Psa. 73:25 Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.
I can remember laying on the floor at the end of a morning service in our church on a Monday afternoon in September of 1994. I was enjoying this new season of God’s manifest presence when the voice of The Lord began to pose a question in my heart. “Am I enough for you?” I thought instantly, “Of course You are Lord”. But He wouldn’t stop. The question kept resounding in my heart. “Am I really enough? If there is nothing else? If you no longer have this church, if your church never grows, if some of your secret desires and prayers are never realized, am I really enough?” I finally got it. I had always connected God to my success and His many blessings but He was talking a different language. He was on another topic. For the first time I was seeing Him as the treasure, He was the answered prayer, He was the object of my desires”. This changes everything. He was the object of my joy, not what He does or provides. This is the secret of contentment Paul spoke of to the Phillipian church from his imprisonment in Rome. Here is how Joseph Caryl describes his value of God.
“What have we in heaven but God? What’s joy without God? What’s glory without God? What’s all the furniture and riches, all the delicacies, yea, all the diadems of heaven, without the God of heaven? If God should say to the saints, Here is heaven, take it amongst you, but I will withdraw myself, how would they weep over heaven itself, and make it a Baca, a valley of tears indeed. Heaven is not heaven unless we enjoy God. It is the presence of God which makes heaven: glory is but our nearest being unto God. As Mephibosheth replied, when David told him, “I have said, thou and Ziba divide the land:” “Let him take all, if he will,” saith Mephibosheth, I do not so much regard the land as I regard thy presence; “Let him take all, forasmuch as my lord the king is come again in peace to his own house,” where I may enjoy him. So if God should say to the saints, Take heaven amongst you, and withdraw himself, they would even say, Nay, let the world take heaven, if they will, if we may not have thee in heaven, heaven will but be an earth, or rather but a hell to us.”
This is the very definition of freedom. It is the worries, fears, and desires of this world that enslaves us and ultimately steals the joys it has promised us. I was tapping to a new day of freedom on the floor that glorious Monday afternoon. All of the things that had troubled me for so long lost their control over my life. I finally had the answer to the Lord’s question. Yes Lord, you are enough and much more than enough for me!!!!
3 thoughts on “AM I ENOUGH?”
ALL GODS CHILDREN SING GLORY, GLORY, HALLELUJAH, HE REIGNS… HE REIGNS…
YES LORD YOU ARE ENOUGH FOR ME TOO.
GLORY, HONOR AND PRAISE…..
GOOD MORNING PASTOR FRANK, HAVE AN AWESOME DAY IN OUR KING JESUS, WITH LOVE…
🙂
So if God should say to the saints, Take heaven amongst you, and withdraw himself, they would even say, Nay, let the world take heaven, if they will, if we may not have thee in heaven, heaven will but be an earth, or rather but a hell to us.”
Yes, heaven is not a specific location, rather where God allows us in His presence. My understanding is hell is where God chooses not to be.
I remember the day I thought, “Lord, all the physical health in the world is wasted without You.” Thanks for helping me live that conviction out for the world to see, for Your glory! \o/
I went to a “religious church & school” until I was 18. In all that time, I don’t recall ever being instructed anything like this message. It was always heaven, heaven, make sure you can go to heaven, and it was always about what I was doing right or wrong. I remember being taught about the great exchange with Jesus taking on my sins, but at the same time, the way I was to approach him was thru another man (priest) or another man (dead saint) and that God lived in a candle in the church above the left over communion hosts, and lastly if you happened to be looking for some intimacy with God,(which you didn’t really hear much about) that came in the form of a memorized prayer. Now if you have been there & done that, tell me I’m not lying. When you walk into a different church, like I did, and see and hear people worshiping God because they want God to hear them (If you are looking you can easily see the difference) you can’t help but know, the God of this universe wants a faith based relationship with us all, and we can spend the rest of our physical lives uncovering the depths of some of what that means. Who said true christianity was boring? Oh yea that was old shoe print head.