Why am I here?

Is life just a cycle of occurrences? We get up, we have breakfast, we go to work or school, we have lunch, we come home, we have tea, we clear up, we go to bed. There are many things about life that are just mundane. We can get trapped in them. We have to do them, but there is more: there is more than we could hope for. Imagine if we really understand what our purpose is on this earth. You know, this world is temporary, it is a breath in eternity, but it matters. It matters how we choose to spend our time. It matters that we understand our purpose.

You may feel that you are not sure where you fit, that you don’t know what your gifts are. There are some things you need to understand. When we become part of the family of God we get our purpose. You might say, “Well I’ve been a Christian for a long time and I still don’t know what mine is, so that’s not exactly true”. You have missed some vital Biblical truths and the sooner you can grasp these, the sooner you will step into the promises of God and find your place in this world. I believe there are three simple points that, if we can grasp them fully, will help us understand why we are here.

The first thing is that we are the salt of this earth, the light of the world. This may be a familiar verse to you, so familiar in fact, that you may have become immune to it’s power. In Matthew 5 verses 13-16, Jesus says:

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt looses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot. You are the light of the world. A town on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand and it give light to everyone in the house. In the same way let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in Heaven.”

This is what Jesus is saying to you today. The Message puts it like this:

“Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here to be salt seasoning that brings out the God-flavours of this earth. If you loose your saltiness, how will people taste godliness? You’ve lost your usefulness and will end up in the garbage. Here’s another way to put it: You’ve here to be light, bringing out the God-colours in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill. If I make you light-bearers, you don’t think I’m going to hide you under a bucket, do you? I’m putting you on a lamp stand. Now that I have put you there on a hill top, on a lamp stand-shine! Keep open house; be generous with your lives. By opening up to others, you’ll prompt people to open to up with God, this generous Father in heaven.”

This is why we are here. This world needs people who will bring out the ‘God flavours’ of this earth: people who will bring out the ‘God-colours’. Our world sees limited colour. We think we can see God-colours, but we haven’t seen anything yet. When something goes from black and white to colour we see more detail. The picture comes alive, but it can also expose more flaws. In a way our job is to expose the God colours by going to the areas of black and white and bringing life to them. This is true in our own lives too. The devil does not want us to see full colour so he is working to get rid of colour, to keep things dark. The Bible brings colour. Jesus brings colour. We bring colour, but the way our eyes see these colours in an earthly realm is nothing compared to the colour of heaven. Those colours are indescribable but we can see glimpses here if we work hard enough to find them. We can expose them in places where the devil believes we will never go. So turn your light on and let it shine, let it bring out colours that we have never seen before. We were not born to live in black and white, we were born to understand colour and to expose the beauty of it in our every day lives. Be people who make generosity something that cannot be contained. Be open with your lives and your homes.

The second thing we need to understand is that we are here to take ground. You have heard the saying, “You are here to leave a footprint”? Well imagine that everywhere you tread you have the potential to take that piece of ground for the Kingdom of heaven. Where we put our feet matters. We are in a war and our purpose is to take ground. The enemy is a thief. He has stolen ground and we need to take it back. Ephesians 6:12 says this: “ For our struggle is not against the enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

We need to recognise that in this world the devil is working. He is into degeneration and he works against regeneration which of course is what God is about. God wants to regenerate our lives, our cities and towns and the people around us. When we decide that where we put our feet matters, we will take back a bit of the power of degeneration and put back some regeneration, resurrection power. Sometimes we just go. We feed the hungry, we stand up for justice, we bring colour wherever we go, but sometimes we have to be willing to pick up our swords and fight for that piece of ground. That is why, if you read the following few verses in Ephesians, we are told to put on the full armour of God. The victory is won. We don’t need to be afraid but this stuff is real and we have to be prepared.

Sometimes we need to acknowledge as the Bible says that our battle is not with flesh and blood but with the ‘cosmic powers of darkness.’ That means that we need to fight to keep relationships good within the body of Christ. If you fall out with someone, put it right straight away because otherwise you leave an open door for the devil to get in and disturb the peace. Someone may have done something to you but the bigger issue is what the devil will do with that situation if you don’t sort it out straight away. None of us can fight this fight alone. We need the armour of God and we need each other. Today you can mend a broken relationship. ‘Sorry’ should be an easy word for us. When we say sorry, whether we are right or wrong, we take back a bit of ground. If the enemy has taken something from you, get your armour on, call on the army of God (E.g. the family of God), go together and take it back for the glory of God. Our purpose is to build the Kingdom until Jesus returns.

