Friday, August 8, 2008

God At Work: A Wondrous Thing!

As I look back to my beginning with my husband and then fast forward to our life now, I am amazed at the work that God has done in us through the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit. By His grace He brought the gospel to us and made it alive in our hearts. We had met in high school, got pregnant outside of marriage, and got married during my senior year in school. We fought and had strife regularly because we were both living out of our own sense of what was good and right and true. However when God did His work in our hearts, He also brought a new preacher into our church who taught God’s word as true and authoritative. So right from the beginning of our salvation, we were pointed consistently back to the path of righteousness and following Christ. Our compass was guided by the Holy Spirit and always pointing us back to Jesus! We already had our first son Aidan and were pregnant with our second son Aaron. Then we were given such grace by God as to be taught how He wanted us to raise our boys even while they were still babies. Our pastor and his wife were teaching us from the pulpit and their lives how to “train up your children in the way they should go.” So the Holy Spirit directed us back to His Word time and again in all aspects of our child rearing as well as our own personal lives. He taught us how the gospel is needful every day for both us and our children. We were reminded to love Jesus because He loves us and to tell our kids about the love of Jesus, too!

We have had some struggles and hard times in our life but God has always been with us, drawing us back unto Him and His word… drawing us closer to Jesus through His Holy Spirit. He helps us to see who Jesus is and gives us the strength and desire to walk with Him more and more each year. I guess the thing that I always see is that, in one way or another, God is constantly at work in us! I have hope that He will finish His work in us because He’s never taken a day off from working on us yet! It reinforces God’s promise that He will never leave us or forsake us as well as the promise that He will finish the good work that He began in us, in Christ Jesus!

Now I see His work in a new generation of believers. About two years ago, my middle son Aaron made a profession of faith. After observing his life and (as best as we can tell) seeing Jesus at work in Him, he shared his testimony of God’s saving work in his life and his daddy baptized him at our church one Sunday. Now (within 3 months of each other), my oldest son Aidan and my youngest son Austin have made a profession of faith. We have suspected that God had done a work in them for awhile, but not wanting to push them hastily into a false profession of faith, we waited (and prayed!) continuing to call them to trust in the finished work of Jesus on the cross. Well, they have and I am glad to hear their testimony, which is really the story of God at work! They will both be baptized on this coming Sunday by their daddy.

I am excited to see how God works! It is wondrous to me that He has had this amazing plan of salvation since before the foundations of the world, and He has planned for His people to participate in that plan through the preaching of the gospel…. His good news! It’s amazing to me that God would take a former blasphemer who practiced all sorts of wickedness like me and change me through His power and for His glory into His mouthpiece for sharing the gospel with my very own little blaspheming wretches… whom He calls to be His mouthpiece to other wretches! Only God would be able to think of something so different and impossible and be able to make it work! Salvation is truly a work of God from start to finish! I am filled with excitement and wonder as so many thoughts of God and His works rattle around in my head. All I can say is Wow! God really is awesome and I can see this most in the work of Christ and the good news of the gospel!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am enjoying watching what God is doing in and through your family. Praise the Lord! I am really looking forward to hearing the boys' testimonies.