The modern smartphone is a wondrous device. It would take pages to list all the things it can do, but a small list should paint the picture: it’s a camera, stopwatch, photo album, video screen, song library, GPS-enabled navigator, texting device, compass, weather report, alarm clock, address book, search engine, and voice-activated personal assistant. It’ll even let you make phone calls!
Need it to do more? It’s also a store, with access to software that lets you do anything from identify the constellations to sell your home. They aren’t kidding when they say, “There’s an app for that.”
It’s pretty impressive and, like it or not, we depend on it. So you can imagine what it felt like when my smartphone went bad. Oh, it still worked, sort of, but the reception was spotty, and it would drop calls and sometimes lock up on me altogether. I’d have to turn it off and restart it to get it working again.
I’m not a techie—I don’t know a thing about malware or spybots or viruses. I just know my smartphone was no longer as smart as I needed it to be. So I went back to where I’d bought it and talked to someone who was a techie. I told him what was happening and he took a look at the phone.
“You’re going to need a reset,” he said.
“But I’ve reset it,” I said.
“No,” he said, “you’ve rebooted it. That may help with your immediate lockup, but it doesn’t do a thing to deal with the built-up problems your phone has accumulated.”
“So what are we talking about?’
“A hard reset,” he said. “It’s also called a factory reset. It strips the phone of all the applications and settings you’ve added and everything that’s been slipped into it by hackers and restores it to the state it was in when it left the factory.”
I was still back on the “strips the phone” part. “You mean I’m going to lose all my data?” I said.
“Just what isn’t backed up,” he said. “But let me ask you, are you willing to go through life with a phone that’s this unpredictable, that’s running this badly?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, are you willing to lose a few things to get it back?”
“I guess I am,” I said. I thought it through for a minute and then said, “On second thought, I’m absolutely willing to do what it takes.”
“Then let’s do the reset. And I can guarantee you’ll like having a phone that feels brand-new again.”
He was right. I walked out of there with a phone I could get excited about.
You Are Created for Wonderful Things
You are so much more valuable than any smartphone or computer. As marvelous as they are, both pale in comparison with the riches inside your mind and heart. You were created by God for wonderful things. You are capable of love and friendship, of productivity and creativity. You can launch a career, start a family, improve the community, make this a better world. And, ultimately, you have been chosen to participate in eternal life with its Author.
But all of us get stale. All of us at one time or another find ourselves operating at less-than-peak capacity. Your mind is crammed with a lifetime of input—information and experiences—and it is important that it be not just updated but reset periodically. Romans 12:2 says, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”
Unbeknownst to you, some of the information in your mind and heart has been corrupted. You’ve misremembered and misrepresented, you’ve mislabeled and mistranslated, you’ve misapplied and mismanaged. You’ve taken shortcuts and cut corners. You’ve assigned blame and held grudges. You’ve done things you shouldn’t have and avoided things you should have done. Like the rest of us, you have not only allowed but often welcomed the imperfections that have made operating at full capacity all but impossible.
Your mind is crammed with a lifetime of input—information and experiences—and it is important that it be not just updated but reset periodically.
Nothing but a hard reset will realign and recalibrate your data so that you once again possess the ability to determine the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God. Without a reset, your judgment will remain cloudy, and you’ll find it difficult to distinguish between good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable, perfect and imperfect.
There are levels of imperfection, degrees of disconnectedness from God. Maybe you’re just not as productive as you should be. Or maybe your life is in complete disarray.
So many people go through this life seemingly empty, devoid of passion and purpose. It’s not that those things don’t exist within them. It’s just that sometimes they need to be reignited. So many men and women feel that they’re simply bystanders, sitting on the sidelines, passively watching the action on the court. Maybe you’ve fouled out, maybe you’ve been injured. Perhaps you’ve taken too many elbows or maybe you’ve just given up.
Moving from that place to where you can begin to fulfill your God-given assignments is going to require a reset. In fact, you may already feel the Spirit tugging at you, telling you that’s exactly what you need.
