Life Interrupted??

I sent this to a friend of mine yesterday, because I felt the need to share with her what I had read during part of my quiet time. This excerpt from Priscilla Shirer's Life Interrupted (all about lessons from the life of Jonah) speaks volumes to a situation of someone that we both love very much. However, I couldn't shake the nudging that I felt I needed to share it en masse--maybe you are like we were & needed the reminder to help encourage you and give you hope for someone you have on your heart, or maybe you need it for yourself. Regardless, I am certain that her words will move you and help give you hope--even if you feel like you are in the belly of the whale.

"But what seems like it’s been designed to kill us may actually be God’s way of preserving us, rescuing us from what could be a far more dire consequence. Maybe, just maybe, the more vast the consequences we face, the more vast the work He plans to perform through us after it eases up or passes. When we feel His correction particularly heavy upon us, it’s sometimes not so much in proportion to past or recent sin as in proportion to the great task awaiting us when He’s done, when we’ve endured it.

I love the way pastor John Piper says it: “Adversity is redemptive; it’s not merely punitive,” God isn’t out to hurt you; He’s out to redeem you. He’s out to get you back to your senses, back to where you realize you’ve been headed the wrong direction, back where you’re desperate to turn this misstep around if given the opportunity. Back to a place where you want His forgiveness as badly as you wanted your independence, where you crave accountability the way you used to crave your freedom, where the things you once cherished about your life with Him become the things you now desire more than life itself.

See, if you’re a child of God, then the frustration, impatience, anger, and all those other things your interruption has purged to the surface are not the only occupants living inside your heart. You also house the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, who continually seeks the things of God even when you’re not particularly wanting to. So just as trials and interruptions are capable of exposing the resistant tendencies and temperaments that still hang out in your life, they can also mark the moment when something else bubbles to the surface—your deep sense of need for God’s deliverance, your too long forgotten fondness for the Father. …………

………There’s always something about forgoing the privilege of prayer that almost always leads us into the fish’s belly. And yet being in the fish’s belly is bound to lead us back to it. In fact, I’m convinced that’s one of the main things it’s designed to do.

But if we aren’t careful, we can allow it to have the opposite effect. Whether from the extraordinary discomfort, the overwhelming shame, the hopeless frustration, or any combination of emotions, we face the cruel temptation to hole up in our hardship and consider ourselves abandoned. Forgotten. Unforgiven. Unforgivable.

Yet here we see Jonah—a spiritual leader of Israel who had hightailed it to Tarshish in front of God and everybody (as well as endless generations of Bible readers) –seizing on this opportunity to do business with God, to turn and look into His face from the thick darkness of his current condition, to cry out to Him in the midst of his despair, knowing that the Lord was his only hope of rescue. He could have resigned himself to this fate, and yet he didn’t. He chose to cry out to the Lord “from the stomach of the fish” (v.1).

No better place than here. No better time than now.

If you’ve been there—if you are there—hear God’s Word to you today:

The LORD longs to be gracious to you, and therefore He waits on high to have compassion on you. For the LORD is a God of justice; how blessed are all those who long for Him. (Isa. 30:18)

While His tough-loving discipline may have been required to help you recognize the extent of your running or to spotlight the place where you blocked Him from working in your life, repentance and restoration are near. Christ has won the right to declare you approved and acceptable in the eyes of the Father—as usable as ever—now that you’ve acknowledged your fault, accepted your discipline, and asked forgiveness. A forgiven sinner is always welcome at the throne of God.

A place called Grace.

If you’ve been running from God and you know it, if you’ve brought some consequences on yourself that are painful to endure, if you’ve caused others to suffer for your failure to live in full surrender to God’s will and way, you can still call out to Him. You can seek a sure reconciliation with the One you’ve offended. ……..

…………God has brought you here to redeem you, my friend, not to destroy you. And your restoration and renewal need not wait another second.”

Excerpt from Life Interrupted, by Priscilla Shirer

If you would like to purchase Priscilla's book, here is a direct link to purchase straight from her website. There is also a companion workbook for Bible study.