Month: February 2022

In the year King Uzziah died

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I requested my friends to give me a verse and I would assign them a week for me to study the verse and pray it over their life. This week the verse is Isaiah 6:1:

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple.

I am not sure about you, but I am not a Bible scholar. When I read this verse, I really didn’t get much from it so I needed to find out what Isaiah meant by those words. Reading scripture can often be intimidating and often confusing. I believe that the Bible is God-breathed. Yes, imperfect humans penned it, but the Spirit of God inspired the words. Since I am not a Bible scholar, I have commentaries from those who are.

Here are the words from The Tony Evans Bible Commentary. I pray they bring this verse to life and when you read it, it will remind you of this powerful lesson.

“Here we see the prophet’s life-changing vision of God’s overwhelming holiness and his call to ministry. It was a very crucial point in the history of Judah. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, and the hem of his robe filled the temple. So although Judah was experiencing turmoil at the death of its king, the true King was seated on his throne in sovereign glory. Isaiah thus learned that the kingdom of God operates according to his will, not according to outward circumstances. If you embrace this kingdom principle, it will change your life.” (page 639)

Dr. Evans continues to say; “Sometimes it takes a tragedy in our lives, or other negative circumstances, for us to truly see God. We may know him as our Savior but not be growing in a day-by-day experience of adopting his perspective of the world and living in obedience to it. In fact, that’s one reason God sometimes allows difficult situations to come into our lives. They help shift our focus off the created things and onto the Creator. Until we adjust our vision from the temporal to the eternal, we may miss out on seeing the eternal altogether. God is not merely interested in getting us to heaven. He wants us to see and experience him here. Sometimes God is most clearly seen in the midst of painful situations.” (page 640)

Studying this verse and discovering this explanation is a real-life application of what Dr. Evans is saying. It isn’t sufficient to just accept Jesus as our Savior. We are given His word in the form of the Bible as a guide for us to “experience him here”. I encourage you to not skip over verses such as Isaiah 6:1 as simply a colorful description of what Isaiah saw, but dig deeper into why it was included at all. The greatest lessons in life often require some exploration on our part. Don’t miss out on what the Lord God has to say to you in His Word today!

Thanks to Dr. Delight Yokley who gave me this verse to study. May you continue to grow in the knowledge and assurance of how precious you are to God and to us, your friends!

That Friend

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Do you know that friend that always has a major crisis going on in his or her life? Every time you talk, their ongoing struggles consume the conversation? And all you want to say is “Get over yourself. You have made it through worse situations and frankly, there are people with even more difficult struggles”. Well, what happens when “that friend” is you?

What happens when you are the one that feels like you are a burden to the people around you? You feel like a Debbie Downer because every time you talk to them or send them a text, it’s about yet another thing you are going through? Right now, I am “that friend”.

Since last June, I have been working with a Counselor on multiple traumas I have experienced throughout my life and although the work done and the Counselor himself are extraordinary, it is completely overwhelming and exhausting.  I get so lost in, not in reliving the trauma, but the years it has stolen from me. Years of anger, depression, oppression, bad decisions that have kept me from the truth and the promises I have been afraid to pursue.

There are mornings that the healing pushes me to pursue God’s truth and His promises for me; and then, there are mornings—like this morning—when it takes everything in me not to call out of work. When I finally willed myself out of bed, instead of putting on my face of fortitude, I didn’t have the energy to put anything on my face at all.  I wanted so bad to reach out to my friends to ask them to pray for me because the weight was too much to bear. I started typing the text, but quickly deleted it as I remembered that just a couple of days earlier I had requested prayer for another crisis that was weighing me down.

Instead of reaching out to my friends as I wanted to, I chose to turn on the Christian radio station to tune out the chatter in my head. As soon as I heard the first song come on, I knew the Lord had taken over the song selection and was my very own DJ. Song after song, I felt the burden that was weighing me down lift right off of me. Song after song, I was reminded that I was not alone.

I was reminded that instead of keeping me from God’s truth and His promises for me, anger and all of the emotions I have felt for 30 years were protecting me from even darker roads than the ones I had travelled. That when I fixed my eyes on Him, I had finally found everything I needed. He lifted my soul and opened up my eyes. He is rewriting my story and nothing could be better.

This healing journey I am on is a difficult one and I know there will be tons more of good and not so good days ahead. But as I listened to the playlist on the radio, I realized that my angst not to text my friends was not because they wouldn’t be encouraging; the angst was the Lord prompting me to reach out to Him. In my fear of being “that friend”, I was reminded that Jesus was the only friend I needed.