Saturday, June 19, 2010

However God does it for you means it is GOOD for YOU!

Reading the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, I realized something I never had before from this passage. It made me think about us as Mercy girls walking in our freedom but sometimes falling to distractions. A lot of times that distraction is comparison, which only leads to death.

So in Matthew 20, the landowner went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. He hired some in the morning to work for the day and also went out a couple of times later to give them "whatever is right" at the end of the day. Evening came and he began to call the workers in to give them their pay. The last to be hired were given one denarius as were the ones who were hired in the early morning. "They began to complain to the landowner, 'These last put in one hour, and you made them equal to us who bore the burden of the day and the burning heat!'" The land owner later replied, "Are you jealous because I am generous?"

We could easily read it and get the message that the last shall be first and the first, last. So much more was revealed.
The workers began complaining, and in that, they walked straight into comparison.

Comparison can only lead to death for us. I can look at another sister and see the freedom she is walking in--what I think is her freedom, and I fall into condemnation for the great amount of freedom she has and I don't. She could have been struggling with whatever issue for multiple years or only one or two. No matter how long or short of a time she was in bondage or even how long she has walked in freedom, the quiet, or rather, not so quiet lie sneaks in saying, "You should be walking in the great freedom that she is," which then becomes a belief in a lie yielding only death. "You don't have the freedom that she shows and that must mean you're not there and a failure." Those are straight lies from the enemy meant to distract us from our pursuit of Christ! We are good enough. We are loved even if our freedom doesn't look like we THINK it should. I'm longing for progress, not perfection.

And I think I've touched on this before, but it's come back up in conversation two or three times lately:
Becoming free is a very slow progress for some of us, and that is OKAY!
That gives even greater reason to include a lot of accountability and support.
That also means choosing not to believe those lies or hesitating to call out to those who are FOR us to help us.


Freedom and victory might come little by little like in Deuteronomy 7:22,


The LORD your God will drive out those nations before you, little by little. You will not be allowed to eliminate them all at once, or the wild animals will multiply around you.

keep reading that passage,

but basically victory came by enduring. God's plans are bigger, which means He may not move as fast as we would like Him to. He probably won't give it all to us at once either. There are WAY too many lessons to learn in the process of finding greater freedom.

So I leave you with this...

Keep trusting. However God does it for you means it is GOOD for YOU!