Stepping Stones: God Promotes You, Now What?

Transformational Thought

It’s fun watching our girls get excited about babysitting opportunities. Even more pride oozes when we hear our friends rave at how mature and skillful our girls are in these new roles. You see, authority is being delegated to them, but they then exercise good moral judgment while ruling over the kids they have responsibility for. These are 2 key characteristics God designed in us. They represent broad analogies of His own attributes. 1st, He promotes us above all creation and delegates authority to us, and 2nd, He gives us morality.

In the first characteristic, He gave Adam and Eve (and therefore all humans) authority over creation. We don’t create out of nothing as God can, but we are creative. We don’t command the nature as He does; but we understand what it is to tame animals, or bring the elements under our authority in making metals, or in cultivating crops.

In the second characteristic, God built into us a sense of right and wrong, as well as the responsibility to choose right over wrong. Consider this…we’re the only creatures who understand the concept of shame, because we’re the only creatures who understand what it is to break rules or to do the wrong thing. Birds don’t apologize; cats don’t get embarrassed; dogs don’t have law courts.

God wants you to bring creation under His authority through the exercise of your authority. Your family, your job, and your recreation, just to name a few…they’re all facets of the creation that He has entrusted to your care. We all have free will, so these aspects are yours to do with as you decide: either for His glory (which is also to your benefit, satisfaction, and growth), or not.

Every longing of your heart, every desire, impulse to act, create, manage, control, or fix is actually a reflection of the impulse to exercise the authority He has delegated to you and to exercise your sense of right and wrong.

Today, when you have impulses in these areas, submit those impulses regarding authority and morality to Him. That is, exercise self-control over each impulse and then ask, “What Would Jesus Do?” We are not animals that just instinctively react, God gave us a great mind and a sense of morality to maximize our responses, thus glorifying Him and fulfilling ourselves at the same time. Your decision, so choose well and you’ll find two things becoming increasingly true: you’ll love Him more AND suffer shame a lot less.

Prayer
Holy Father, Mighty God: In You we live, and move, and have our being. From You we receive the authority to order our lives as we please; either for our good and Your glory, or for our own glory and Your judgment. Please have mercy on us, that we may increasingly understand that the best authority is that which is exercised according to Your word, and the best morality is that which accords with Your will. This we ask, through the sacrifice of Christ, and all God’s children said, – AMEN!

The Truth
“Let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Genesis 1:26-28

Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. The LORD God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”
Genesis 2:15-17