Making It Personal
Look inside. The process of reset begins with feeling that tug, hearing that call. So, ask yourself: Do you need to reset your marriage? Your career? Your finances? Your friendships? Do you need to reset your focus? Where else in your life might you need to reset—to shake off the mistakes of the past and get back in the game?
It is not God’s will for you to be on the sidelines, bruised and battered. Yes, you may have been through tough times. You may have had more than your share of pain and heartache. But it’s how you react to such situations that is key. Remaining a victim, wallowing in self-pity, succumbing to apathy—these are not solutions. They lead nowhere.
I don’t want to minimize what you’ve been through, but there is a time for crying and a time for action. Tears and sweat are a lot alike. Both are comprised of water and salt. But while tears will earn you sympathy, sweat will earn you success. When you reset your way of thinking about life, you will see results. Getting reset will get the bugs and viruses out of your relationships, your job, and your finances. It can rejuvenate every aspect of your being.
It is not God’s will for you to be on the sidelines, bruised and battered.
Reset is not easy, but it is often necessary, and the key, once we recognize the need, is willingness. So ask yourself, Am I willing to lose things I might regard as precious in order to gain even more?
Life is about choices. Each of us will face that moment when the choice is to reset or stay where we are, and the decisions we make now will affect the rest of our lives. We reviewed some of the situations that give us trouble in the first chapter—school, job, relationships—and the question now becomes, Do I have the courage to step out from the shadows of those situations and into the light of reset?
But what about that great fear that a hard reset will cause you to lose data—in the form of people, places, and things you cling to? That’s why there are backups. If you reset to align more fully with God, he will have your back. Rest assured that all essential knowledge is backed up in storage with God. Everything you need will be accessible. The information that is truly lost needed to be erased from your hard drive to allow you to run more efficiently and rapidly. That is the point of a reset. Most likely, the lost data contributed to your data corruption and to the overload that led to your need for a reset in the first place.
Am I willing to lose things I might regard as precious in order to gain even more?
I could have chosen to live with a subpar phone. After all, I would have still had a phone. I simply would have had to accept that its capacity was greatly diminished, that I would not be able to utilize all the functions it was capable of performing. And to this day it still would be dropping important calls.
What about you? Are you content to operate at less than capacity? Or are you willing to reset? Let’s look at two examples set for us in the Old Testament—Esther, who answered the call to reset in the face of pressure that would have dissuaded many of us, and Hosea, who exemplifies God’s love even for those of us for whom reset is a halting process, and who demonstrates the riches available for us in relationship with him.
Esther’s Choice: For Such a Time as This
“Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”
—ESTHER 4:14
The choice to reset is yours. No one can make it for you. But the consequences are never solitary. They affect not only you as an individual but also all those who are connected to you. In few places is this clearer than in the book of Esther.
Esther was an orphan raised by her cousin, Mordecai. They were the descendants of Jews carried away by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, generations earlier. They lived in Shushan, the capital city of the Persian Empire, which stretched from India to Ethiopia. The king was looking for a new queen, and beautiful young women were brought to the palace from throughout the kingdom. Among them was Esther, whom the Bible describes as “lovely and beautiful.” Each of these young women was prepared for a year, and Esther was the favorite of the man readying them for presentation to the king.
The choice to reset is yours. No one can make it for you. But the consequences are never solitary.
Throughout, Esther concealed her Jewish background, as Mordecai had instructed her. Meanwhile, Mordecai paced and fretted in front of the court. He need not have worried. The king, says Esther 2:17, “loved Esther more than all the other women, and she obtained grace and favor in his sight more than all the virgins.” He made her his queen and “made a great feast, the Feast of Esther” (v. 18).
Meanwhile, Mordecai learned about a plot by two door-keepers to kill the king, and he told Esther, who “informed the king in Mordecai’s name” (v. 22). The plot was confirmed, and both men were hanged.
Not long afterward, Mordecai refused to bow down and pay homage to a prince whom the king had promoted above all others. Haman, the prince, was furious. He told the king that because the Jews had their own laws “and they do not keep the king’s laws” (3:8), they should be destroyed. The king agreed, decreeing that every Jew in the kingdom be killed and all their possessions taken.
