- Jul 14, 2011
- 55
- 27
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Non-Denom
- Marital Status
- Married
I AM WHO I AM
God wanted us to know Him as “I AM WHO I AM” a name God gave to Moses for those who might ask what is our God’s name? It is I AM who sent me. This is what Moses was told to tell them. There were many gods of that day that men attribute their greatness to. These created gods became their object of worship and they gave them names to reflect man’s cause. Our God’s name that He gave to himself attributes to His own greatness without the need of men to do it.
Adam and Eve ended up suffering because in essence, like the devil and his followers, they called into question God’s Supremacy through His ability to reason, judge and set value. They turned from the only one who can give them value by removing their trust from God by doing what He ask them not to do. Adam and Eve placed their trust in their own self-importance, their own greatness.
Your value is in God. Apart from God’s value placed on you through His purpose for you, you’re a destructive work. God’s redemptive plan is to restore that value that we are so willing ready to surrender through our own ignorance being convince by the devil and a society in rebellion to do so. This is Lesson 1: There is a God and you are not it
JESUS ILLUSTRATION ON GREATNESS
Jesus used an illustration that to be great we must become as a little child. Jesus is helping us redefine greatness because the misunderstanding of it can become a stumbling block to our faith. It can twist our desire for what is right as we see happened to Adam and Eve.
Looking at this little child all they can do is trust. They are dependent on and look to you the adult for almost everything. When you are properly meeting their needs and providing proper parameters for them to live, you’re helping them understand their value. Knowing your value and feeling valuable helps take away the hunger to prove to yourself that you have worth. but that is only half of it.
This little child responds to a world in which they are subservient. A world where they are learning to be of service to others by not allowing them to grow into a life full of self-serving ways. We recognize those self-serving ways as selfishness and this can be model through us as parents/caregivers to them. Selfishness is where you believe you have a right to something for yourself with a disregard to the well-being or consideration of others. Sin is alive and well in that kind of atmosphere and so is the destruction that accompanies it.
When you grow to be of service to others, the things God puts in you and reveals to you allows God to lead you to a place of service a position the reflects God through you. You could be most gifted person but if you haven’t been loved properly and disciplined to be restrained to be helpful to others (to serve) you will struggle to find your place in God’s design for your life, your whole life. The Lord is a redeemer and though dependency on Him and obedience to Him he can make you useful. The Lord can satisfy that hunger by looking to Him to reflect value instead of having to seek others to affirm it in you. You will wear people out pursuing them for your value and they will want to get away from you because you are making ungodly demands. Most of the time those pursuing importance in this way become disillusioned with Jesus and fall away from faith in Him. They may show up for roll-call, but their desire for Jesus and what is right is replaced with hypocrisy.
States of selfishness hiding behind pride doesn’t work for those who desire to be partakers in the life of God. Jesus said, “unless you become as a little child you cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven” This life in Christ is not made for those who think they are greater than others it is made for a submissive trusting soul.
There are two roads to walk from which the scenery looks different. One road is in the service to others walked with God in which your life will find joy if you are following Him. God will bring you across others to be of service to and help by guiding you to them. The other road is different. This road you are driven to walk with others like yourself who are also trying to obtain gain from the people we were meant to serve. Then the people you come across is just a means of getting you to where you want to go and possess what you’re trying to gain. One road is to serve the other road to be served.
Being a foster parent with the few experiences I have in caring and watching little children not my own, my heart has been moved with compassion and understanding. I’m moved in how we influence these little ones to feel safe again to trust when they have been neglected or abused. Regardless of the amount of damage done to them by their parent’s sin and others which has had its work in eroding the image of God in them…even the little ones who have been greatly damage, you still find that they have some laugh in them, still have some play in them and they still have some HOPE in them.
These are little people who haven’t given up hope that someone might value them. What becomes sad in their set of circumstances is all the insecurities and fears that you see grip these little lives. They cannot even give words to express these fears that the devil and the sin of man has placed upon their souls, but we see the reality of the destructive work it does to them by the way they act.