The third thing that we are here for is to make Jesus famous. Why do we find it so hard to tell people who He is and what He can do? It is not hard to tell someone your story because we can assume that God is already working on their story. People cannot argue with our stories. No one can say “that didn’t happen to you” because it did! Psalm 45: 17 in The Message says, “I’ll make you famous for generations; you’ll be the talk of the town for a long, long time.” What if it was Jesus who everyone was talking about? What if our stories made Him famous? What if the love we show reveals His love for all? I want to make this Psalm my mantra “I will make you famous”.

We can make Jesus famous by telling stories of His goodness but we also need to remember that we can make Jesus famous by the way we live our lives. This works both ways. If we are here to show Jesus to others it really matters how we live. We might be someone’s first introduction to Jesus and I don’t want them to look at me and say “if that is what Christianity is like then I don’t need it.” It matters. Don’t be known for being someone who is always complaining, someone who is selfish or tight, someone who does not look after our world but rather as someone who sees beauty and goodness and life at every opportunity. That doesn’t mean we won’t make mistakes; we will, but we have got to try not to. We can see miracles if we do what Jesus did and they will make him famous. Be careful that you are not trying to make yourself famous. We are nothing without the grace of God.

So how are you interpreting your faith? The way you interpret the Bible is what others see. If you are not reading your Bible you can guarantee you are not interpreting it as well as you could, because you don’t know what it says! How we interpret our faith is how others see Jesus. We don’t need to go shouting on every street corner or pressurising people into thinking how we do, we just need to lift His name higher in our lives and our households and make it our mission to make Him famous in a credible way. People know if what we say and what we do don’t match up. Work hard on your character; it matters. Colossians 3:1 in The Message says, ““So if you’re serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don’t shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ-that’s where the action is. See things from His perspective.” If you are serious about trying to be more like Jesus: act like it! It matters.

So why are we here? We are here for purpose.

We are here to:

1.    Bring out the God-flavours and God-colours of this world.

2.    Take ground and expose the work of the enemy.

3.    Make Jesus famous.

If you don’t know your purpose, there it is. Do these things first and the rest will follow. Don’t miss these truths because you may have heard these verses before. God has a plan for you beyond what you could ever dream or imagine. You are not a mistake or an accident. You are a child of God and you do not need to fear. Keep going; keep loving, and don’t give up.

Do our lives really matter? More than we will ever know.

I submit!

Do you remember in the 90s there was a real craze of wrestling? I am sure you know who the ‘Undertaker’ was or ‘Hulk Hogan’. This craze did not pass my brothers by and, most days, wrestling would be on their agenda in some form. Sometimes they would play with their figures in a ‘wrestling ring’ made probably from a shoe box and some string, and sometimes they would get Dad involved and have a ‘Royal Rumble’ in the living room! On occasions I was known to partake in these rumbles and me and my two younger brothers would wrestle my Dad, while my mum and baby brother looked on. We knew that if we clenched our fist and rubbed it on the side of Dad’s neck he would squirm and if another were to tickle him at the same time he would submit! So we would pin him to the floor shouting “Submit?” And he would say “No way!” so one of us would try the clenched fist thing and eventually he would have to say “I submit!”

There was a time in my life, I am sorry to say, that these kind of occurrences happened most days. The only way we could get Dad to submit was for all three of us to work as a team against him, but he somehow managed to get all three of us to submit in one round. After that, very often, one of us would go off in a bit of a strop because we were made to submit when we didn’t want to and we were taken out of the game!

The term “I submit!” was familiar in our house growing up but it is only now that I recognise the importance of it. I am not talking about Royal Rumbles or the act of doing an elbow drop!! I am talking about the significance of being able to submit to God. God will not necessarily pin us to the floor and say “Submit?” but He is asking us to ‘give in’, to ‘yield’ our own will to Him. James 4:7 says, ‘Submit yourselves, therefore, to God. Resist the devil and He will flee from you.’