Mordecai was inconsolable, and when Esther reached out to him, he asked that she intercede with the king. Esther told him that no one, not even the queen, went before the king without being summoned, at the risk of death. But Mordecai said,
“Do not think in your heart that you will escape in the king’s palace any more than all the other Jews. For if you remain completely silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father’s house will perish. Yet who knows whether you have come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” (4:13–14)
Think of all that had just been dropped in Esther’s lap! She was a young Jewish woman thrown into a courtly world, trained to think, speak, and act like the queen of a great empire. And yet she had hidden her true nature from all of those in the court, the way many hide their Christianity when they are with people they think might make fun of it or treat its adherents as somehow lesser. Now she faced a huge decision. She had position, ease, and comfort. Remaining silent would ensure her safety. And yet the plea of the cousin who had raised her, the cries of her people, and the voice of God all stirred within her. Listening to that stirring and speaking out could well cost Esther not just her position but her life. Such might be the price of the reset she was being called toward.
In that moment she weighed not just the potential price but the potential gain. She knew too that she had to prepare herself, and she enlisted the aid of the entire community whose fate she might well hold in her hand. “Go,” she said, in a message sent to Mordecai, “gather all the Jews who are present in Shushan, and fast for me; neither eat nor drink for three days, night or day. My maids and I will fast likewise. And so I will go to the king, which is against the law; and if I perish, I perish!” (4:16).
We must be prepared for reset, and Esther is a great example of the lengths sometimes necessary to be fully ready. Few people take preparation as seriously as she did, and the reason is clear—she knew the consequences she faced going in.
There is so much more to learn from Esther’s example. She knew enough to tap in to the strength of her community and her God. Few things can ensure successful reset as working in partnership with those who have gone before. By the simple act of telling a friend, pastor, or Christian colleague that your aim is to renew your spirit, your commitment will assure that there is additional strength, wisdom, and experience to draw from.
We must be prepared for reset, and Esther is a great example of the lengths sometimes necessary to be fully ready.
Esther’s diligence helped prepare her mentally and spiritually for her task, and when she made herself visible to the king, “she found favor in his sight” (5:2). He offered her whatever she wished, up to half the kingdom.
It’s important to note that Esther didn’t simply make her plea. She knew the king’s character, what might sway him and what would not, and she knew better than to rush. She asked that the king invite the prince to a banquet she prepared. At that banquet, she requested that both attend a second banquet the following night. The delay was part of God’s timing. The prince, who was sure that he would benefit from Esther’s pending request, saw Mordecai standing in the king’s gate, and he was filled with hatred for him. With his family, he decided to prepare gallows to hang him.
During the night, while the king was unable to sleep, he was reminded of Mordecai’s great service to him, and he asked what honor had been shown to him. When he learned that no honor had been shown to Mordecai, the king asked Haman, “What shall be done for the man whom the king delights to honor?” (6:6).
Haman, filled with hubris, believed he was the honoree, and he described lavish honors he fully expected to be bestowed upon himself. When the king instead told him to provide those honors to Mordecai, Haman was doubly distraught. Then, at the banquet, Esther exposed the fact that she was among those to be killed in Haman’s plot, and the king had Haman hanged on the very gallows meant for Mordecai. The queen received his house and appointed Mordecai to oversee it. It was then that she implored the king to spare all of her people from Haman’s plot, and he granted her request and gave the Jews the power to defend and avenge themselves.
To this day, Esther’s example is still alive. Her reset and the saving of the kingdom’s Jews are commemorated in the holiday of Purim. But is it alive in your own heart?
What about the example you set? You may not get to affect the lives of so many people, but you are no less important in your own way. If you are in need of reset and decline it, what about the younger brother or sister who sees that you have drifted from the Christian life you once embraced so strongly? What about those in the neighborhood who see one more promising young person heading in the wrong direction? What about the friends and family members who look to you as an example?