When they grow up, they learn to mask to a degree the damage by neglect or abuse trying to maneuver in society but it’s destructive work is still their wreaking havoc in their lives. Their inability to trust because of the pain becomes the biggest hurdle.
This inability to trust keeps them from realizing their value. They feel their value is slipping away from them which now becomes a fight in them and to all who encounter them. It helps you to understand how God can have mercy on us because not all our behaviors are out of willfulness but some out of defense. Our reaction as we and others encounter people like this in their very bad behavior begins to affirm to them their diminishing sense of value, there are truly worthless. They live out their life in this war by self-preservation instead of the value God had set on them.
If you don’t feel like your worth anything, you begin not to care. Or you make your pursuit to prove you are worth something that you are great. It becomes a dog-eat-dog world to you and you must take care of yourself first, which leaves you very little time to reflect on the real God who can save you. It’s just one of the devil’s many plans to derail your life. This damage I have mentioned can start from the cradle. Only Jesus’s work in their life can save them from their path of destructiveness if they are willing not to follow the pattern of rebellion, they had been raised in.
Some people are just too wicked so you leave them to God and the devil to carry out their work, in hopes they will find an end in their madness and turn to Christ. The ones who are willing to sit with you by their own willingness, God may have their ear and may be calling them, have patience as God has had patience and mercy on you. But be the standard to them not the bridge, Jesus is the bridge to God. They need to see in you that there is another way, another place in which they need to live and that they can’t stay where they are then you have a door to share about Jesus Christ and His kingdom.
It was the innocence of child and their receptiveness in being guided that Jesus, I believe, was expressing through the image of coming to him as little child. He wants us to be of the same mind of a little child, but towards God.
GREATNESS THAT COMES FROM GOD
We want to be a people of God knowing God as He is because that understanding conforms your life to something greater. This kind of greater is something that is birth into your being by God and as your knowledge of Him grows He begins to fill the things in your life that you are part of as a result. Your life starts to become an overflow of Him of Jesus into it. It is this overflow of His greatness in your life that produces outflow of something really great. The good news is you don’t have to manufacture it. It’s from Him, through Him, to Him the scriptures say are all things. You don’t have to look for greatness God is greatness.
Isn’t that remarkable, by just knowing God and putting into practice those things you learn from Him, His power begins to transform your life into something of great worth. Isn’t that the essence of greatness, something of great worth- great value? Does this not speak to God’s supremacy consisting of His ability to reason, judge and set value? It is everything that is in God that is making you valuable. Think about the Hebrew children in Egypt they were a slave people. They were debased in their sense of value so isn’t it extraordinary when you think about the name God gave to Moses “I AM” as the name of their God. I AM everything you will ever need.
It is not your set of circumstances that dictate your value it is who you know. It is through this willingness to submit to the One who is greater than you that leaves all the unimaginable and all the unbelievable open for God to fill. Does that make your life valuable? Yes! More valuable than what you could trade it in for; the momentary claim of greatness with its limits that accompanies sin and destruction. It has been those things I look back on that have been through and by God’s power that I say, “I could not have imagined that or could have never believed that would have happened, I am most thankful for it”. These are such great treasures of His kingdom, maybe small to others but very valued by me because of the peace of God that accompanies it.
This trust in Him is the opposite of going out accumulating whatever it is for yourself to prove your value. What if your circumstances don’t permit you to get what you want? What if it does but you fail in your endeavors trying to get what you want? Or what if you lose what you had gained. Does that mean you are not worth anything? Well, the world would tell you…yes. That one lie keeps many trapped in their mind and occupied in their busyness unable to come to God.
I know one question you may have reading this. What about all the great inventions we have and all the good things that have come from people trying to pursue greatness? First, I won’t accept the premise that all things we have created or our pursuits in them have been great or good for us, but let’s look at it a little closer. When something good does come forth out of us can we truly say this gift to humanity was from me, that it came as a result of my pursuit to greatness. If you are honest, good things don’t come that way. Many times, you hear it said, “we were lucky enough to stumble on this discovery or we were fortunate to save this life, or it happen to be a coincidence”. If you really think every process out fully, when it is something good, God’s fingerprints are on it by His mercy or through His grace in some way.