Do you ever feel like life is one big wrestling match, that just when you think you have fought one battle another one appears? We try to resist the devil in these times and stand up to him because we have authority over him, but still battles come. Joyce Meyer says that we have to look at this verse as a whole and understand that the first part says ‘submit to God’. If we say that the enemy is under our feet but we don’t fully submit to God, he (the devil) still has a way in. I think that means that if we are not willing to submit a particular aspect of our life to God, the devil will use that as a way in and he will bring destruction with him, but if we are able to say whatever you are asking of me Lord I will do it, we are able to walk in peace and then the devil does not know what to do with us, he will flee from us.

God knows who we are: better than we do. The Bible says that He will work all things for the good of those who love Him. We have to be able to trust that He will do that. We can say, “What if He doesn’t do what I want Him to? What if he doesn’t answer my prayer in my timing?” By human nature it is difficult for us to let go of our own will but with God it is safe. He knows what is best and it will always be something that is good, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time. It can be uncomfortable but if we spend our lives always doing what we want to do we will very possibly carry with us a low level of pain all the time.

I once heard one of the pastors at my church, describe the book of James as “Exfoliation with a rasp!” Ouch! But we cannot ignore the truth in it. Chapter 4 verses 13-17 say this:

‘Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.” Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, we will live or do this or that”. As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the right things to do and fails to do it, commits sin.’

That is a challenging verse, but there it is, plain as day, if you know you are being disobedient to God you are sinning. If you know that the speed limit is 60 and you are doing 75 you commit a sin. If you know that you are allowed to park in a space for 1 hour and you leave it there all day you are committing a sin! If you know that God is asking you to give something up and your stubborn nature will not let you do it, you are committing a sin! Wow! I can be very stubborn. I find it very difficult to give in, my husband will tell you this, but I have to submit my stubborn ways to God and give Him full charge of my life.

When there is no known sin in our lives we can walk in peace. I said it earlier, but I will say it again, the devil does not know what to do with you if you have peace in your life and in order to keep that peace you have to let God rule. We loose peace when we try and do things our way. Colossians 3:15 says, ‘And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful’. The Message translation puts it like this ‘Let the peace of God keep you in tune with each other, in step with each other. None of this going off and doing your own thing. And cultivate thankfulness.’

We are in a war, the only way to win is submit to God and keep hold of His peace. That is the thing that will keep us marching forward as His great army. We need to question our movements by asking ourselves if we feel the peace of God in the decision we have made. If we don’t we mustn’t do it. We mustn’t do life on our own, it doesn’t work if we just try to do it our way. We need to be so thankful every day that we serve a God that loves us so much that if we submit everything to Him, He will bring us good things, things beyond what our hopes were.

Sometimes we might need to ask ourselves the difficult question “What will happen to my faith if I don’t get what I want?” If you are asking yourself that question please do all you can to make your answer, “I will keep going. I will keep building the kingdom and the enemy will not get a foot hold in my life.” Smith Wigglesworth, in his sermon What Wilt Thou Have me to Do? Written in October 1914 says this “If God can have His way today, the ministry of somebody will begin; it always begins as soon as you yield.’’ If you don’t know where you place is submit everything to God and your ministry will begin.

If you are stuck in a rut and you need to let go of your own will, can you say “What will you have me do Lord?” Smith Wigglesworth tells the story of a Russian man who was very much used by God and amazing manifestations of the power of God were seen around him. People asked him what his secret was and he said,

“First God called me, and His presence was so precious, that I said to God at every call I would obey Him, and I yielded and yielded and yielded, until I realised that I was simply clothed with another power altogether, and I realised that God took me, tongue, thoughts, everything, and I was not myself but it was Christ working through me?”

I know the word ‘yielded’ seems like an old fashioned term but it carries so much meaning with it. To yield means to surrender, to give over, to relinquish. It also implies the idea of producing or profiting, like a farmer would yield a good crop. If we yield ourselves to the will of God, if we give everything over to Him we will profit from it because God is good and He can be trusted. I want God to work through me more than anything. It has not been easy to come to that conclusion because it can be very hard to give up something you really want but nevertheless, here I am, saying I will yield my will to His.