Your reset can change the lives of all the people who see your rededication, who benefit from the good that emanates from a life that has been rekindled and repurposed.
Your reset can change the lives of all the people who see your rededication.
No one can make the decision to reset for you, but countless people can benefit if reset is what you choose. That is the power of relationship, and Hosea is a textbook case in the art of relationship with God.
Hosea: The Choice to Love
Ours is no cold, distant deity. Ours is not the God of the Deists, who set the universe in motion like a watchmaker but has no day-to-day involvement with it. Since the very beginning of time, God’s desire has been to be in relationship with his creation. God did everything he could to make certain that man knew just how much he loved him. Even though man quickly disappointed God through disobedience, God has been steadfastly proving that he loves us—in spite of ourselves. We have the ever-present choice to enter into, sustain, and renew a relationship with him.
In experiencing God’s love, we come to realize something very important. Love is never defined by the one who is loved. It is defined by the lover. The one loved does not possess the capacity to understand the depth of the lover’s love. Consequently, the lover must love the loved one until he or she learns how to love the lover back.
The truth of the matter is that God loved me first, and it took me a while to learn how to reciprocate as best I could. To understand that, we need look no further than the fact that if you find yourself in a season of rebellion, in a season of doing whatever you’re led to do in your carnality, God is saying to you that he really wants a relationship with you. Even if you’re choosing the path of death, he is offering life. While you choose chaos, he offers reset. While the Enemy desires to kill, steal, and destroy, we know that God came in Christ that we might have life and have it more abundantly.
Love is never defined by the one who is loved. It is defined by the lover.
God is calling you out of the madness. God is calling you to the quality of life that he has designed for you from the very beginning. He really wants this to work.
Hosea and Gomer
Perhaps no better example exists of the kind of love God is offering than that found as we unpack the life of the minor prophet Hosea. Hosea prophesied during a period of extreme moral decline, when people had turned to their idols and mixed them in with their worship of the one true God. Even the priests had turned away from what God had called them to do. And yet God continued to prove his steadfast love in the midst of their rebellion and disobedience. He did so through Hosea, using the prophet’s own life to dramatize the reality of God’s love of his people.
God told Hosea, “Go take yourself a wife of harlotry and children of harlotry, for the land has committed great harlotry by departing from the LORD” (Hosea 1:2). It was as if God sent his prophet to the red-light district to seek a wife.
Her name was Gomer. And Hosea, this anointed man with the word of God on his lips, saw the woman God had sent to him to marry. Picture the ancient version of stiletto heels, fishnet stockings, and a miniskirt. She was wearing too much lipstick and a gaudy wig, and she was walking from one car to the next, from trick to trick.
God told the prophet, “That’s the one I want to be your wife.”
Hosea, maintaining his honor and dignity as best he could, had to stand up and proclaim, “Gomer, God has sent me to be your husband.” Think about the men standing around, some of whom had no doubt been with her, making fun of him, saying, “You can’t be talking about her!” But Hosea was on assignment from God, and he was there to take her as his bride and prove that he really loved her.
You can picture it: They married, and Hosea took Gomer home, cleaned her up, and gave her something good to eat. The first few days were wonderful, but then late one night, those streets started calling her name again. Gomer slipped back into her miniskirt and fishnets and went back out into the red-light district.
Hosea woke in the middle of the night and discovered her missing. He got up and went down to the red-light district wearing a sandwich board that said, “If anybody sees my Gomer, tell her I’ll be right here waiting on her. Tell her I love her.”
By this time, the guys on the street corner were joined by passersby, shopkeepers, cops—everybody. Word had spread. People knew Hosea and Gomer, and they knew the score. They walked by Hosea and laughed. “You’ve lost your mind,” they said. “She’s back on the streets. She’ll never love you like you love her.” But yet he said, “Tell her that I’ll be right here when she finally decides to come home.”
Hosea waited for her night after night until finally, early one morning, she stumbled in. She had one broken-heeled shoe in her hand, and she was bloody and battered. What did Hosea do? He welcomed her and loved on her again. He made her some breakfast and told her, “I want you to know that no matter what you’ve done during the night, I still love you. I’m still committed to this relationship.”
