Be still and know that I am God

BE STILL AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD PSALM 46
I’m speaking today of the great need for all of us in this current crisis of the global coronavirus pandemic to know what to do... What do I do next what do I not do OR What is happening – God is happening AND God is telling us what he wants us to do – he is saying Be still etc. He is telling us what the big question is that we should ask him – WHO ARE YOU LORD?

God’s purpose is for people to KNOW HIM. When we say ‘Who are you Lord?’ he wants to tell us Who He is. Many people are more concerned with ‘What is going to happen to me’. I believe that MANY THAT ARE HEARING THIS understand and many have accepted this challenge of being still before God as a way of life. When we say we have sought to do this faithfully as a way of life in the day to day happenings of our yesterday life we can live in the hope of living this way as the absolute priority in the new TODAY of the current crisis in the Earth. We are living out an enforced Sabbath rest of FAITH! The Sabbath of the OT was God’s way of demonstrating to Israel that when they rested and trusted him they would see him miraculous work and provision for them. God will order the externals in his own miraculous way for you but you must order the internals for yourself, including the receiving of the wisdom to manage the externals that he is ordering.

Many Christians get to know the concept of God and then try the rest of their lives wanting to know what is going to happen to them. The New Covenant is not designed to tell people what is going to happen to them – it is designed to show them WHO is going to happen to them. What my or anyone else’s opinion is about what you need to know about God must only serve to move each and every one of us to exercise the faith to ask The Holy Spirit to reveal Jesus in each individual life (John 2:27).
Heb 8:10. His covt says all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them. 12For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins ?and their lawless deeds I will remember no more.”?

The reason things went wrong for Israel in the Old Testament is that they went to Idols to find out what was going to happen to them and the false prophets told them what they wanted to hear. The true prophets spent their time warning them and encouraging them to live in obedience to God’s covenantal terms of agreement. The same problem can happen in the New Testament when people get the wrong slant on what God’s covenant promises and terms of agreement are really about.

So how are we going to get to know God?
We get to know God IN the things that happen to us – both the good and the bad – when we say ‘Who are you Lord?’ rather than ‘What is going to happen to me Lord’.

From the very beginning of his ministry Paul knew he would go through trial and tribulation but he never worried about that. His main objective in life was to get to know the person of Jesus in an intimate way.
When he had his first encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus and he fell to the ground his first words were ‘Who are You LORD?’ That one sentence means a lot. It says ‘I want to get to know you and you are in charge.’ He was then told that he would suffer for this man Jesus and he accepted that wholeheartedly.

Paul believed fully in prophecy but prophecy meant more to Paul about WHO Jesus was rather than Paul having to know what was going to happen to him, whether good or bad in human terms. He would get to know more who Jesus was in the midst of All of these things.
The spirit of prophecy is the testimony of Jesus. (Rev. 19:10).
This because the work of The Holy Spirit is to bear witness to the person and the reality of who Jesus is and what he has done and what he is doing in joining us to himself and The Father and The Spirit. His passion is to become known and loved by us as he loves us and knows us. This kind of prophecy encourages and comforts and builds us up, causing us to grow in the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ. (1 Cor. 14:3)

God will reveal his will and purpose through prophecy, but it will confirm things to our spirit that are from God, rather than predict a strange or unknown event of the future.
If we could trust as fully as we can in the pre-ordained purpose and the pre-ordained walk that God has for us (Eph. 2:10) we could rest in that and accept the adverse and the positive aspects of whatever happens. In that rest we would be focused more on knowing who Jesus is rather than what was going to happen to us. In any case, whatever happens to us there is always the opportunity to get to know Jesus more fully in it.

Phil 3:7 ‘But what things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ. 8Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith; 10that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings…

When Paul suffered persecution and imprisonment he felt he could identify with the suffering of Jesus, and that The Holy Spirit would show more about how Jesus felt when he suffered on the earth. He called this the ‘fellowship of his suffering’.
He also knew he would share the feelings of victory and joy that Jesus experienced in his resurrection. Paul wants us to share this same partnership of getting to know Jesus by hanging onto the hope that Jesus will bring victory out of every seeming defeat, no matter how difficult it may seem when we are going through it. This experience of final victory is that of actually sharing a deep joy with Jesus because that is the emotional experience of having a victory.

It is natural for us to want to know what is going to happen to us and to feel secure in that knowledge of the future – but a greater experience of faith in God through The Holy Spirit is waiting there for us... That is, that God wants to share with us every experience we go through.

In any experience of sharing life with someone else there is an unfolding to us of who that person really is. Little by little the deeper things of the heart and character become known. It is not like reading a book about them because it happens only in the happening and not in the knowledge of some facts about which can give us a theory of what we want them to do or to be for us. Jesus is far above anything we can ask or think.

We get to realize that God is deeply compassionate and profoundly tender and infinitely patient and he waits for us to learn while he never stops unfolding who he is. We learn to trust that he is the only one that knows the end from the beginning and that our extreme efforts to have to know WHAT is going to happen rather than WHO is going through the happening with us causes us to be looking the other way. He planned for us to be fulfilled in life this way, by getting to know him as we experience life conscious of him being with us. He is also fulfilled in this.
GOD WILL HAVE QUESTIONs FOR US TOO...
When Adam went his own way into the darkness and independence of self focused experimentation, God pursued him and said ‘Where are you – where is my friend that used to want to walk with me every day?’ God is still looking for that friendship.
God said to Elijah when he ran away in fear for his life from the cruel King Ahab and Jezebel What are you doing here… Our perfect answer becomes the perfect question ‘Who are you LORD?’ Then God shows us. His directive in getting us to know him is not a dominating commandment. It is an overture of a person who is saying I want us to get to know one another. That is God’s desire – to have fellowship with us. When this desire is mutual you have something absolutely exquisite in terms of a relationship. This is perfect love we are talking about here. When Paul said ‘That I might know him, and the fellowship of his suffering, he was not just looking for suffering, he was looking for an intimate fellowship with the feelings and emotions both good and bad of the person he wanted to know more than anything else,

He is the same yesterday today and forever, consistent in his compassion and guidance and discipline.
How can we be consistent same yesterday and tomorrow?
We do many things the same each day because they are worth doing and they are important - or we wouldn’t do them! They can be done better day by day in love and compassion and character and integrity and in hope and in faith.