Are we willing to change?

Jeremiah 17:10 "I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings."

Since I've trying to study for some time today without any success I decided to write some things that just won't get out of my mind these days.

I've been thinking a lot lately about "being tried". Well, I know a lot of people (including me, of course) that seems to be always with the same problem... some have healthy problems, others emotional problems, a lot financial problems, and so on... and the thing I've been observing these days is how people that have those kind of constant "trials" on their lives react to it.

I guess we could even categorize the way people deal with "trials":

1 - There are those people that say: "Oh God, why are You doing this to me?", I'd call them the "poor me" people. They usually complain all the time, they are always expecting something bad to happen again just after a problem goes away, they always blame someone else, some blame God, some blame the enemy, some blame situations that happened on the past, whatever excuse they can find to find a reason for their situation... "Oh, the enemy is trying to destroy my life, that's why I never have a relationship that last more than 2 moths", "Oh, I never have money because the world is not fair."...

2 - Another category is of the people who says: "It's just a trial, I will just wait for it to pass and them everything will be good again". These are what I would call "lazy optimistic", those people that pass their lives sitting and waiting for something to get better, then things get better, they enjoy some moments and the "trial" comes again, so they sit and wait for it to pass... "Of course it will pass, I'm praying and my God will give me the victory"...

Well, I could spend hours here categorizing people and their reactions to the "trials", but at the end what really matters is not the different reactions people have, but their lack of action. What do I mean? I mean that if it's a trial you need to be approved, otherwise you'll have to take the test again, how many times it takes till you pass, because God is trying to change our character so we can be the way He wants us to be.

What I normally see are people complaining they don't have money (I talk about this because it's the thing I see the most, I'm Brazilian, few people there never had money problems), then they start praying so that God may bless them (of course, nobody wants not to have money even to eat), but even before they start praying they already spend the money they believe God is going to give them, and them when the money arrives they are already without any money. Of course I believe God can bless people with money, God can whatever He wants, it's obvious, He's God, but what people forget is that He is also our father, and that He wants us to be the way He made us to be, so He has to teach us, but most of the times we think we learned something and just go back to act exactly the way we did before...

So, what I'm learning these days is that when I'm passing through some "trial" in my life I need to act. Of course the enemy wants to destroy our lives, he came for that, but if you've been saved by the blood of Christ the enemy can't touch you; it's obvious that things we did on the past have consequences, but they don't define our lives, once we've accepted Christ our sin was erased, God is not punishing you because of your sin, Jesus already died for that, and He raised again, defeating forever the enemy; to pray is one of the better things we can do in this life, it brings us closer to God, it makes us understand God, I'd say it almost defines our relationship with Him, and I'm one of the persons that can really say that God hear our prayers and He even move mountains to answer our requests, but you can't pray and not listen to God's answer, it's easy to ask God to give us something, but it's not always easy to ask Him to show us what we need to change in order to have that thing we want, it's not easy to ask God to show us what we have to do to get what we need, it's not always easy to ask God to change us so that we won't keep making the same mistakes.

The point of this long wondering is that we need to put our lives in the Potter's Hands and let Him work on us, being available to do what He wants us to, paying attention to what He is telling us to do, and most important, doing it.




"The Potter's Hands" by Hillsong

God bless you all!