God did not get me in a headlock shouting “submit?!” If we want to see the advancement of the kingdom of God, if we want God to use us in a powerful way we have to be obedient to Him and we have to submit. In fact it is not actually that hard to assume that our creator, the one who knows us better than anyone else, might actually have a plan that exceeds our expectations. The choice is ours but the outcome will always, in the long term, be good and God is to be trusted. We can walk peacefully as Jesus did, knowing that He has the victory and the enemy is under our feet.

Move

“For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “move from here to there”, and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you”.

When I was a little girl I always wondered what the point of moving a mountain was. I saw this verse very literally and believed that God could move a physical mountain to a different place if I had faith the size of a mustard seed but I never really got why he would want to. It is only as I have got older that I have realised that a mountain is a metaphor for our situations. The mountain is the problem in your life. A mountain is anything that is a barrier to you completing God's Will. A mountain is anything that is slowing down or getting in the way of your progress in the Kingdom of God.

You may find yourself daunted by your mountain. You may find yourself circling around it wishing and praying that someone would move it, but you will never find your place here. If your mountain is a hindrance to you moving into the things of God you have to GET UP and tell it to move.

I found myself at the foot of two mountains, both seemingly immovable. My husband and I felt we had done everything to try and keep going, working around them, facing them head on, fasting, praying, believing wholeheartedly that God would step in. At the time I didn’t acknowledge these problems as mountains, they were problems that we believed God could solve. We were waiting on some miracles and then one day we day we thought that we had received one. The relief I felt was immense. I cried out of relief and thankfulness and belief that God had done all that I had asked him to. A week later our dream was shattered and the miracle was not there anymore, it was a mistake. I hit the bottom but at the bottom I was reminded of the power of the resurrection and I got up again.

For the first time I saw our problems as mountains. There were two and to us they were big. We couldn’t climb them and I did not want to stand at the foot of them. I recognized that I could tap in to the power of the resurrection and I was desperate for these mountains to move. I couldn’t see clearly and I was so distracted from the will of God and who He wanted me to be that I had to do something about it.

I was reminded of the verse: “For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “move from here to there”, and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you”.

So I sat at the top of my stairs and something stirred in me and I began to whisper “Move!” God knows what our mountains are and ours felt very big to me at that moment, but nevertheless I carried on “Move!” “Move!” The thing that was stirring in me turned into something much louder than a whisper and I started to speak it out “Move!” “Move!” “In the name of Jesus move!” “Move!” Imagine the scenario, what must the neighbours have thought? But in the end I didn’t care, and an anger against the power of hell rose up in me and I screamed louder, “Move! Move! MOOOVE!” and then, after a few minutes, a peace descended on me that I can’t explain. In my minds eye, I couldn’t really see the mountain any more. It was vague and hazy, and the thing that seemed so big didn’t feel quite as big anymore. I saw that God was uprooting it. My outlook changed and I felt lighter. He was moving it and I believe that by faith I moved a mountain that day. As the days unfolded I recognized it was not there anymore.

God is moved by faith. I don’t understand why sometimes He moves mountains and other times it seems like He doesn’t. If it looks like He hasn’t think about what you can do, have you spoken to it? Have you told it to move? Do you really believe it can move or are you comfortable at the bottom of it because it provides you with an excuse as to why you are not moving forward? Some people describe the mountain in full detail to God and ask Him to move it. Maybe the reason that we are told to move the mountain is because it is us who view it in this way, we are causing the blockage between us and God with our blurred vision. I am not saying don’t pray about your problems, of course you should, but when there is a mountain it is worth telling it to move. When you do it, don’t look at the mountain, look through it to what is beyond. Look into the eyes of Jesus because He is the one who will move it. I believe He can move mountains, I have seen it, but you have to tell it.

