Source and Reward

A couple of years ago, i heard the Lord say into my heart "if you will let me be your source and your reward, nothing on earth can touch you." This statement from God to me has changed much about my outlook on life. As I obey God in this, I am finding strength to move forward in what He is calling me to. This idea, the God wanted to be my source AND my reward was very new for me. I had lived the vast majority of my life in an opposite mode.


Genesis 15:1 After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, saying, “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your exceedingly great reward.”


Since I was a little kid, i had lived on the responses of people. Positive responses and negative responses. Up until I was 27, I was my primary source, and what I achieved, and the recognition of those achievements by people around me, were my primary reward. Even though I believed Jesus had paid the price for my sins from the time I was small, it never occurred to me that I could make life decisions by asking God what He wanted me to do, and then wait for an answer. I had a saving relationship with Jesus...but not a living relationship with Him.


Jesus is really faithful, and in His faithfulness, He released me to my own leadership for a season. He let me be my own source of leadership long enough to see how disastrous the path I was choosing really was. Even though when I was 27 I had my dream job, a cool car, a pretty wife, a cute house, and a decent retirement started...on one day I found out how tragically unstable my little facade of a life really was. One gorgeous Saturday afternoon in early summer, I came home from windsurfing (my obsession at the time) to a wife who told me that we were pregnant with our fist son, and that she was leaving me. She was unwilling to raise a baby with such a self-centered individual as me. My initial reaction was anger. "How could she do this to me?!"..."what would everyone think?!" Although I didn't see it at the time, my reaction proved her point with great emphasis!


Over the next few weeks, God showed me that this tragic point in my life was slowly reached, choice by choice, by me trusting in my own leadership. About a month later, sitting on the front steps of my house on another gorgeous summer day, i verbally gave leadership of my life to God. My wife hated me by this point, and all of my attempts to manipulate her into forgiving me and returning to normal were making things worse. I told God whatever He wanted to do was ok with me, whether it was save my marriage or let it end, and that i would do whatever i thought He was telling me to do. In His mercy, He quickly told me "just love her, no matter how she feels about you. This is what you promised me you would do on your wedding day. Just keep your promise."


That day I started to do just that. I stopped withholding love when she didn't do what I wanted her to, and being nicer when she agreed with me. Essentially, I stopped trying to manipulate her into agreeing with me. For a while, this made her really angry, because she was convinced I wasn't sincere. After a few months, she saw i meant it, and her heart softened. By the time Noah was born, about 8 months later, our marriage was actually on a solid foundation for the first time since we had gotten married. It was no longer resting on me as the source, but had started to rest on God. I had finally learned to start making Him my source. Honestly, our marriage has only gotten better since that hard adjustment in 1998.


Learning to make God my reward has taken MUCH longer. Because of insecurities caused by making myself my source since I was a little kid, I would rely on promptings from other people...validation from others...to get confidence in the value of my life. As long as I could find someone to tell me "you are smart," then I could believe I was smart. If I could find someone to regularly tell me "you are handsome," I could believe I was handsome...and so on. I learned to let other people define me, and I learned to hang out with people that defined me in a way that I liked. For most of my first 27 years, as I was steadily walking down a road leading to tragedy and failure, I was always able to "feel" successful, since I was letting those around me reward me with compliments for what I let them see....as long as I demonstrated my wit, or my humor, or a nice car, or solid job performance, i could keep being defined as successful. This is exactly what my enemy had planned for me, and I was quite agreeable to his plan. As long as I relied on people to define me, satan had an excellent mechanism to drive me to failure, or worst case for Him, to keep me in line. My opinion, and the opinions of other people were my reward for a job well done.


Once I started making God my source, conflicts started to arise between my source and my reward. God would reveal truth to me in His words to me that the reward system I had in place really didn't value much. I grew in secret with God, but most of the people I knew didn't know much about what was taking place inside. This kept my life with God "in check" because I had to work at balance to keep it comfortable for me, and for others.


I started to develop two Tom's: social Tom and real Tom. Social Tom was willing to be real Tom in situations that "validated "real Tom, like when hanging out with other people who loved Jesus....but if it looked risky, social Tom stayed on the outside. As long as I was moderately...comfortably...americanly...Christian, this system worked fine. All the Christians I knew were good at being worshipers on Sunday and "normal" the rest of the week. Comfortable was lukewarm. Enough Jesus to feel Christian, enough world to feel normal:


Revelation 3:15-16 “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth.


A couple of years ago, everything changed for me. I found out a small piece of information that had eluded me for 38 years: Jesus had an amazing plan for my life that actually required a "wholehearted" response. I found out that there was a ton of exciting, fulfilling, and fascinating stuff Jesus had for me to do, but He was only willing to unfold it to the extent that I was willing to seek it. The measure I was willing to give Him of my life, was the measure He was willing to move in. Because of His commitment to love...because of free will...If I would give Him a partial response in my life, I would limit Him to giving me a small taste of what He had designed me for...If I could learn to give Him everything, He would let me experience the full measure of what He had designed me for. This turned my life upside down and inside out. I realized that for most of my life, I was spiritually bored. I never would have admitted it...who would say God was boring with their lips...but I was really going through the motions in a lot of ways. When I gave God some more of my life to work with, I found out God's design for my life was way more fascinating than my balance. This inside out transformation killed the other Tom, and just left real Tom alive. What a glorious death it has been!


What I have learned is that fearing people...making their validation of my life more important than God's...was a clever trap the enemy used to keep me quiet...to keep me in line...to keep me from my full inheritance. If satan couldn't keep me out of God's family, his next best plan was to keep me quiet. God fiercely desires to give me everything He has planned, but He won't force me into it. Satan hates God, and wants to keep me from Him. When rebellion, pride, or anger won't work, satan will give fear of people and fear of losing comfort a shot.


Over the last couple of years, God has been training me to look to Him for validation. "What do you think, Father, of what I said?" "What do YOU think, Father, of what I did." "How do you see my life, God?" This frees me to flow in His plan without fear. If God is my source AND my reward, nothing on earth can stop me from getting all that is in His heart for me. If God's opinion is the most important one to me, then I will give Him everything! Whether I live in it now, or wait for later, on one day God's evaluation of my life will be the only one that matters. I want to step into eternity now and not wait until I die. This is freedom. This is real life!


No one has the legal right to define me but the One who made me. I set me heart to not give to others what only belongs to God!

Proverbs 1:7 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, But fools despise wisdom and instruction.