Jehovah
Jirah is the Hebrew name meaning “God
is my provider.”1 Although at times, we expect Him, as the provider
of all our needs, to come through by meeting our timetable with our
expectations along with the drama and fanfare of an overdue ship sailing
into port. Not so. God does not respond to our requests to keep our
image of Him, but rather to create His image in us. The
true image of God is represented and manifested in His Son, Jesus the Christ.2
God creates in us the character of Christ when we submit to His will and draw
near to Him so that His Hands can strip away, mold, build, and shape the very
essence of our being, a child of God.
We are a vessel unto Christ,3
jars of clay and a broken one at that. For God to shape us into Christ’s
character, He wants us broken, broken in spirit,4 such that our
vessel is incapable of holding in any of our old creation. We must give up all
of our being.5 In our brokenness, we must allow the Creator to make
a new wineskin to hold the new wine—His Spirit.6 God’s Spirit is
Holy and is represented by the fruit we experience with Him dwelling in us: His
Love, His Joy, His Peace, His Perseverance, His Kindness, His Goodness, His
Faithfulness, His Gentleness, and His Temperance.7
To bring this principle to life, I
must tell you a story, although the ending is not yet complete. Like a number of you, I am a self-starter, an
initiative, motivated achiever, capable of doing anything on my own. Now, you
may be thinking, There’s pride in that statement, and your right, my
self-nature, my vessel of clay is full of pride. My very nature is to focus on what I can do,
rather than that which my Creator can do in me. However, I have a burning
passion to submit to God and draw near to Him by spending hours of a day,
sometimes a full day, praying, reading His Word, meditating on rhemas—
those scriptures that God gives special meaning and significance to me—and then
writing—writing words He inspires in me. Yet, when it comes to providing the
sustenance that keeps my body alive, I end up meddling in His affair.
Jesus describes for us what it is
like to rely on the Father for all our needs with faith that every need will be
met through Him:
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek and you will
find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he
who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man is there
among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks
for a fish, will he give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to
give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in
heaven give good things to those who ask Him!”8
My
problem, and it may be similar to yours, is that I want to make sure that I am
not given a stone. So I meddle, try to influence the outcome, not in order to
take credit, but to provide some insurance—a plan B—in case He doesn’t come
through. The very thought of this is a preposterous representation of walking
in faith. There is no faith in God when we attempt to pad the outcome so that
our expectation of the outcome will come true.
Our faith becomes a sham, and when it fails, we cry out in anger and
possibly blame Him for the ensuing mess.
God wants us to cry out to Him as we
walk in faith with Him.9 David, a hallmark of faith in God as his
provider and protector, writes in his songs to God of the numerous time he
cries out to God:
“But you, O LORD,
are a shield around me,
my glory,
and the one who lifts my head high.
I cried out to the LORD,
and he
answered me from his holy mountain."10
“O LORD, hear me
as I pray;
pay
attention to my groaning.
Listen to my cry for help, my King and my God,
for I will
never pray to anyone but you.
Listen to my voice in the morning, LORD.
Each
morning I bring my requests to you and wait expectantly.”11
God
wants our commitment to Him and our dependence on Him to be complete, without
question, with total reliance on Him.12 He is the divine vinedresser
that shapes our branches, cutting off the unfruitful behavior in order to
develop an abundant harvest of righteousness.13 For without Christ,
the True Vine of sustenance, we can do nothing to give life to our spirit.14
Christ wants you to feed your spirit
with Him. This is the message He gave the multitude that followed and pressed
on Him after He fed them all with five loaves of bread and two fish: Christ is
the Bread of Life.15 He wants us to fill our new creation, the new
wineskin He creates, with His new wine, His new covenant, represented by His
blood, His sacrifice for our sins.16 His life has to become our own.
In order to receive Him, for Christ to indwell and embody within us, we must be
made new by allowing Him to make a new vessel from the broken clay jars that we
are.17 We must cry out to God in humility, give ourselves completely
over to Him, so that He may create His image in us, the character of Christ.18
When I realized that faith is not
the waiting on the deliverance of my expectations, and when I shed the back-up
pride of “I can do, even if You don’t,” then as Isaiah proclaimed, “Then you
shall call, and the LORD will answer, you
shall cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am’”19
Praise to Our Father for the
words He has given me. ~Jeff Cambridge
Written June 18 & 23, 2004
Copyright © 2004, 2005, 2016
Stellar Rhema Ministry, Jeff Cambridge
Footnotes
All Scripture quotations unless
otherwise noted are from The Holy Bible, New King James Version,
copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982, Thomas Nelson, Inc., Publishers.
Verses marked NLT are Scripture from
the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House
Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189.
All rights reserved.
Verses marked NIV are Scripture from
the Holy Bible, New International Version®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International
Bible Society. Used by permission of
International Bible Society. “NIV” and
“New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States
Patent and Trademark office by International Bible Society.
1. Genesis 22:14
2. 2 Corinthians 4:4, Colossians 1:15, Hebrews
1:3
3. Isaiah 30:14; Jeremiah 18:1-6, 19:10-11;
Lamentations 4:2
4. Job 17:1; Psalm 31:12-13, 51:17
5. Philippians 1:19-26
6. Matthew 9:17
7. Galatians 5:22
8. Matthew 7:7-11
9. Psalm 72:12, Luke 18:1-8
10. Psalm 3:3-4 NLT
11. Psalm 5:1-2 NLT italics added
12. Philippians 3:1-11 NLT
13. John 15:1-8
14. John 15:5
15. John 6:48-51, 40:22-40
16. John 6:53-58
17. Romans 6:4-11, 2 Corinthians 5:14-17,
Ephesians 4:20-24
18. Psalm 142:6, Colossians 3:1-17
19. Isaiah 58:9
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