Author: Lisa Groen
Category: Devotional and prayer
Maybe you have seen those special glasses that people are giving to their color-blind friends and family of late that help the red-green color-blind folks to see reds and greens in bright vivid color. This is a perfect illustration of what it is like to become a Christian. It is right to say God gives us something comparable to real, tangible “glasses” to use for viewing the world around us. Let’s take stock of that! What was it like when you first became a Christian? Did the world become more clear to you? Did colors become more vivid to you? If we think about it—I would venture to say that seeing in color for the saved person in a real and tangible way is only a little slice of the pie of change that happens for the saved person with how we encounter the world around us once we start comparing before salvation to after salvation changes in perception. Joe is a minister friend who told me of a dream he had one time in which he was sitting at the foot of a tree trunk smashing eggs with a hammer. The next thing he knew is he was inside the tree, that was tipped over and the top was leaning towards the ground, and he was coming out of it, like he was being squeezed out of it down to the earth. When he came out, he saw everything in color. Everything was pale and black and white before he came out of the tree trunk, but everything he began to see once out of the tree was in vivid beautiful colors.
When talking with him about this dream, it seemed to be that he became born again when he was as it were “birthed out of the tree trunk” and began to see everything in color. When I thought about the eggs he was smashing, the idea of “breaking every yoke” came to mind—and that is a play on words, which I have found the Lord to use sometimes in visions and dreams he has given which I have heard related to me from other Christians. Did we or could we take stock of everything this entails for us? What are the implications truly for each of us becoming born again, and shall we not relish the changes God has wrought inside of us? Are these types of changes in perception not the very reason we sing praises to our Great God and Eternal Father of Lights?
Is not the roaming grazing and pastureland abiding with the Lord as we walk through his word, and not a walk to the inside of a rainbow of marvelous lights when we stroll through, gazingly at the word to soak in every morsel and every droplet and eat the delicacy of the finest of wheat which is saturated with the water of life itself? Take some time to relish the droplets of the water of life and soak them in deeply. Soak them in as you read the word until your constitution is changed and you begin to bubble up with praise songs for God allowing you to take in the hearty morsels of the richest of fare. They are not only hearty, but delightful, and beautifully orchestrated words of life that sing with a melody all their own! God tunes our ears as well! We can somehow see the vibrating words of the Love of Jesus melting over the very people around us and giving us a different disposition of love towards them and awakening something in our hearts that might somehow have lain dead within us prior to our being born again, and now alive toward people who may have somehow seemed unloving if we were in our pre-Christ state. Now our love can melt over them and the scent of Christ is left in our relationships when before we may have left blandness and staleness, now the aliveness of Christ is tasted, as we overcome our blandness, our previous lukewarmness, even overcoming our prior coldness as Christ leads us in our redeemed walk with him full of those discerning real life as we have been born again and made alive with Christ!
Here we get just a smidgen of the pie of the perception of being born again and see it written about in 1 Cor 2:9 which says, “but just as it is written: “Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, And which have not entered the human heart, All that God has prepared for those who love Him.” NASB
Let’s take the time to unpack this and relish in every drop of the goodness of God through his word we can discern! The downward tipping of the tree trunk shows the Lord “stooping down to make us great” or perhaps Jesus kneeling down to wash our feet. Maybe that is just what we need the Lord to do for us today—to wash our feet. And along with that, most of us could tolerate to have a few yokes broken, because as we are all aware we are at the moment on this side of heaven where the Lord is in the business of smashing yokes in whatever places we find them showing up. Just remember to take your hammer, hammer in the morning, hammer in the evening, all over this land. It’s a hammer of justice, it’s a bell of freedom, it’s a song about love between my brothers and my sisters…(circa Peter, Paul, and Mary). But seriously, Joe is a building trades worker who does remodeling, and assignments like this for a living. His business is to “swing a hammer”. My take on the dream is God wants us to “Make it OUR business to hammer away at our yokes” until we see clearly, until we see vividly, until we see colors not yet discerned by us, and until we see through the eyes of the Spirit. Make it OUR business until we are so done with sin in our lives that we want to see it crushed through the Spirit. Jesus too was a Carpenter, so through HIS WORK as he lived in the form of a man, and as He lives through us, WE, as men and women should SWING that hammer upon our sin in the natural as Jesus works in us swinging his hammer in the Spirit, making it his business to kill our sin, and us swinging our hammers along with him until the sin yokes we had in our lives are broken and gone! If our eyes have gotten blurry, we can ask the Lord to renew our vision as well! Crush our yokes, and open our eyes, Oh Lord again, I pray!!
Singer/Songwriter Steph Macleod had a similar experience as my friend Joe in that when he got saved, he went outside and saw colors he never saw before, everything went from drab grey to bright and lively, and he said he actually noticed people smiling at him for the first time that he could remember. He wrote a song about it called “Light Beams” and I share the link to it below. Hi full testimony on the writing of this song can be seen in his full-length online concert YouTube videos, (which I highly recommend, but I didn’t have time to find the specific videos– there are at least 2 or more recorded testimonies that yes make me cry). I am also sharing a link to Peter Paul, and Mary’s “If I Had A Hammer”, from the 60’s if you are part of the young crowd and have no idea what real good American folk music is like!
Prayer:
Dear Lord, there is a lot to take stock of in the act of your making us born again! You grant us power to love! Power to us to pray for the Lost for them to see! Power for the discernment of looking with the eyes of the Spirit! You are a great and mighty God Lord, Yet You have bowed down to make us great, giving us the great and invaluable gift of being born again, to be saturated with the good news and the water of life! Saturated with the joy unspeakable and full of glory! To be lifted out of the dungheap, given robes of righteousness, and our feet washed, and we have been saturated with the scent of Christ and seated along with You Oh Lord in the Heavenly Realms! What a Savior! What a salvation! OH Halleluiah! These are the riches of the finest of fares! Praise your name Dear Lord, for all you have done and shown us! Praise You for all you want to show us! Praise you for what you continue to do in us! Praise Your Name Forever, Lord, Amen!
Steph Macleod’s “Light Beams”- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IT2A4KT8IM
Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “If I had A Hammer” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxWTDcP9Y5E
Keep growing in the Word! LG
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