My brother in law is a wise man. He has been gifted with the awesome ability to speak so the common man can understand him. He is not an uneducated man. He graduated from the Naval Academy and has gone on to get extensive biblical training. He is one of the most well educated men about the Bible that I know. Yet, when he opens his mouth to speak about what The Lord has taught him you cannot help but hang on his every word. He has a southern twang from being raised from in Nebo, North Carlolina and it is interesting just hearing him talk at all. This past Sunday was the first time that I really have heard him speak. I attended my parents church and he taught in a Sunday School class I attended. The entire time he spoke the entire class was hanging on his every word. What he preached was something I already knew but had never heard it applied like he did. He told us that his father and grandfather had the awesome ability to take things in nature and make them apply to biblical principles. Wow! He told me later that he grew up believing that this is how most people were. I am lucky to have a father-in-law who has the same gift. It is not that common at all. Michael has that gift, too.
He taught that class on the idea of grafting fruit trees. He told us that when you take a branch and graft it to a root, that the seed produced will always be what the root is. You can graft a red delicious apple branch onto a crab apple root and the seed produced from the red delicious apple will be a crab apple seed. In fact, that is the most common root. If you take an apple seed from the apples you buy in the grocery store and plant it, it most likely will produce a crab apple tree. Amazing. I guess I had never thought about it. You can take a pear branch and graft it and you will still get a crab apple seed. He told us that as Christians we will always produce seeds to the root we are grafted in. If we are grafted into Christ then we should produce the fruit of Christ. That fruit is love, joy, peace, patience and so on. It was like a light bulb went on over peoples heads all over the room. I heard a lot of "oh's". He asked us point blank what kind of fruit we were producing. He also talked about pruning too and how that applies to the Christian life.
He also talked about how we should not see our children grafted into our branch but into the vine or the root. I need to be pointing them to the root, Christ and not have them believe that there is anything that I, as their mother, can do that will save them. It is a personal decision between them and God.
There was one other thing he talked about that I have been thinking about since then. He was talking about how God called him to the mission field. He told how God had been working on his heart for a year or two and how he finally decided that he did not want his children to see him, as a father, tell God no. He knew that if he told God no, then when God called Isaiah and Abbey that they would say no just like he had. That really struck a chord with me. I have told God no many times and I am seeing the results of that in my children. The Lord has been working on my heart about some things and I have just kept pushing those thoughts away thinking up every excuse to not do what The Lord is telling me to do. This whole mission conference has convinced me that I can no longer tell God no. THere are some things that I need to be patient about as our family is not in a place to accomplish some of the things that I feel led to do. I know though that The Lord is preparing my heart and the hearts of those in my family. There are many things though that I can be doing. Is it scary? Yes. It requires me to get out of comfort zone. It requires me putting myself out there to be ridiculed and confronted.
I told my kids in the car on the way home from church the other day that I do not want to get up to heaven and stand before God and have him say, yes, I did things for His name but I was supposed to do so much more. I want to take the gifts that God has given me and use them for His glory and honor. I am so thankful for all The Lord has done for me and I want to spend my life serving Him. I want my children to look back at their mother's life and remember me as a woman who did not tell God no.
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