Death was necessary for new growth!!!!

Happy New year everyone! I thank God that we all made it into the New Year by the grace and mercies of God. It promises to be a fruitful year as there is so much that God has in store for us. It is my prayer that as we draw closer and closer to Him, we begin to see the full manifestation of His wondrous works in our lives!

We have prepared our goals for the year, put plans together and are praying through them. In our excitement though, there is a tendency to look back at the previous year and it brings back all kinds of feelings. Some are good, others just make us groan in our spirit. Recently I was listening to a message by Pastor Steven Furtick entitled “I’m glad it happened”. In the message he reflected on how the year 2017 had gone and the kind of mindset that we had to carry into 2018. I was deeply moved by the message and as I listened, the story of the death and resurrection of Lazarus dropped in my spirit. This is a story that we are all familiar and it has been preached on from different perspectives. As I read and meditated on it, I began to see the passage in a whole new light which deeply impacted me.

In the book of John chapter 11, we are told the moving story of Lazarus’s death, he was the brother of Mary and Martha. These young ladies had had close fellowship with Jesus and it was Mary who had poured the expensive perfume on Jesus’s feet and wiped it with her hair. Lazarus had been sick for some days and Jesus had been summoned to pray for him, the way Jesus reacted to the situation was quite interesting:

4 But when Jesus heard about it he said, “Lazarus’s sickness will not end in death. No, it happened for the glory of God so that the Son of God will receive glory from this.” 5 So although Jesus loved Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, 6 he stayed where he was for the next two days. 7 Finally, he said to his disciples, “Let’s go back to Judea.”- John 11: 4-6

The expectation was that after saying all this, Jesus would rush out and see to Lazarus but he did not. Now it is not as though Jesus did not care but it was because he was working according to God’s timing and not the timing of the world. The truth is that Lazarus had to pass through that tough season of sickness and die because there was something deeper that God wanted to show the world. The first thing that hits me is that for every issue that you go through in life, there is a bigger picture. Unless you have the Spirit of God to reveal this bigger picture to you, you will spend your life moving in unending circles, asking questions that have already been answered.  The miracle that God was about to give Lazarus was not just for him, but it was for the world to see the wondrous hand of God at work. Another thing to note is this, there is always an area or areas our lives that we take to the Lord in prayer. We have a fixed image of how things should go and how God should move, simply because we have gotten so familiar with the move of God that we don’t expect that He would change His style. God’s ways are different from ours, His thoughts are higher than ours, so never expect Him to work your way. Mary, Martha and those around Lazarus expected Jesus to come with immediate effect and heal him the way he had been doing before. When the sisters sent the message to Jesus, they said this in John 11 verse 3:

“So the two sisters sent a message to Jesus telling him, “Lord, the one you love is very sick.”

The mindset here is that once Jesus loves Lazarus, He should just drop everything and come along because if they can’t bare the pain then that thought alone should move God. The truth is this is something we all do as we converse with God, we tell Him that if he loves us then He should just short circuit the pain and make everything better immediately! There is a lesson in your pain, so if He is slow to respond, it’s not because He does not care, in that bleak moment He needs you to understand certain things. That area of your life that you have been trying to kick start again on your own because you saw it die, it needed to die! A wound has to die so that fresh skin comes along to beautify the place again. God needed it die because for so long you have been trying to work matters on your own, and in doing that you spoilt a lot of things. It could be a relationship, marriage or even business venture that had to die so that God could kick start it again in His own way.  He is showing you that He is God and He does not need your help in mending things. He needs you to sit back and watch Him work things out. If something is dying, it’s actually out of your hands and you have no control over the situation. Mary and Martha had no way of stopping the death of Lazarus, they had placed their trust in Jesus to change the circumstance. The only thing that you can do during that period is to pray and watch God rescue the situation. The really is no other way around it!! When there is an area of your life that has died or is dying, there are people around you that will pass comments and try to make you mistrust God. The story of Lazarus is no different, look at what they said when Jesus delayed in seeing to Lazarus:

They told him, “Lord, come and see.” ³⁵ Then Jesus wept. ³⁶ The people who were standing nearby said, “See how much he loved him!” ³⁷ But some said, “This man healed a blind man. Couldn’t he have kept Lazarus from dying?”