The Apostle Paul in a book to Timothy said,” godliness with contentment is great gain”. Please, Please, please take some time to think about that because it is from that godly contentment that all great actions are churned out into our life and the lives of others.
Paul also said in Acts 17: 22-31 (please read) in an excerpt from a speech Paul made, “For in him (God) we live, and move, and have our being”
If that is true, doesn’t that set our value? It should give us our reason to respond to the one through whom we exist. Why would we devalue ourselves but settling on something lessor?
I would like to leave you with God’s thoughts found in the scriptures expressed through His son Jesus Christ.
Matthew 5:19
Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commands and teaches people to do so will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 18:1-5
At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”
He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.
Mark 10:42
But Jesus called them to Himself and said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. And whoever of you desires to be first shall be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.”
God does not call us to great things. God created us and calls us to know Him who is a great God. This puts anyone who is willing to believe Him, know Him and follow Him into a realm of greatness without any need for worldly accomplishments. That is greatness and then God fills our life with Himself and we do not know what will happen as He does. What we do know is the temptations of this world grows dim in the brightness of His presence and our life is change by His greatness.
THE INVITE
If you do not know Jesus, but you want to, Jesus is God. In your own words or these, Tell Him you repent from your sins, you are turning away from wrong doing. Tell Jesus you want Him to be your Lord (that means you will look to give an account to Him). And that you want Him to show you the right way to live and the way to the heart of the Father the creator of souls. That you will make every effort by the help of His Spirit and your own willful choice to seek Him to find His “will “for your life because you want to be blessed and at peace by living a life pleasing to Him.
If you believed what you just prayed, God says by His word you are accepted. You are put back into right relationship with him. Nothing you can do made this so, except accepting His offer. Now go live a life worthy of what you agree to. Never cease to ask in prayer for Him to help you maintain your relationship with Him. Your cares become His and He wants to show you how to care for things properly by depending on Him. Obtain a Bible because in it you will find the words of life that pertain to the one God in three– Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Also find the best church you can with what you have learned in from this site. I am very happy for you.
Sincerely, Mark Balicki
God wanted us to know Him as “I AM WHO I AM” a name God gave to Moses for those who might ask what is our God’s name? It is I AM who sent me. This is what Moses was told to tell them. There were many gods of that day that men attribute their greatness to. These created gods became their object of worship and they gave them names to reflect man’s cause. Our God’s name that He gave to himself attributes to His own greatness without the need of men to do it.
Adam and Eve ended up suffering because in essence, like the devil and his followers, they called into question God’s Supremacy through His ability to reason, judge and set value. They turned from the only one who can give them value by removing their trust from God by doing what He ask them not to do. Adam and Eve placed their trust in their own self-importance, their own greatness.
Your value is in God. Apart from God’s value placed on you through His purpose for you, you’re a destructive work. God’s redemptive plan is to restore that value that we are so willing ready to surrender through our own ignorance being convince by the devil and a society in rebellion to do so. This is Lesson 1: There is a God and you are not it
JESUS ILLUSTRATION ON GREATNESS
Jesus used an illustration that to be great we must become as a little child. Jesus is helping us redefine greatness because the misunderstanding of it can become a stumbling block to our faith. It can twist our desire for what is right as we see happened to Adam and Eve.
Looking at this little child all they can do is trust. They are dependent on and look to you the adult for almost everything. When you are properly meeting their needs and providing proper parameters for them to live, you’re helping them understand their value. Knowing your value and feeling valuable helps take away the hunger to prove to yourself that you have worth. but that is only half of it.
This little child responds to a world in which they are subservient. A world where they are learning to be of service to others by not allowing them to grow into a life full of self-serving ways. We recognize those self-serving ways as selfishness and this can be model through us as parents/caregivers to them. Selfishness is where you believe you have a right to something for yourself with a disregard to the well-being or consideration of others. Sin is alive and well in that kind of atmosphere and so is the destruction that accompanies it.