Tell Them How Much I Love Them
I know that you may be shaking your head. You can’t begin to comprehend spending a night as Hosea did, much less years. You’re saying, “There’s no way I could be like him.” That may well be true. Only a few of us really have the capacity to be Hosea, to love like that. But all of us have been Gomer. We are all wicked by nature. We have done what we wanted to do. We all have run from God.
The good news is that God doesn’t give up on us—even when we have given up on ourselves. Hosea’s relationship with Gomer is a picture of God’s relationship with Israel and his relationship with us. Its message is that God really wants this relationship to work. He knows that, as with Gomer, there will come a day when you get sick and tired of being sick and tired. You will come to realize where your real help comes from, and you’ll choose to fall into the arms of someone who really loves you rather than into the hands of those who continuously abuse you.
“Tell them,” said God to Hosea, “just how much I love them. Show them with your life.” Through Hosea, he pleaded with his people, who were just like Gomer, to return.
The good news is that God doesn’t give up on us—even when we have given up on ourselves.
Here is an authentic call back to relationship with God. The world has robbed you. The world has hurt you. The world has mishandled you. The world did not understand you. But God wants relationship with you. God is calling us to turn back to him.
The idea of repentance is really saying, “God, I’ve gone too far. I’m ready to turn around and get my life back together.” That is the essence of reset. Israel recognized that the punishment they were experiencing was the result of not being what God wanted them to be. It is up to us to recognize that we are in need of authentic relationship with God and to seek that relationship.
It is not simply a matter of going to church. There are some people who attend just because they’ve been told it’s the right thing to do. There are others who come because a family member is pressuring them, and still others who come out of form and fashion. What we are seeking instead is an organic, authentic relationship with God, the kind where you wake up in the morning saying, “This is the day the LORD has made. [I] will rejoice and be glad in it” (Ps. 118:24). It is a relationship in which you give God glory, no matter where you are, where nobody has to force you to come to church, and nobody has to force you to talk about how much you love God because when you think about what God has done in your life, you can’t keep it to yourself.
That is what reset gives us—a real relationship with God.
You want a relationship that is not a hobby, not a plaything. You want one that is real, through and through. That is what reset gives us—a real relationship with God. And once we return, God has promised healing. Your disobedience has torn you, but he will heal you. Your sin has caused you to be smitten, but he will bind you.
Pain and Healing
It’s worth taking a closer look at the pain that can lead us to reset. The kind of pain experienced by Gomer was no doubt severe, for no one can live in rebellion and long escape its lasting effect. But there is a duality in all of our pain. Much of it is caused by evil. We acquiesce to temptation toward the things that cause pain and suffer the consequences.
We understand that pain, for we know we participated in it and we know we deserved it. Still, its lingering effects can cause bitterness and hardness in our spirits. We are wounded by unhealthy relationships, and we struggle with the anger that grows out of the pain, but the reality is that God says, “It doesn’t matter what happened to you. I can still bind you up. I can take away the pain. I can heal a broken heart. I can repair a jaded mind.” Whatever it is, God can make it right.
God sometimes allows you to be hurt by people or situations where you are not at fault. How is that possible? you think. Why would God allow pain to come my way? Many of us simply get angry at God and turn against him in moments like that. But that pain, like the pain that grows out of our rebellious actions, is in reality a gift from God. He is saying, in essence, “I am doing this in order to help you.” Just as it takes pain to teach us to avoid hot stoves and other causes of physical injury, it takes pain to teach us the limits of behavior, people, or situations that can hurt us mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It is there to push us away from danger. That is the positive side of pain.
At times God acts like a skilled surgeon who realizes that some healing will never take place unless a cut is made. A knife in a skilled surgeon’s hand is sometimes the only thing standing between a patient and death. The surgeon’s object is not to hurt the patient, although he knows you will experience pain, but to heal. Without that cut, the cancer, the infection, the damaged organ would never be treated.
