Dear Praying Friends,
Thank you for your commitment to pray for our prodigals and for revival in our circles. God is working and we want to be a part of that work. In preparation for the start of our men’s study this fall, I picked up the book that we hadn’t finished in the spring, Life With A Capital L - Embracing Your God-given Humanity, by Matt Heard.
It is a worthwhile read for all. He has a chapter entitled: Your Life Is Bigger Than You. In it, he highlights the wonder of God’s glory, because it is easy to become so consumed with our own life, circumstances, surroundings, and pursuits, that we forget the bigger picture.
J. R. R. Tolkien, in his classic Lord of the Rings trilogy, tells of four hobbits: Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, who knew almost nothing of the big world outside their little shire, but became central to the main theme of the story and the future of Middle-earth.
The experience of seeing the unimaginable beauties of the world outside their little homes and experiencing the horrors of battle and pain impacted them greatly. Matt says, “They were drastically different because their perspective of life had been enlarged.
Their eyes had been opened, their hearts had been impacted, and their lives had been transformed by what they now knew as the greater reality regarding the world they lived in. And their role within that reality.” They got to experience the greater story.
As we do life, we experience the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. We get to enjoy wonderful blessings and also enter into the depths of untold pain and suffering. The spectrum is wide, and can go from one side to the other in matter of moments.
From the birth of a child to the death of friend or relative, life is filled with ups and downs. If we are going to make sense of our little stories, we will need to understand the larger story. God’s story! God’s story is all about His glory.
This is the reality of the gospel. Everything about who He is and what He has done is His glory. The Hebrew word for “glory” literally means “heaviness” or “weight.” Like the little hobbits, we have been drawn into God’s greater story of glory, and somehow we have the honor of adding weight to His story. Therefore, our individual stories should revolve around the fulfillment, the enhancement, and the glory of his story.
Living life with a capital L is all about allowing our weakness to experience His strength, our smallness to embrace His greatness, and from our insufficiency to enjoy His fullness. “Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth! The LORD of hosts is with us; the of Jacob is our fortress.” Selah (Ps 46:10-11).
Pray with confidence today.
In Him,
Bryan and Rachel
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