When you grow to be of service to others, the things God puts in you and reveals to you allows God to lead you to a place of service a position the reflects God through you. You could be most gifted person but if you haven’t been loved properly and disciplined to be restrained to be helpful to others (to serve) you will struggle to find your place in God’s design for your life, your whole life. The Lord is a redeemer and though dependency on Him and obedience to Him he can make you useful. The Lord can satisfy that hunger by looking to Him to reflect value instead of having to seek others to affirm it in you. You will wear people out pursuing them for your value and they will want to get away from you because you are making ungodly demands. Most of the time those pursuing importance in this way become disillusioned with Jesus and fall away from faith in Him. They may show up for roll-call, but their desire for Jesus and what is right is replaced with hypocrisy.
States of selfishness hiding behind pride doesn’t work for those who desire to be partakers in the life of God. Jesus said, “unless you become as a little child you cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven” This life in Christ is not made for those who think they are greater than others it is made for a submissive trusting soul.
There are two roads to walk from which the scenery looks different. One road is in the service to others walked with God in which your life will find joy if you are following Him. God will bring you across others to be of service to and help by guiding you to them. The other road is different. This road you are driven to walk with others like yourself who are also trying to obtain gain from the people we were meant to serve. Then the people you come across is just a means of getting you to where you want to go and possess what you’re trying to gain. One road is to serve the other road to be served.
Being a foster parent with the few experiences I have in caring and watching little children not my own, my heart has been moved with compassion and understanding. I’m moved in how we influence these little ones to feel safe again to trust when they have been neglected or abused. Regardless of the amount of damage done to them by their parent’s sin and others which has had its work in eroding the image of God in them…even the little ones who have been greatly damage, you still find that they have some laugh in them, still have some play in them and they still have some HOPE in them.
These are little people who haven’t given up hope that someone might value them. What becomes sad in their set of circumstances is all the insecurities and fears that you see grip these little lives. They cannot even give words to express these fears that the devil and the sin of man has placed upon their souls, but we see the reality of the destructive work it does to them by the way they act.
When they grow up, they learn to mask to a degree the damage by neglect or abuse trying to maneuver in society but it’s destructive work is still their wreaking havoc in their lives. Their inability to trust because of the pain becomes the biggest hurdle.
This inability to trust keeps them from realizing their value. They feel their value is slipping away from them which now becomes a fight in them and to all who encounter them. It helps you to understand how God can have mercy on us because not all our behaviors are out of willfulness but some out of defense. Our reaction as we and others encounter people like this in their very bad behavior begins to affirm to them their diminishing sense of value, there are truly worthless. They live out their life in this war by self-preservation instead of the value God had set on them.
If you don’t feel like your worth anything, you begin not to care. Or you make your pursuit to prove you are worth something that you are great. It becomes a dog-eat-dog world to you and you must take care of yourself first, which leaves you very little time to reflect on the real God who can save you. It’s just one of the devil’s many plans to derail your life. This damage I have mentioned can start from the cradle. Only Jesus’s work in their life can save them from their path of destructiveness if they are willing not to follow the pattern of rebellion, they had been raised in.
Some people are just too wicked so you leave them to God and the devil to carry out their work, in hopes they will find an end in their madness and turn to Christ. The ones who are willing to sit with you by their own willingness, God may have their ear and may be calling them, have patience as God has had patience and mercy on you. But be the standard to them not the bridge, Jesus is the bridge to God. They need to see in you that there is another way, another place in which they need to live and that they can’t stay where they are then you have a door to share about Jesus Christ and His kingdom.
It was the innocence of child and their receptiveness in being guided that Jesus, I believe, was expressing through the image of coming to him as little child. He wants us to be of the same mind of a little child, but towards God.
GREATNESS THAT COMES FROM GOD
We want to be a people of God knowing God as He is because that understanding conforms your life to something greater. This kind of greater is something that is birth into your being by God and as your knowledge of Him grows He begins to fill the things in your life that you are part of as a result. Your life starts to become an overflow of Him of Jesus into it. It is this overflow of His greatness in your life that produces outflow of something really great. The good news is you don’t have to manufacture it. It’s from Him, through Him, to Him the scriptures say are all things. You don’t have to look for greatness God is greatness.
