God speaks

This past month I've had two big struggles with God. Both of them just came to me while I was in thought and normally I would have just blown it off because I didn't want to believe that God would speak to me through my own thoughts. Instead I waited to see what else He would say to me and then via people's words and scripture I read I was constantly reminded of the thoughts I had.

The first time this happened it was dealing with software piracy and I knew God wanted me to get rid of all of my illegal software. I didn't want to do it of course. I didn't understand why that was necessary. I tried to talk myself out of it, but every time I tried I knew that if I did that I was telling God I didn't have faith in Him. After a few days I saw the scripture about if you can't be trusted with a little than how can you be trusted with much and I took that as the answer to my question of why. I ended up getting rid of it all.

The second time was dealing with the story about the woman pouring the perfume on Jesus' head. I basically heard this story more times than necessary haha. Last Friday Brandon, Chris R, Joseph, and I discussed it during our lunch meeting, Sunday morning Brandon preached on it at church, after lunch on Sunday Brad talked about it during our Bible study with Christian, Sunday night Garrett preached about it at FOCUS, and that night I just happened to read it in my Bible coincidentally. Ever since Friday when Brandon pointed out that sometimes God requires us to give extravagant gifts and that we need to be ready and willing to obey something popped into my mind. I knew of something that I strongly felt God wanted me to give to someone, because when I told them I was going to sell it to help fund upgrading my computer they freaked out and said that I should keep it and they showed me that they basically would really enjoy having something like that. Giving this gift was really tough for me. When I first thought of it I thought it was too crazy to actually be done, so I just ignored it, but the thought lingered. I couldn't get rid of it and every time I reheard that story about the woman giving the gift to Jesus it just reenforced the thought inside of me. Again I felt myself struggling between giving the item and sacrificing something in myself or keeping the item and keeping my heart from God.

It may seem frivolous to most people that it would be so hard to stop pirating software or to not be able to upgrade my computer, but if you know me well I'm sure you somewhat understand. These two things have been huge lessons in materialism for me. I know that God's plan throughout these two things was to make me less dependent on the things of this world and more dependent on Him.