if there was something else at work that was for my good even though I really hate being late.

Sometimes a delay is just what life hands me, but sometimes there is a purpose I may discover later because that has happened to me. More often I don’t find out the cause. Delays and waiting reveal my frustration about the lack of control I have over so many things. They can also expose a bit of demandingness I really don’t want to see.

This week as I was reading in Exodus I was reminded once again of the delays the Israelites experienced on their way out of Egypt. After 430 years they were leaving behind the only culture they had ever known. Joseph was long dead and the favor these people had known during his lifetime had disappeared into torturous conditions of slavery. A careful reading of the early chapters of Exodus gave me a glimpse of how cautious they might have been to risk trusting this Moses who showed up promising God was going to deliver them.

Many of these people would likely have lost a sense of the identity they had before Egypt offered them safety through Joseph’s favor with Pharaoh. Even in the worst conditions, Egypt was home.

The plagues had decimated the Egyptians and the wariness of what response might come against them, I would think they were thinking it was time to get on the road to the land Moses said was promised to them. Little did they realize how long the trek would be − 40 years − or why God would take the long route to get there.

Most would not have considered it a divine delay, but it was.

The Israelites had a great deal to learn. Not only was their identity tied to the Egyptian culture, but also their thinking. These people undoubtedly saw themselves as victims to the tyranny of what was then the greatest political-military-economic power of that time. They were also heading into the wilderness where those people groups already inhabiting the land would oppose them and knew how to fight and had experience in battle against other cultures. As oppressed people, the Israelites had no experience with weapons nor did they own them.

After the plagues the Israelites would think (or assume) that God would not only go before them, but also make a smooth trek of it. If He was good and powerful and had demonstrated that during the plagues, those ideas would not be surprising. Fair enough, but they didn’t really know Him or what his plan was.

Douglas K. Stuart in a commentary on Exodus notes this:

“God was at work to bring his people to a right relationship with him and to teach them dependence on his provision for them. He was shaping and educating them, allowing them to learn (frequently the hard way since that is all too often the only way people really learn a lesson) what it meant to trust him in all sorts of situations.

In addition he was treating them in a way that has always been difficult for people to accept: he was not telling them everything they wanted to know. He told them what they needed to know in order to receive his salvation.”

Yikes! Here we are all these years later and those are still lessons most of us are trying to learn.

We want to know where and He tells us He will go with us. We want to know when and He says “in due season.” We want to know what and He says “I am with you always.”

The delays are still one of the ways God is educating us, shaping us, teaching us about Him and also ourselves along the way. He has told us what we need to know, but He wants us to learn to trust Him in all sorts of situations, to discover his goodness and provision, his faithfulness, and our dependence on Him.

The Bible is rich with promises to remind us of those truths:

“His massive arms are wrapped around you, protecting you. You can run under his covering of majesty and hide. His arms of faithfulness are a shield keeping you from harm.”

Psalm 91:4 (TPT)

“We all experience times of testing, which is normal for every human being. But God will be faithful to you. He will screen and filter the severity, nature, and timing of every test or trial you face so that you can bear it. And each test is an opportunity to trust him more, for along with every trial God has provided for you a way of escape that will bring you out of it victoriously.”

1 Corinthians 10:13 (TPT)

“So now I live with the confidence that there is nothing in the universe with the power to separate us from God’s love. I’m convinced that his love will triumph over death, life’s troubles, fallen angels, or dark rulers in the heavens. There is nothing in our present or future circumstances that can weaken his love. ³⁹ There is no power above us or beneath us—no power that could ever be found in the universe that can distance us from God’s passionate love, which is lavished upon us through our Lord Jesus, the Anointed One!”

Romans 8:38-39 (TPT)

God’s delays have a purpose.

He is not random.

He is utterly consistent, but He didn’t promise us a short easy route after we accepted Him any more than He did the Israelites as they were leaving Egypt for a better land.

He did promise to never leave us or forsake us, to lean into Him and trust Him, to come to know Him more intimately, and to grow our character to look more like Christ.

Throughout every day we are all bombarded by messages that come to us from every direction. They arrive as voicemail, text, email, memorandum, and even through “snail mail” crammed into our mailboxes. Some of them are ones we are eager to hear or get and others are not. Sorting through all of them consumes time and no matter how we may have felt when this barrage first started, most of us are weary of all the time this takes out of our day (or night).

Each message (wanted or unwanted) requires a decision from us of some sort. Often that means we need to give or leave a response as well and that means we add to the clutter of messages because we add to them. Sometimes we are stunned on a day without many messages to deal with but that would be rare because many of us write messages or notes to ourselves to remember one thing or another.

Most messages come as print, audio, video, or mixed format for us. But there is something about this that we can miss in our snowstorm of messages each day.