They had failed to see the bigger picture of what God was doing so they spoke words that seem to doubt the ability and power of God. When you are going through a death season, there will be people around you who will make you feel that it’s absolutely impossible for God to work a miracle. To them there is no sign of life but don’t forget that it is God who spoke the world into existence and breathed life into the first man. God is the only one who can restore to you what you felt was absolutely lost and forlorn, man has no capacity whatsoever to do it.

According to the Jewish beliefs, it was no miracle at all if someone died and resurrected on the third day. This is what makes the arrival of Jesus on the fourth day even more unusual, as He did what most people thought was impossible.  The People proclaimed Lazarus was dead, Jesus said that he was asleep, there is a distinct difference in the way they perceived the situation. The fact that they said was he was dead, shows us how impossible and irreversible they felt the situation was. It looked absolutely hopeless! To say that something is impossible is the easiest way out because you don’t have stretch your faith anymore. In that moment you are not heeding to the spirit of God, you are conforming to the way of the world. You are not using your eyes of faith to view the situation.

Jesus spoke of the matter differently, He said that Lazarus was “asleep”, sleep is temporal and eventually you will arise from it. This is to say that the circumstance that you find yourself in will not last forever. Jesus arrived on the scene and woke Lazarus out of his slumber and things changed immediately. The way Lazarus had departed from the world was painful, but when he awoke, he was a different man. Jesus instructed that Lazarus be unwrapped from his grave clothes immediately. This is Jesus setting him free from his past chains and placing him in a new place. When Jesus walks in to turn a situation around, he brings complete deliverance and there is no trace of what your circumstance used to be! There is going to be suddenly, you won’t understand how it happened but it will happen! Don’t try and free yourself on your own, allow Jesus to intervene so that it works to perfection and strengthens your faith. Let the words that come out of your mouth speak differently from the words that men say, you are created in the image of Christ. You must think differently, walk away from the past and don’t look back again!

If God had arrives according to your time to turn things around, it would be a minor miracle to you. It would mean that matters had occurred according to your plans and not His. He is always looking for an opportunity to show off to the world, so it’s best not to get in his way. Whenever things go dark in your life and you have no logical explanation for it, just know that God is about to make a grand debut in your life. If you are in doubt, take a closer look at the life of Joseph. It will happen in a way that you not even have words to explain. God does not just want to deliver you, He wants to take you to that gloriously end that He had planned for you according to Jeremiah 29 verse 11.  When you come out of the season of death, the way matters fell apart and the way God puts you together is very different. Things were slow but when Jesus stepped in, there is an unusual speed with which things changed and words cannot describe it. We always want to know what God is doing and how he is doing so that we can make sure that it happens. In situations like that, God will take the matter out of your hands completely and make you sit down and watch Him work it out the way He deems fit. It would be in your best interest to surrender fully to Him. People have this negative notion that to surrender to God means you are weak, it’s far from that! You are simply giving it all to God, allowing Him to be totally involved because you just don’t know it all!

Whatever trying situation you were faced with, it had to happen. Death was necessary for your growth. God needed you appreciate certain areas and people in your life more, by gradually taking it away. As He took it away you began to understand why it was in your life and what you should have done to maintain it. These lessons are not meant to stir up regret but rather give you greater wisdom for the coming year! 2017 may have been a very tough year for you, certain things just died away and you tried so hard to bring it back together but it just failed again. It forced you to look at other alternatives and take decisions that you probably regret now. You cannot turn back the hands of time and change it but you can accept that all things are working for your good. God will take that situation that went haywire and work it out in His own way. He will rectify every wrong situation if only you allow Him and have faith that He will do it. Don’t allow the words of people around you make you doubt what God has said He will do. He has plan, you tried pushing it by your strength and it died, so step aside and let Him work it out the way He knows best.

My dear reader, 2017 is gone and you cannot get it back but 2018 is heavily pregnant with restoration and new seeds for growth. So whatever died in 2017 that should not have died, be assured in your spirit that it will resurrect! It can only happen when you spend time with God, praying without ceasing and meditating on His word. God will surely come through for you! He will cause new joy, peace, faith and love to spring forth again!