It Starts Small

I’ve come to believe we can’t have faith without truly understanding the victory God has won over us. From that victory comes the power of His word. Getting saved is not the finished product. It’s defiantly not the end of all conflict or troubles in our lives.

1 Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: 2 By whom we also have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Romans 5:1-2

Our salvation is not the end of all tests, trials or tribulations in our lives. I had learned through a preacher that the word tribulation means pressure. It’s a word picture when you crush grapes you squeeze the juice out of them and make wine. The same with olives. Through the pressure of squeezing them, you crush the oil out of them. God brings pressure into our lives. Without pressure, we can not be made into saints.

Whenever trouble, heartache, or disappointments come, God resides over all of it. God brings conflict to cause us to stand, but satan brings conflict to cause us to stumble and sit down.

The world brings us pressure. The instant you step out of the world it tries to squeeze you back into its mold. My own flesh will come against me and cause pressure. It fights against my new nature.

For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would. Galatians 5:17

There a constant civil war going on inside us. By our very nature we are evil at heart, but when we accept and receive Christ as our savior, yield our lives to him, the new creation wars against the old nature.

Did you know that you can reprogram you brain? This is science, you can google it. You have millions of neuropathways in your brain. Think of them as super highways. It’s much easier for the brain to use a super highways, than say a dirt road. It’s an automatic programmed thought. For example, I had programmed my brain to believe I was garbage. So anytime I failed, or someone told me I was garbage, that dirt road turned into a super highway over time.

Reprogramming your brain takes time. You have to reprogram a new pathway. So, God spoke and said you are my daughter and I treasure you. I had to stop allowing my brain to use the super highway (the thought I’m garbage) and start using this dirt path (I am loved and have value). The more I believed God’s truth and used this new thought pattern, the more the path grew into a road, which grew into a super highway. The other road, shrinks and altogether disappears.

Science is awesome! So I believe as part of this new creation, this transformation, was Jesus speaking truth, me accepting it as truth, and reprogramming my old thoughts and ways, into a new thoughts and ways. Let me tell you it takes time! It’s takes dedicated practice. In psychology, they try to get you to use positive thinking. Think positive and you’ll change what you feel about yourself, but we know God’s absolute truth. Feelings are fickle, it’s only through His word, embracing His victory, yielding to him, that real change occurs.

So our flesh wars against us and creates conflict, but the devil himself causes pressure in us. If you’ve never met the devil, it’s because you and him are traveling in the same direction. If the devil doesn’t bother you, it’s because he doesn’t need to.

God also brings us pressure. His love scourges us. He disciplines us. He doesn’t want to make us happy, he wants to make us holy.

Conflict in our lives teaches us consistency.

And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; Romans 5:3

Patience works constancy and consistency in our walk. When pressure comes, it reveals what I am made of. Patience is actually endurance and perseverance. Who do you run to? What do you run to? Two great questions when you feel pressure. It has taken many river crossings for me to develop the right means to those questions. For a longtime I ran to my husband or friends for understanding. When that failed I ran to a bottle. When that failed and I was finally a broken shattered vessel I began to understand that I could only run to God, FIRST. Seeking your significant other and friends is not wrong, but really God wants us to seek him first.

I feel in many ways, this entire mess I’m in was my lack of truly seeking him first in ALL things. From the smallest to the biggest, choices we made without ever truly going to him in prayer AND waiting for the answer. Endurance to wait to hear from him, rather than just assuming a good feeling was guiding the decision. This is what he’s been trying for so long to build I me. Failures, was revealing what I was made of. I was impatient and didn’t much care for endurance or lean on God to handle whatever mess I was in or swept into. There’s no instant maturity in the Christian life. We start out as babes, and grow. Some of us never get passed being a babe in Christ and just get lost wandering in the desert. We will never learn great spiritual truths if we don’t have consistency, endurance, or patience.

Looking back over my own life, there’s 4 things I can identify I did when conflict came to my life. The first was to just run away from it. Live in denial and run to something self destructive. Another method of dealing with conflict was resentment. Icky, I know. I had built grudges instead of living under the law of grace and mercy. A third method was resignation. I got discouraged and gave up. It wasn’t until I started to study Romans 5, that I started to understand there’s another method.

I had to resolve conflict by faith. I had to endure in faith. Faith is not receiving from God what you want, it’s accepting from God what he gives. Often, conflict is God’s way of using conflict to develop his character in us.

Just recently I started having issues with someone at work. They were constantly doing my job. I could be right there and they take over what I was doing. It was making me angry. My boss pointed out to me that I wasn’t being very nice towards this person and asked what was going on. I decided to just commit the situation to God and pray over it. A few mornings later, the Holy Spirit interrupted my prayer and spoke, it’s because you think they don’t think you can do your job.

I paused for a moment. That was odd. I finished my prayer and then thought about what was spoken. Sometimes I’m running two stations on the line at once. I’m actually pretty good at it, and this person just comes over and starts doing my job. God was right! Instead of being grateful for their help, I took it to mean I’m not good enough. This person is one of the nicest people. They’d give you the shirt off their back. They weren’t trying to say I couldn’t do my job, they were just being helpful. I had a great conversation with this person. I apologized for being a jerk at times, and come to find out they are the same way.

So this whole conflict was God showing me how to be nice. How to say thank you and be grateful for help, rather than thinking and feeling that I’m not good enough. I’m still working on reprogramming myself in this area. It still kind of bothers me but the Holy Spirit is right there when it happens and reminds me, be thankful. So instead of being passive aggressive, I can turn to them and genuinely say thank you.

Conflict, through faith and seeking God not only brings endurance and consistency, it also brings character building.