Isn’t that remarkable, by just knowing God and putting into practice those things you learn from Him, His power begins to transform your life into something of great worth. Isn’t that the essence of greatness, something of great worth- great value? Does this not speak to God’s supremacy consisting of His ability to reason, judge and set value? It is everything that is in God that is making you valuable. Think about the Hebrew children in Egypt they were a slave people. They were debased in their sense of value so isn’t it extraordinary when you think about the name God gave to Moses “I AM” as the name of their God. I AM everything you will ever need.
It is not your set of circumstances that dictate your value it is who you know. It is through this willingness to submit to the One who is greater than you that leaves all the unimaginable and all the unbelievable open for God to fill. Does that make your life valuable? Yes! More valuable than what you could trade it in for; the momentary claim of greatness with its limits that accompanies sin and destruction. It has been those things I look back on that have been through and by God’s power that I say, “I could not have imagined that or could have never believed that would have happened, I am most thankful for it”. These are such great treasures of His kingdom, maybe small to others but very valued by me because of the peace of God that accompanies it.
This trust in Him is the opposite of going out accumulating whatever it is for yourself to prove your value. What if your circumstances don’t permit you to get what you want? What if it does but you fail in your endeavors trying to get what you want? Or what if you lose what you had gained. Does that mean you are not worth anything? Well, the world would tell you…yes. That one lie keeps many trapped in their mind and occupied in their busyness unable to come to God.
I know one question you may have reading this. What about all the great inventions we have and all the good things that have come from people trying to pursue greatness? First, I won’t accept the premise that all things we have created or our pursuits in them have been great or good for us, but let’s look at it a little closer. When something good does come forth out of us can we truly say this gift to humanity was from me, that it came as a result of my pursuit to greatness. If you are honest, good things don’t come that way. Many times, you hear it said, “we were lucky enough to stumble on this discovery or we were fortunate to save this life, or it happen to be a coincidence”. If you really think every process out fully, when it is something good, God’s fingerprints are on it by His mercy or through His grace in some way.
The Apostle Paul in a book to Timothy said,” godliness with contentment is great gain”. Please, Please, please take some time to think about that because it is from that godly contentment that all great actions are churned out into our life and the lives of others.
Paul also said in Acts 17: 22-31 (please read) in an excerpt from a speech Paul made, “For in him (God) we live, and move, and have our being”
If that is true, doesn’t that set our value? It should give us our reason to respond to the one through whom we exist. Why would we devalue ourselves but settling on something lessor?
I would like to leave you with God’s thoughts found in the scriptures expressed through His son Jesus Christ.
Matthew 5:19
Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commands and teaches people to do so will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 18:1-5
At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”
He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.
Mark 10:42
But Jesus called them to Himself and said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. And whoever of you desires to be first shall be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.”
God does not call us to great things. God created us and calls us to know Him who is a great God. This puts anyone who is willing to believe Him, know Him and follow Him into a realm of greatness without any need for worldly accomplishments. That is greatness and then God fills our life with Himself and we do not know what will happen as He does. What we do know is the temptations of this world grows dim in the brightness of His presence and our life is change by His greatness.
THE INVITE
If you do not know Jesus, but you want to, Jesus is God. In your own words or these, Tell Him you repent from your sins, you are turning away from wrong doing. Tell Jesus you want Him to be your Lord (that means you will look to give an account to Him). And that you want Him to show you the right way to live and the way to the heart of the Father the creator of souls. That you will make every effort by the help of His Spirit and your own willful choice to seek Him to find His “will “for your life because you want to be blessed and at peace by living a life pleasing to Him.
If you believed what you just prayed, God says by His word you are accepted. You are put back into right relationship with him. Nothing you can do made this so, except accepting His offer. Now go live a life worthy of what you agree to. Never cease to ask in prayer for Him to help you maintain your relationship with Him. Your cares become His and He wants to show you how to care for things properly by depending on Him. Obtain a Bible because in it you will find the words of life that pertain to the one God in three– Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Also find the best church you can with what you have learned in from this site. I am very happy for you.
Sincerely, Mark Balicki
