Guest Post - Words of Hope

Another week another newspaper column for Mini.   Yesterday I didn't get a chance to go out and pick up the latest newspaper so I have just read this myself!  Hope you enjoy, take a little something away from the article and enjoy a blessed weekend!

 

As I’ve mentioned before, I am challenging myself to read through the whole bible in one year. Currently I am almost done with 2 Chronicles, so I’d say I’m making pretty good progress. If you’ve read around this area of the bible, you’ll notice that Israel has got a TON of kings. I mean, most of the stories from 1 Kings to where I am right now (and who knows, it may go beyond that! I’ll see soon!) are all about how Israel got this really awesome king who either had his heart set on God or was as far from God as one could get. When you read, you notice that there are probably 4 good, solid kings who are after God with all of their hearts and do as God moves them to do. The others either are completely opposed to the idea of Israel’s God or kind of try to get into Him but don’t feel like giving their whole heart away. A noticeable trend seen is “so-and-so had his heart right with God but did not remove the high places and Asherah poles and this was detestable in the eyes of the Lord” or something like that. The first couple of times I read that I thought nothing of it. But when all of these books of the bible CONSTANTLY repeat this and every single time the king who keeps these “high places and Asherah poles” fails at what he’s doing because his heart isn’t right with God according to the bible, I noticed a great lesson to be learned.

For those of you who maybe haven’t gotten into that part of the bible or need some brushing up, the “high places and Asherah poles” are these really strange locations to worship other gods. When I noticed this trend, I started thinking about why most of these kings didn’t get around to taking these places down. I mean, if it was that important to God and could all together improve the quality of their lives, wouldn’t you think that the removal of these places would be of the upmost importance?

The reason that these kings didn’t get rid of the high places is in the name itself. High places…. They weren’t necessarily the easiest things to get to. Out of sight, out of mind, right? They thought it would be too much of a hassle to tend to these worship centers so they just never got around to it. Now does that remind you of anyone? To me, we are these kings.

The way I see it, our “high places” are parts of our lives that don’t necessarily glorify God. They might not be particularly bad, but we aren’t giving God the control. We take certain aspects of our lives that we just don’t see as important or maybe that we don’t think we can give up and we hide them in the highest places in our hearts but we expect God to make something of us. The truth is, God will never be able to make anything extraordinary out of our lives until we give him those high places. We will never be the few great kings mentioned who triumph over all by God’s hand until we realize that God deserves EVERY part of us. It’s time to get rid of the high places, friends.