IBOGIRLLIVING

I'm sure I've mentioned on this blog in recent past that in this season of my life, I am committed to being a woman that God can trust with anything. I know that God loves me no matter what I do but I want Him to see me as His trustworthy child and this sentiment was confirmed by Pastor Dharius Daniels a few weeks ago when he preached a sermon at Transformation Church.

The title of the sermon he preached was "I Don't Need Closure" and for many reasons that message resonated but he said something specific that as I said above confirmed and re-iterated my personal commitment to be seen as trustworthy by God. To illustrate his message, he used the Biblical character of Job whose story I'm sure we are all familiar with. The reason why his message stuck with me was because he showed how God through His trust in Job engaged Satan in what he described as Representative Warfare. I will elaborate a bit more on this in a minute.

The Bible describes Job as 'blameless, a man of complete integrity, one who feared God and stayed away from evil' (See Job 1: 1) so it comes as a shock to many I'm sure (myself included) when God allows Satan to "test" him in the ways that he does (See Job 1: 12-20).  Satan goes ahead to take everything away from Job save his life but still Job would not open his mouth to curse God. He lost one thing right on the heels of another and when Satan takes his health, it is Job's wife who he uses to say to him to "curse God and die". It is here that Pastor Dharius explains what Representative Warfare is and simply put, God trusts Job so much so that He is convinced that even if everything is stripped away from him, it would not make him stray in his commitment to God. 

Satan was not really after Job's cattle or sheep, his property, servants or children. Those were merely the things he used to try to get what he really wanted which was Job's commitment to God. ( see Job 1: 22). When his first attempt fails, he goes back to God seeking permission to attack his health. (Here we see that Satan really has no power to do anything to us without first receiving God's permission and sometimes we have to be okay with not understanding why God gives it). This was also part of Pastor Dharius' message and you can check on Transformation Church's YouTube channel for the full video.

We know how the rest of Job's story goes but in a nutshell, there is something to be said when God can trust us so absolutely that no matter what He gives Satan permission to do in order to test us, He knows our commitment to Him will never waiver. His trust in us is such that we are able to engage the enemy in representative warfare through our continued praise, prayer and faith in Him.

So again I am fully committed to becoming trustworthy to God and although I may not be at Job Status just yet, that is the goal.

Thanks for reading today! See you again soon.

XOXO

Ibogirl