That is what God is doing with you. He knows the cut he is making hurts you, but he knows it is the gateway to healing and wholeness. And God, as the ultimate skilled surgeon, can stitch you together again so that when you heal, there will be no scars. “Come, and let us return to the LORD; for He has torn, but He will heal us; He has stricken, but He will bind us up” (Hosea 6:1).
Think of the times when God had to cut you and your reaction was, “Lord, it just isn’t fair.” But now, when you look back over your life, you thank God for the surgery since it took things out of you that were not good for you. Some of you would still be in unhealthy relationships if God had not performed that surgery, and in many cases God healed you without scars. So many of us now can say, “That stuff I was crying over ten years ago I’m laughing at today.”
God, as the ultimate skilled surgeon, can stitch you together again so that when you heal, there will be no scars.
But, being human, we often rush right into another bad relationship, another unproductive situation. When God uses a fresh cut, renewed pain, to get us out, we’re again crying the night away. That’s the time to remember what has happened before, to realize that this is something you’ll get through. You will get over the pain, and maybe this time you’ll learn the lesson he wants you to learn.
Divine Resuscitation
This lesson of divine resuscitation appears many times in the Bible. Deuteronomy 32:39 says, “Now see that I, even I, am He, and there is no God besides Me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal.” Jeremiah 30:17 says, “For I will restore health to you and heal you of your wounds.” God is saying, “And when I get through healing you, I’m going to position you for revival.” And that is in essence what reset is—a revival for one.
God even lays out the process. After Hosea 6:1, in which he promises healing, we read, “After two days He will revive us” (v. 2). It’s important that we understand the continuity. God provides space between the incision and the next move. He is telling us not to move too quickly. Give God time to heal you. Don’t bounce, as so many do, from one thing to the next. That was Gomer’s problem as well. You keep bouncing from one car to the next, from one smile to the next, from one relationship to the next. Give yourself time to heal before God’s next move.
After two days He will revive us;
On the third day He will raise us up,
That we may live in His sight. (v. 2)
God is getting ready to take you through the process of resuscitation. As sure as Lazarus rose from the dead, you can rise from where you are. Whatever is dead in your life—marriage, friendships, job, money, morale—is about to experience a revival that’s going to bring spiritual life back into you. You may have lost the pep in your step. You may have lost the passion that brings dreams to fruition in your life. You may have lost your desire for the things of God. But God promises spiritual CPR, divine resuscitation—a word that means “to raise up again,” although we use it to mean “to bring around,” to bring back from unconsciousness to consciousness. CPR is the process of getting your heart beating and getting the breath of life into your lungs. That is the power of reset.
When God made Adam, Adam was not a living being until God blew his breath into him. The Hebrew word for “breath” and for “spirit” is ruach, a word whose very pronunciation pushes air from your lips. That whoosh, that ruach, is what God breathed into Adam. It is the very breath that Jesus gave up on the cross when his spirit returned to the Father in heaven. It is the breath, the wind that came from the corners of the earth in Ezekiel 37, over the dried, disjointed bones in the desert, to cause them to stand up like a mighty army. And it is the same breath that God’s Spirit breathes into you.
Get Up!
God is ready to speak, to breathe, to blow over everything that is dead in your life. He is about to whoosh all over your situation! He’s about to whoosh over your marriage, your career, your schoolwork. He is about to send a fresh wind over your home and your family. Ask the Lord to breathe over every aspect of your life, and he will.
It’s one thing to be resuscitated. It’s another to get up. And Ephesians 2:4–6 says,
But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
[God] is about to send a fresh wind over your home and your family.
When we make the decision to repent and turn from our wicked ways, God quickens us and raises us up together to sit with our elder brother, Christ Jesus.
Getting up, in a sense this profound—for this is, after all, coming to life after spiritual death—means a completely new countenance. No longer will you wallow in a dead place around dead people. You will be radiating life. “Stop looking like you’re dead,” God is saying. “Look alive! I am changing your posture, your position. Stop making excuses as to why you must stay down. Get up!”