Each of us in our person is also a message. I was reminded of that while reading in 1 Thessalonians when Paul writes to the church in Thessalonica:

“The word has gotten around. Your lives are echoing the Master’s Word, not only in the provinces but all over the place. The news of your faith in God is out. We don’t even have to say anything anymore—you’re the message!”

1 Thessalonians 1:6-7 (MSG)

Paul is stating plainly that these people had heard the message of God’s Word and it had so changed and impacted who they were in every area of their lives that they had become the message.

This wasn’t about writing down something for someone or telling someone in just words. This was a complete transformation of who they were so every aspect of behavior, speech, nonverbal expression, and choice reflected how the Word had been engrafted into them.

And people noticed.

What a message all they met or interacted with must have received, but what about us now?

We also are a message to everyone who encounters us or observes us whether we intend that or not. We convey who we are to more than those we are intentionally wanting to communicate with. We, the message, are given to our neighbors, postman, cashier, waiter or waitress, mechanic, and hundreds of others every day who observe us whether up close or at a distance. Our values and choices are conveying who we are – we are a message.

Many of us may not actually know our neighbors well. Beyond waving or saying “hello” other interactions may not happen, but the message of us gets conveyed in hundreds of ways – when and how our trash cans are left out, how we handle our lawn and landscaping, whether we scream at others who live with us, if we train our children and animals to respect property, whether we work nights or days, or are regularly seen heading out to worship on a Saturday or Sunday. All these are our message to the world and when all these messages are combined, they convey quite a sketch of us.

That can be funny or sobering to consider.

But in all the places we live and move each day is there evidence that we are believers in Christ? If so, is it because we have told them, or they have seen us carrying a Bible with us or is it because they see or sense something more? Does Christ’s life in us cause us to be a fragrance (as Paul wrote to the Corinthians) that distinguishes our message beyond the words we say or the things we carry? Whether we intend to or not we are the message and for some, the only message they will really see or read to gain a sense of whose we are. Does who we tell them we are match the message of us?

It can be far easier to say who we are than to have the message of us actually convey the words we say.

The message of us will always be the one others remember more than what we may say to them. Do our convictions need to be strengthened so that we don’t need to plan or think through the message second by second? What happens with the messages we take into us through all and any means? It is certain they shape and impact us and the message that we become.

The Apostle Paul spoke to that as well when he addressed the church at Thessalonica:

“When the Message we preached came to you, it wasn’t just words. Something happened in you. The Holy Spirit put steel in your convictions.”

1 Thessalonians 1:5-6 (MSG)

Do we need more steel in our convictions to live authentically each moment of each day?

However we choose to answer that question, or live each day, let us remember this – we are the message.

We all love a day that has no drama or undue stress. We can relax and enjoy the day. Oftentimes we look toward vacation days or weekends for such respites from the daily challenges of life and work. There is something about being able to let down our guard and just chill out that appeals to most of us.

Even when we plan for such days or times away, many of us have had these plans and desires upended. Flights get delayed or canceled, construction on the highway sends us on an endless detour, a sudden storm halts all modes of transportation, or someone gets sick. Our hope for an easy day, weekend, or vacation disappears like a vapor.

We continue to long for easy days, lazy days. We want someone else to be in charge for a while.

Sometimes when such a day comes together, we lean back in a hammock and let thoughts roam, or we sit on a patio as dusk falls and listen to the sounds of the night commence as the last rays of the sun slip below the horizon.

We stop paying attention and cuing into anything but our own reverie.

It can be natural to forget there is an unseen world around us where a battle is raging for our soul. Our archenemy never sleeps and is always seeking who may be off guard and lured into his devices.

It can happen to the best of us who love and serve the Lord. If it happened to Kind David, it can happen to any one of us.

David, the Goliath slayer, the one about whom songs were written and sung throughout Israel, was a mighty warrior undefeated in battle with God on his side. But then in 2 Samuel 11 as spring came and all the kings were going out to battle, David sent his chief of military operations, Joab, and all his servants and mighty men out to battle while he remained at home. Didn’t he deserve a day off now and then?  He had trained mighty men of war, certainly they could manage without him this time. Perhaps they could, but maybe he couldn’t manage to handle his leave from battle as well as he thought.

Here he is relaxing on his roof on a beautiful day and the archenemy sees his chance. David’s eyes gaze upon the beauty of woman bathing and lusts after her. He sends for her to be brought to him. She is Bathsheba, wife of one of his mighty warriors, but no matter. The enemy has already stirred David’s lust to a fever pitch, and he takes her to his bed and then sends her home. Did he really think no one would notice and that he would not get caught?

Even if no man or woman saw the deed, did David think God was off on vacation and missed what he did?

As I was reading this passage, I took note of the wise comments in the footnote to this story in my Bible:

“There is no point in life’s journey so dangerous as when one has arrived at a comfortable place and lowers one’s guard.

