Look, that you may see!

Hear, you deaf, and look, you blind, that you may see!
Isaiah 42:18

Is this not often the case!?!  God is continually before us but we see him not.  He can be moving in amazing ways yet we wonder "Lord, where are you?  Could you come?  Please?"  Sadly there are many times where we don't even go as far as to ask to see him.  We plow forward in our daily affairs unaware of anything but our urgent concerns and comfort desires.

I feel like the Lord is convicting me greatly of this lately.  As I read through Isaiah I am encouraged, convicted and challenged to live differently and realign my focus.  While the Lord moves in my heart it is amazing how much it changes what I look for.

I recently heard a message at our church here in Côte d'Ivoire from a visiting Dutch pastor about a car that he longed to have.  It stood out to him because it was a color green that he had never seen on a car before.  He wanted that car so bad that he bought it.  As he drove home that day he saw 15 other cars that were the exact same as his, color and all!  Did the factory somehow produce a ton in one day?  I doubt it.  His eyes were open and he was more observant that he was able to see.

It says in Matthew 5:8 "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."

As I take time in God's word and delight in him asking that Christ would come and purify me from my sin the most amazing thing happens.  I begin to see God and his moving more clearly.  When I cry out to him in prayer and anxiously await his response I truly see him move.  Many times it is not how I expect him to move or at times contrary to what I asked for but somehow I see that it is in direct response to my prayer just weeks, days or even moments earlier.

God has been doing some incredible things here in Côte d'Ivoire.  The 2 Public Universities that total over 70,000 students have been closed since the war.  It has been incredibly difficult.  How do you do campus ministry when the 2 largest universities are closed?  Yet our God is the "everlasting God"!  He is opening doors for ministry in so many other places, from high schools to private universities to dorms to little apartments.  I am seeing God transform the way that "I knew" to do ministry almost daily.

I often ask my sons "Do we have a small god?  or do we have a Big God?"  They eagerly jump up in the air with their hands up and say "A Big God!"  Oh how true this is.  If we would just open our eyes and allow him to purify our hearts that we may see!

"It is not a cheerful thought that millions of us who live in a land of Bibles, who belong to churches and labor to promote the Christian religion, may yet pass our whole life on this earth without once having thought or tried to think seriously about the being of God.  Few of us have let our hearts gaze in wonder at the I AM, the self-existent Self back of which no creature can think.  Such thoughts are too painful for us."  A. W. Tozer The Knowledge of the Holy

Craig Hauquitz