Thursday, January 25th, 2024
I love when God takes the time to speak to us through the practical things we do. It’s like He is telling us that even the things that seem like monotonous chores can be an opportunity to meet with Him. He is reinforcing that everything we do can be a form of worship unto Him. In my particular situation, it was splitting wood. Whenever I can do something practical for our household that also doubles as a workout, I am all in!
We have had a recent string of below-freezing weather, which is actually good for splitting wood. There is no soggy mud getting tracked around, and it’s great for getting the body warmed up. On this particular day, I had my eye on one of the straighter, knot-free logs towards the bottom of the pile. It was somewhat frozen to the ground but also surrounded by other logs. I worked to get it freed from the ground but I still could not lift it up. There was a decent amount of snow on everything, so it was a little hard to tell where one log started and one log stopped. I heard God speak to my spirit, “Step back and look around. Sometimes there are other logs we have to get out of the way first before you can get the one you really want.”
As I looked around, I saw a smaller log about three logs to the left. I worked on freeing that one first. Then I moved to the right and freed that one. Now, the log I wanted was no longer bound and I could easily roll it over to where I needed it.
Let’s think about this from a spiritual perspective. We all have those things that we are asking God for. Perhaps it’s healing or deliverance or provision. We tend to put most of our energy into that thing because we think that’s the biggest problem or the biggest need. But what if God is highlighting some “lesser” things that He wants us to deal with first? Do we shrug them off because we think it’s unrelated to that big need? What if we follow the path God desires and start tipping over the dominoes He lines up first? Before we know it, we might be standing right in front of that big thing ready to easily overcome it.
Let’s look at some related scriptures. Matthew 9:2 says:
2 Then behold, they brought to Him a paralytic lying on a bed. When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the paralytic, “Son, be of good cheer; your sins are forgiven you.”
Everyone around that person, probably even including the paralytic himself thought he just needed healing. I’m guessing none of them would have realized that forgiveness is what would set his mortal body free. Jesus recognized that his condition was not purely physical. It was a spiritual issue and Jesus dealt with that. Then the man’s healing immediately followed.
Matthew 17:15,18 says:
15 “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is an epileptic and suffers severely; for he often falls into the fire and often into the water.
18 And Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of him; and the child was cured from that very hour.
Here is a boy that suffers from uncontrollable seizures that tend to put him into life-threatenting situations. Jesus doesn’t go after the seizures; He goes after the demon that is causing the seizures. It’s not the domino that we thought needed to be dealt with, but once that domino was out of the way, the healing immediately followed. Just like with my own example, while I struggled and struggled to go after that one log, once I got the other logs out of the way, I really didn’t have to work hard at all to free the one I really wanted.
Final Thoughts…
Lately, God has been teaching me a lot about deliverance. Often, that thing we want to be freed of has a root that we are either unaware of or unable to deal with without God. We think that we just need to be freed of fear or anger or pride or jealousy, but we are unaware of what may actually be causing the undesirable fruit. It could be words spoken that opened a door to the enemy or the generational curse that we are still carrying or the unforgiveness that we may not even know we are harboring. Everything in creation is based on sowing and reaping. God’s ways are not haphazard. He didn’t create us to know all that He knows. Instead, He created within us a need to seek Him first and trust that He knows exactly what He is doing. He knows how to free every bound log and He wants us to experience freedom just as much as we do.