Sin seldom shows itself all at once, or even as sin at all. The temptation to sin is usually more subtle than that. But once in its grip, one is taken to places one never intended to go and held longer than one ever intended to stay.”

It’s been said that any fool can lose a battle. You just need an opponent who is weaker, but it is a questionable talent to lose a battle when you start off with all the advantages.

History gives us numerous examples. It happened to Lt. Col. George Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn despite his strategies and belief that the attack he planned would be a surprise. It happened to Napoleon when he ran short on supplies and sought to retreat from Moscow after he decided to invade Russia. It happened at the Battle of Antietam during the American Civil War as well and the list of such battles could go on and on. Over and over again when one side was underestimating the opponent or resting and not on watch, a rout took place.

You may be saying that our archenemy in the spiritual world is far stronger than you are and if you do, the enemy knows he is likely to win. He knows then that you have forgotten that our triune God and all his angels fight on our behalf. Our responsibility is to stay on watch and call on Him when those subtle temptations begin.

Peter understood that well. He had a history of faltering when the enemy was sneaking around. His recommendations are key to keep in focus on easy days:

“8 Keep a cool head. Stay alert. The Devil is poised to pounce, and would like nothing better than to catch you napping.

9 Keep your guard up. You’re not the only ones plunged into these hard times. It’s the same with Christians all over the world. So keep a firm grip on the faith.

10 The suffering won’t last forever. It won’t be long before this generous God who has great plans for us in Christ – eternal and glorious plans they are! – will have you put together and on your feet for good. 11 He gets the last word; yes, he does.”

1 Peter 5:8-11 (MSG)

Have you noticed how easy it is to be caught up in the stress of always striving, seeking to accomplish something?

It represents struggle or fighting for something. And there is no question there are more than one or two principles, values, and causes that are worth fighting for or on behalf of, but in our Christian experience have we balanced out when we are to cease from that?

Everywhere I look struggles are in abundance. So much in our lives and world is being shaken. We can easily be thrown off balance and our natural instincts kick in and we either flee or fight.

The key we must not lose goes to the foundation of our Christian walk and what informs the decisions we make as we live in the world while seeking to be not of the world as God’s sons and daughters.

I often hear that we need to stand in the midst of all that swirls around us. We are reminded our foundation is not to be on sand, but on the Rock which is Christ, the Lord.

It reminds me of one of those books I read long ago, the little gem by Watchman Nee entitled Sit, Walk, Stand, that focuses on truths from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.

In less than 65 pages, he lays down the foundational principles Paul lays out as succinctly as anything I have read. If you have read it, you know what I mean. If you have never read it, put it on your book list.

Our difficulty of standing in the midst of challenge and trial is perhaps because we have not first learned to sit as Watchman Nee makes clear. Standing suggests we are in conflict or warfare and we cannot consider warfare unless we have first learned to truly rest in Christ, in who He is, and what He has done for us and already accomplished on the cross and through resurrection.

When we can sit and rest in that truth, we have greater clarity on the reality of the victory that was already accomplished and yet will be accomplished for the rest of all time.

That gives us the beginning of clarity on what it means to cease striving. If we get caught up in constant striving, I am not so sure the enemy is not gleeful when he senses we are not certain that Christ’s sacrifice has counted for much of anything.

Have we also lost sight of the Holy Spirit within us to lead, guide, comfort, and empower us?

I am not suggesting there are not attacks of the enemy from a broad range of options available to him, but rather if we rightly discern what is an assault from him and what is a consequence of some poor choice or failure in our own lives. Our discernment is key

Nee makes clear that if we have a solid understanding of our position with the Lord that we will be able to learn how to walk with Him before the world. In Ephesians Paul makes clear we are to put on the whole armor of God so we can stand against the wiles of the devil. Paul doesn’t suggest at that point that we are to march into battle, but rather to stand. Am I, are you, remembering why Paul exhorts believers to do that? (It is key to the foundation that leads to cessation of striving.)

Watchman Nee puts it this way:

“The word ‘stand’ implies that the ground disputed by the enemy is really His, and therefore ours. We need not struggle to gain a foothold on it.”

From Sit, Walk, Stand

The weapons Paul writes about in Ephesians 6 are by and large defensive except for the sword that can be used both defensively and offensively. That gives a metaphor for the truth that we have the ground because of Him.

We are not, I am not, trying to get the ground if He dwells within us or me. Jesus took the war to the enemy at the cross and defeated him there. That is what allows us to know and be assured that we can stand. Additionally, it tells us that the Lord is counting on us to stand with the help of the Holy Spirit and not be shaken as the world around us starts to come apart.

Consider Paul’s words:

“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

Ephesians 6:10-12 (ESV)

Is what the Lord has called us to do easy? Absolutely not!! But He has given us the gift of the Holy Spirit and we are to depend on Him. And that is as it should be.

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