If you don’t talk to your mountain your mountain will talk to you. It will tell you it can’t be moved: It’s too big. The mountains in my life seemed immovable and the devil kept telling me that God wasn’t going to do what I hoped for. He is a LIAR! He doesn’t know the future. The truth is he is scared that God will do exactly what we ask in faith and he loves to tell us it can’t be done, that it is impossible, that God doesn’t love us enough, that we are not worthy of a miracle, that the sin we committed isn’t really forgiven. He is a LIAR! God is the only one who knows the future but we can see glimmers of it in faith when we look beyond the mountain and we can be confident that beyond the mountain is the goodness of God. So don’t listen if your mountain talks to you, it will bring doubt and anxiety. Don’t stand there looking at it. It will overwhelm you and overtake you, but speak to it, shout at it, command it to move in Jesus’ name.

The interesting thing for me is that over a period of three or four days I went from hitting the bottom of the ocean, to tapping in to the power of the resurrection, to moving a mountain. My circumstances did not change. They still remain but the mountain, the blockage, moved. I can see more clearly now what is on the other side of the mountain, in fact most days I can see that more clearly than what is actually in front of me.

“Faith apprehends as real fact what is not revealed to the senses, it rests on that fact, acts upon it and is upheld by it in the face of all that seems to contradict it. Faith is real seeing.” (Vincent)

Faith is real seeing. Even when everything seems to contradict it we can be upheld by faith that our God is a God who moves mountains. I like the part where it says, “acts upon it!” Act as though your miracle is on it’s way. Get ready because God is moving. Make plans in faith that your mountain will not prevent you from moving forward. Make a decision to move. Get up and move!!! You do it! No-one else will move that mountain for you. You do it and keep looking to what is next.

Interestingly when our mountain has gone we have some choices to make. Are we going to let ourselves go back there? Will we keep going even though our circumstances haven’t necessarily changed? We must be obedient to Jesus. We have to learn to be obedient to Him and yield everything to him. The mountain is the blockage and when it’s gone are we able to yield our miracle? What I mean is, are we able to submit to God and say, “Whatever you want me to do I will do it, even if I don’t get what I want in the timing that I want?” He will work all things for good and He can be trusted. In his letter to the Philippians Paul writes in chapter 4 verses 11-13 “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all things through Him who gives me strength.”

Paul shows us that it is possible to be content even if our circumstances are not as we hoped they would be. We can settle and find peace if we move our mountains, the things that are a blockage between us and God, and we can move forward into His will with faith and confidence that all things are possible and that we can do ‘all things through Christ who strengthens’ us. Tell your mountain to move and then learn to be content to be in God’s will. That is where our place is and it is the best place to be. 

There He is!

Have you ever found yourself surrounded by darkness? At the bottom of the ocean or in the deepest valley and you feel that God is nowhere to be found there? It is a frightening place to be. It can feel like life is caving in on you and you don’t know how to breathe. It is in those moments, when God seems so far away, that we have to look harder to find Him. Jeremiah 29: 13 says, ‘When you search for me, you will find me’. It is very hard to muster up the strength and courage to go looking when you can’t see a way out of your trouble, or when all that seems to be around you is dark, but it is in those times that we have a choice to make and that choice will determine our future. He is there, He is closer than we think but some times we can’t feel Him.

When I was younger, my grandad died. He was a man of great faith and we prayed and prayed that God would heal him. God didn’t heal Him here on earth and when it was his time to go he knew exactly where he was going. He told my grandma that he could see angels coming to take him home and when he died he left traces of heaven in the bedroom. My grandma was there and my dad and uncle were with her. She was overcome with grief. That moment was the darkest moment of her life. She couldn’t feel God but my dad and my uncle could. In fact they tangibly encountered the presence of God in that room and they shook because of it. I tell that story because in the darkest place was God. My Grandma couldn’t feel Him but the others could. He was there, in that room. The power of the resurrection was in that room.

I want to look for a moment at the book of Jonah. When we think about Jonah, we think about a man who disobeyed God, was swallowed by a big fish, then was spat out and went to Nineveh. Sometimes we even picture scenes from the Disney film ‘Pinocchio’ and we imagine the story, as a child would, with Jonah in the belly of the fish alive and well, with his boat and his cat to keep him company. Maybe that’s just me! But this book is powerful. There is part of this story that I have missed every time and it was opened up to me by my dad.

