The Missing Link
Part 3: The Past
In order for people of God to succeed, we must do things His way. This is a very simple statement, but it is a monumentally great truth, and most people have a very challenging time wrapping their heads around it. Humanity took its lead about how to increase and expand from cues and clues that God dropped in their minds and hearts from the very beginning. To make sure we continually followed His directions and instructions, He gave us His Word as a roadmap for life; and not just any life, but God’s Word is a roadmap for living life in the Spirit! This is why we were created. We were predestined by God to be His children, to have His seed within us, and to take on His nature and walk in it every day.
Humans don’t create stuff, we copy stuff. Everything that we attempt to accomplish comes from a pattern that God has already set, and everything we produce uses something that God created long ago and loaned to us. We need to get a grip on this because understanding it is necessary to have a heart of faith, humility, and gratitude, and these attributes are extremely important to God. We are all followers, and through His grace, God has given us the ability to choose who we will serve. The earth experience doesn’t allow for ambiguity when it comes to choosing who we will serve. We will either serve God and follow Jesus Christ, or we will serve the world and follow whatever the devil cooks up. Again, not choosing who we will worship is not an option. A failure to choose God is a choice for the other side. This is a big chunk of meat to swallow, but it’s the truth, and if our aim is to walk in truth, we must hear and digest it first.
Most of us are taught to believe that we can direct our own lives just fine, and we don’t need any spiritual help. If this were true, we could fix the problems and issues of the world, and we would have done it long ago. In truth, we are far from perfect, we make tons of mistakes, and we desperately need God’s help to live successful lives. We only need to go back to the very beginning and look at Brother Adam and Sister Eve to see this. God created a perfect paradise with unimaginable beauty, and then after creating Adam and Eve, put them in the midst of this epic paradise. They couldn’t make it rain, give it a ground and soil, or make the sunshine every day for the plants. The only thing they needed to do was rest in God’s creation and take care of what He’d given them. They were to be excellent managers of excellent blessings. But this wasn’t the way they ended up seeing things.
They were tricked into giving the devil their authority and dominion, and they fell for it. They fell for it because they doubted that God had given them all they needed but thought there was more to be gained. They didn’t want to be under God’s sovereignty and chose to separate themselves from it. They turned from the light, and this darkness in their behavior unleashed darkness in the earth. At one time, the planet’s beauty was sheer perfection, but like Adam and Eve, we have taken this beautiful planet for granted. We’ve not been the good stewards of it that God called us to be. The world’s condition is evidence that science, religion, doctors, lawyers, government, or politicians cannot solve its problems. Only God can. He has a plan, and it is the greatest unimaginable honor to partner with Him to help His plan move forward in the earth.
From the very beginning, God created us to work in partnership with Him, and He has already done the heavy lifting. We should never look at our lives as God fitting into them, but rather us fitting into Him. He made space for us. We were in His thought process long before we entered our mother’s womb. Ephesians 2:10(NLT) says, “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.” Through Jesus Christ, God has made us a part of Him. His Spirit lives inside our body temples. We are followers of Jesus Christ; he’s the head and we’re the body. Acts 17:28 tells us that it is in Christ that you and I live, move, and have our being.
Heavenly Father is continually teaching us to move in Christ, and one of the greatest spiritual lessons we are to learn is that of gratitude. It is necessary for our success as believers, because we cannot maintain blessings if we fail to be thankful for them. We saw this from the very beginning with the tremendous losses and the blessings that Adam and Eve let slip through their hands. The past is important to our successful journeys forward because of three very important reasons, 1) God demands that we have genuine thankfulness for the finished work of Christ through his sacrifice and resurrection; 2) He demands that we remember and acknowledge how He has blessed and preserved those before us; 3) and as a demonstration of our humility, we must acknowledge the sin that has been passed down from generation to generation and to the extent that we can, we must atone for this sin.
It is entirely possible that no one in your bloodline has viewed themselves as a conduit to honor God through Jesus Christ in this way, but our Heavenly Father deserves the highest honor that we can give Him. And if no one in your family has expressed the supreme level of gratitude as well as the most authentic and genuine sorrow for sins committed against His Word and Will, you may be the one to do it. To receive Heavenly Father’s permission to bring your bloodline before His throne and to repent on their behalf may be a pivotal piece of your life’s puzzle and the fulfillment of a key part of your purpose. Pray about it, and if the Spirit says so, continue to study with us and learn more about how understanding the past is pivotal to the missing link assignment from God.■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
“The Past” written by FMack for Springfield Fellowship © 2020. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.