La Bonne Vie

10.13.11

Nehemiah 9.3 3 They stood where they were and read from the Book of the Law of the LORD their God for a quarter of the day, and spent another quarter in confession and in worshiping the LORD their God. NIV

Sometimes it is the little things that get my attention… like standing for 12 hours at a prayer and worship service. Well, Paul it was not a quarter of a day in the sense of a 24 hour day, it was a quarter in the sense of daylight hours. Oh, okay then, it was for six hours: six hours of standing worshiping God and confessing one’s sins. The only time I ever spent that much time in church was when I worked for one and put in my time in the office and then attended the evening service.

Now, I admit the above was not the norm: they didn’t do that all the time. But I have read and heard accounts of where people today do such as what we read in Nehemiah 9 on a fairly regular basis. The question is: what is the level of devotion? And what is the level of pain in life? Why does it always have to include pain? Why does dependence on God mostly seem to want to spring from difficult circumstances?

Pain is a motivator; pain causes us to do something about it. Nehemiah and his people recognized what they had been promised and what they had thrown away and realized how foolish that was. They were once a free and blessed people but now they were serfs for a foreign king. They once ruled in power and subdued kingdoms and armies but now they were few in number and kings and armies subdued them. They did the math and saw that they had thrown away all that was precious to them. It was painful to think about what they had been and what they were now.

The higher the level of pain, the more we want to do about it. If it gets bad enough we’ll stand in church for a few hours and confess our sins and worship God. If it gets bad enough, we’ll read our Bibles; we’ll serve, we’ll even pray. In Kingdom terms, The Good Life may be viewed by most ‘normal’ people as a bad life because of the pain and difficulties involved. But in the right perspective, real and lasting good can come out of a ‘bad’ life if we accept it for what it is and are motivated to seek God for relief. That might cause some to stand for six, eight, or twelve hours to worship and repent in front of God. Life is all about what we do with it.

Sometimes it’s the little things that stand out to me and cause me to wonder about my own devotion… and my level of life-pain. And what that pain is causing me to do. Am I rebelling against the pain or am I standing before God in worship and repentance? Life is all about what I do with it and about it.

Today, I am motivated to pray and seek God for good to come out of my pain: good in whatever form He chooses. I have learned this in life: I don’t always get to prescribe as good what I call good. Good always comes from God in whatever package He has decided to deliver it. My job is to stand (literally or figuratively) and seek Him, and trust that from Him all good will come…