So we find Jonah in a boat with some sailors. He is trying to flee the presence of the Lord, but God sends a storm and the sailors are frightened because they know that it is God who has caused the storm. Jonah owns up to being the problem and eventually they throw him overboard. The storm immediately stops. Then God provides a large fish to swallow Jonah and out of the belly of the fish Jonah cries out to God, saying

“I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried and you heard my voice.” Jonah 2:2.

The rest of the prayer that follows is Jonah’s psalm of thanksgiving, but if we stop here and look at what is written we find an interesting thing. It is written, ‘out of the belly of Sheol’. The term ‘Sheol’ in Hebrew means a grave or pit. It was thought by the early Hebrews to be the place where the dead gathered and was believed to be located beneath the earth, perhaps at the roots of mountains. The dead were thought to lead a conscious shadowy existence there, they were not in torment, but had neither hope nor satisfaction. Some thought they remained cut off from God. So Jonah is in great distress and ‘out of the belly of Sheol’ he cried and God heard him. You could argue that Jonah had sunk to the bottom of the sea, in fact he could’ve drowned and found himself in Sheol. If he had died this means that God provided a fish to swallow up his body and it remained dead inside the fish for three days and three nights. When God heard his cry from Sheol, He told the fish to spit him out on to dry land and in fact, after three days and nights God brought him back to life. This could well have been a resurrection.

In the darkest place we can call out to the Lord out of our distress and he will answer. He is our provider. For Jonah it was a fish, for us it is the thing that sustains us. He will bring us out of our ‘Sheol’.

Now the other interesting thing about this is that Jonah remained in the fish for three days and nights. This fact is referred to in the book of Matthew and in the book of Luke. Matthew 12:38-42 tells us that the story of Jonah is a sign. It says “For just as Jonah was for three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” Jonah was a sign to the people of Nineveh and so Jesus is a sign to this generation. He was and is greater than Jonah. He is the resurrection!

Does death have the last word? Rob Bell says in his video Resurrection:

‘Resurrection announces that God has not given up on the world because this world matters, this world that we call home, dirt and blood and sweat and skin and light and water; this world that God is redeeming and restoring and renewing. Greed and violence and abuse they are not right and they cannot last because they belong to death and death does not belong. Resurrection says that what we do with our lives matters, in this body the one that we inhabit right now. So every act of compassion matters, every work of art that celebrates the good and the true matters, every fair and honest act of business and trade, every kind word they all belong and they will all go on in God’s good world. Nothing will be forgotten, nothing will be wasted it all has it’s place. Everybody believes something, everybody believes somebody. Jesus invites us to trust resurrection; that every glimmer of good, every hint of hope, every impulse that elevates the soul is a sign, a taste and glimpse of how things actually are and how things ultimately will be. Resurrection affirms this life and the next as a seem-less reality embraced graced and saved by God. There is an unexpected, mysterious presence who meets each of us in our lowest moments, when we have no strength, when we have nothing left.’  

When we can’t find God we must look at the resurrection. We must ask him to resurrect our hope and strength from the depths of the ocean, from our Sheol. We must look to the power of the resurrection. You know the Bible says that the same power that conquered the grave lives in us! In us! We must tap into that power and get up. We have a choice: do we let the enemy take us out or do we trust the power of the resurrection?

Nobody wants the suffering. Jesus didn’t want the suffering but He knew that after three days He would be brought back to life. God is our provider. God has seen to it. When our eyes are fixed on Him, there is where we will find our source of power: this resurrection power. When we wonder where Jesus is we can be sure He is not dead in the tomb! Whenever you touch someone’s life, resurrection power is there. There He is! in the resurrection.

You can find Him in the wind, in the trees, in creation. I found Him at the beach again. I found Him whilst looking for shells with my family, whilst hearing my children shouting ‘Wow! Look at this one!” whilst looking at a piece of glass that had been smoothed out by the torment of the waves of the sea and I saw myself as that piece of glass. Broken but beautiful and smoother because I choose to let God use the stormy waves to shape me. There He is! (At the beach in winter.) There He is! (In the flowers in spring.) There He is! In the resurrection and we can never be the same again. Will you trust the power of the resurrection? Trust that it can lift you out of the grave and into life? There He is! He is on the beach.