Order Out of Chaos

Is the life of the Christian marked with struggle? We certainly all go through them. I enjoyed seeing a brother at church yesterday whom I had not seen in a while. He's a wonderful man, and has been dealing with the health issues of his elderly parents, and the logistical problems of moving them to a location more practically ordered so that he and his siblings will be able to help them when necessary. He's a strong individual, and he is a very good example of the kind of Christian, who while he readily admits he doesn't understand where all of this fits into the "bigger picture," nonetheless entrusts all of what he is going through to the God he loves.

I know plenty of solid Christians, fully dressed in the armor of God, who seem as though they are never affected by hardships. Once I have gotten to know them though, I have learned that they have gone through stuff the way most everybody else has. We all have different personalities, and we are all at different stages of growth in our lives, and we can all deal with things in ways that are influenced by those factors. So what about self-imposed hardships, bad habits that dominate lives?

I don't believe that we ever get to a place where we don't struggle with some problem or another. The latter half of Galatians 5, beginning at verse 16, makes that pretty evident. What is at issue here is learning to walk in submission to the Holy Spirit. Some people seem to become believers and have an immediate victory over life-dominating bad habits, while others seem to have a drawn out, life-long struggle.

When one is going through a protracted struggle with an ungodly habit, the usual reason is that one has not truly submitted the problem to the Holy Spirit. What's going on there is that a person is trying to gain a sense of happiness, security, or a feeling of satisfaction from "things" or from experiences that are apart from the Lord. It just won't work. The Bible says that God is a God of order, not of chaos, and His very first commandment is that we should have no other gods before Him.

It is only when He is our number one, all-commanding love of our lives, that the rest of life will be in in order. "Order," for some reason these days, seems to smack of the mundane, the humdrum, or a drudgery for a lot of folks, but God doesn't remove the color from our lives to give us order. If we are not centered on the object of our faith, God, our source of life and strength, we end up wanting some sort of quick-fix, miracle treatment for our struggles. If He were to allow some sort of deliverance apart from Him, how does that make us want to have a deeper walk with Him? How does He reign in our lives if we are grateful to that 'quick-fix' of our struggles? Seeking a deeper, closer walk with the Lord is something that requires us to devote our time and our hearts to constant evaluation.

Psalm 119, verses 37 and 38 say, "Turn away my eyes from looking at vanity, And revive me in Your ways. 38 Establish Your word to Your servant, As that which produces reverence for You. " and in the King James, verse 133 says, "Order my steps in thy word: and let not any iniquity have dominion over me." This whole Psalm is geared toward cementing the believer in the empowering work of God's holy Word. The psalmist declares the importance of the protection that God's Word provides against sin, and prayer after prayer, the way that God uses His Word in our lives. It is a treasure trove of verses that we can pray to God and meditate on with Him to deal with the things we struggle through, always with Him first, and leading the way.