Get up out of that place of craziness. Get out of that place of abuse. Get out of that place of exploitation. Get up and be who God has called you to be. Live in such a way that those who wrote you off as dead will have to take back everything.
God offers faithfulness and promises restoration. Gomer represents Israel. Israel represents us. God says, “Come on back home. I love you. I’ve been standing here waiting on you. I saw you out there doing what you were doing, but come on back. I’m going to love you even when I ought to leave you alone. When you get sick and tired of being sick and tired, I’ll be right here loving on you, waiting on you to come back home. I’m going to clean you up. I’m going to give you position. I’m going to remind you of who you are and I’m going to heal you of all your wounds, all the stuff that happened to you when you were out there, all the pain. I am going to raise you up to a level where people won’t even know it’s you.”
Rain and Revelation
Let’s keep going. In this part of Hosea, God is saying, “I’m getting ready to reset you in a way that’s about to blow your mind.”
Hosea 6:3 says,
Let us know,
Let us pursue the knowledge of the LORD.
His going forth is established as the morning;
He will come to us like the rain,
Like the latter and former rain to the earth.
There is a distinction between information about God and revelation about God. Information is cognitive. It’s what you read in a book. It’s based on your intellect. Revelation is based on your spirit and your experiences. I know people with plenty of book sense who have no common sense. I know people who are intellectually brilliant but spiritually dim, who have no idea how God is moving in this season. That’s something you can’t find in a textbook. When God is moving in your life, it isn’t your intellect that responds. When you get a revelation of God, it is not based on information but on what you’ve been through. When you’ve seen God preserve you and keep you from losing your mind, when God has kept you together while everything around you is falling apart, you recognize that it’s revelation, something that lives within. It’s revelation that gives me a breakthrough when I should have had a breakdown.
God is saying, “I’m getting ready to reset you in a way that’s about to blow your mind.”
Revelation, when you feel it and when you live it, will make sense to you, but it may not make sense to the people around you. The other courtiers in the court of the Persian king could not know what Esther knew. Hosea could not expect those around him to understand his love for Gomer. But whether or not other people get it, it is important for you to get it, and to hold on to it. God is about to reset you, but you cannot look for others to understand. It is something you understand in faith and through experience.
God’s providence, his movement in us and through us, is as established as morning. When you, as Gomer, look over your life, ask yourself: Has there ever been a day you’ve been alive that morning has not come? And if the morning comes, doesn’t it come with the promise of a new beginning, a second chance, a third chance, a fourth or a fifth? It doesn’t matter how long and dark and painful the night was, Gomer, or what you did in the dark. “Weeping may endure for a night,” says Psalm 30:5, “but joy comes in the morning.”
Gomer, someone exploited you. Someone told you what to do. But it’s time to say good-bye to everyone and everything that exploited you. It’s time to let Jesus love you. It’s time to give God glory for healing you without scars, for cleaning you up and straightening you out. He has filled you and he is about to take you into another dimension. There is more to come, whether it has to do with your marriage, your relationships, your friendships, your job, your money, or your health. Tell the doubters that you have gotten your revelation, that it is inside you and more real than any book knowledge.
God is about to turn this thing around. Don’t wait until the battle is won. Lift your hands and praise him.
Jesus, My Choice
If, like Gomer, you have been delivered from evil, I am calling you to show it! If you’re going to be for God, act like it! If you’re going to be for God, walk like it! If you’re going to be for God, talk like it! Say:
• I’m choosing faith over fear.
• I’m choosing worship over worry.
• I’m choosing love over loneliness.
• I’m choosing grace over guilt.
• I’m choosing peace over possessions.
• I’m choosing praise over pouting.
• I’m choosing goodness over gloom.
• I’m choosing mercy over misery.
• I’m choosing salvation over sin.
• I’m choosing heaven over hell.
REFLECTIONS
• What stands in your way as a Christian?
• What missions might God have in store for you as he calls you to reset?
• Who are the role models in your life, people you might call on as you reset?
• Are you ready to celebrate your reset, to demonstrate the life you've reentered?