Dr. Miranda: God’s Journeys

I am standing up here, letting the Lord be the one who directs my thoughts. I have a few things here to back me up, just in case, but I have been saying, “Lord, what is the next idea You want me to share with my brothers and sisters?” And here in my mind I have an image of the journey, God’s journeys and God’s processes. We have a God of journeys and processes, and that is what I am going to try to share with you here. May the Lord speak through these minutes.

When you enter the ways of the Lord and conceive the desire to serve the Lord in some way in your life, to be used by God, and you begin developing your gift, God gives you a ticket for a journey. It is not merely a physical journey, but above all a spiritual journey, and it is a journey within yourself, into the unexplored territory inside you. You are a world; you are a universe. You have a limited, concrete body, but God has created you in such a way that you are also a galaxy; you are a precious world. Your mind, your spirit, your emotions, your ideas, your thoughts, your will, your experiences—all those things make you a dimension that one can enter, travel through, explore, and discover things in.

So when God calls us, He calls us to begin a journey with Him, and that journey takes place in time and often in space, as with our brother who came from Guatemala to Mérida, Mexico, and it also takes place within him, as he discovers things he did not understand about himself and adds other things to his person. And that is what happens with each one of us when God calls us to service, when God calls us to the Christian life. He tells us, “Come, get on board with Me, and let’s take a journey. The next years of your life are going to be a journey. Fasten your seat belt, order yourself a little coffee, look out the window, and try to enjoy the journey as much as you can. Sometimes you are going to pass through some stormy places and the plane is going to shake, but do not worry; I am going to take you to the other shore, to the other place. Do not grow impatient, do not become anxious, do not despair. I am with you, and that boat is not going to sink because I am in it.”

And so you have to conceive of the rest of your life and the rest of your spiritual journey in that way: as a journey with you and God together in a vessel, heading toward a land to which God wants to take you. And everything that happens on that journey will have a purpose, a reason, a meaning, something to learn, and nothing will be wasted. Everything you see, everything that happens to you, everything you experience—God will make sure that you benefit from it. There will be a memorable photograph of that moment that you will later be able to revisit, look at, and share with your grandchildren or your disciples, because the Lord will make sure that nothing is wasted. It is like those sisters who have that turkey there: they make their turkey, season it, and begin pulling off every bit of meat, and nothing is wasted. Not even the little bit of fat is wasted, because there is someone who likes that fat. And when only the bones are left, they take the bones, cut them up, and make soup. Yes or no? And when the bone has already given everything it had, they take it, make a statue out of the bone, and hang it on a wall so they can still get some benefit out of what remains.

And that is how God is with all the events of our lives. When we enter into God’s journey, God will make sure that nothing is wasted and that everything brings some blessing, some growth, some lesson—something that will be a blessing to someone. It is training, and that is why the Word of the Lord says—and why we can understand what Romans 8 says—that for those who love God, that is, those who are called by Him, what does it say? All things work together for good. That is what it means: God has called you, God has commissioned you, He has sent you on a journey with Him along for the journey, and then He says, “Do not worry, because everything that happens to you will have meaning, purpose, a reason for being, benefit, and value.” Wow!

Look, even I, the one telling you this, do not completely believe it. Because if I believed it, I would never become anxious or worried or anything, because I would know that everything that happens to me does so because God has allowed it or designed it that way. Then I could be at peace and would not be afraid, but my brain and my biology continually betray me. And my mind rebels against what my spirit knows, and that is why I become anxious, but in my spirit I know that it is so. Listen, though, how difficult it is to believe that when the Indians are shooting arrows at you, you are in the middle of the circle with the wagons all around, and the cavalry does not arrive in time to rescue you. And you say, “Well, perhaps there is an exception somewhere, and I am the exception.” When financial straits come, or ministry struggles, or times of eagerness and barrenness, or marital problems, or the rebellious child, or the illness that will not go away, how important it is in those moments for us to say, “I am still in the vessel, God is still with me, and the vessel is not going to sink. God did not call me onto this journey to fail. This vessel is not going to sink; it is not going to crash against the precipice, because God has said, ‘For He will command His angels concerning you, to guard you in all your ways; they will carry you in their hands, so that your foot will not strike a stone. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, because You will be with me.’” The journey—even if the journey passes through a valley where there are monsters, and in the darkness I can see only their phosphorescent eyes, filled with hatred toward me—I will feel my Father’s hand telling me, “Do not worry. I want you to pass through this jungle because I want you to learn not to fear the monsters and to know that your Father is more powerful than the monsters.”

Do you know that sometimes God lets the devil look us directly in the eyes so that we will learn not to be afraid of him and learn that our God is more powerful than Satan? Not long ago, I was in my office counseling a woman who had just come to the church a few weeks earlier; she had been with us for two or three months. She was a special woman—lovely, sweet, well-behaved, educated—and we were talking about her life, about how she felt spiritual oppression, about her past, and about all sorts of things. I led her to confess certain things that...... because I felt there was demonic oppression in her life, and we began to talk. I already have a process through which I guide people when these things occur, and then I said, “Now, sister, we are going to pray,” after going through renouncing and confessing and everything else. She closed her eyes for a moment, and we began to rebuke, and in an instant the air grew dense. She opened her eyes, and what was looking at me was not the woman I had with me one second earlier. It was a sinister being that looked through me and looked inside me, and my entire being filled with fear—I confess it—because you know what it is like to be sitting here and have this person whom you thought you knew now look at you, and it is another person whom you have before you. And it looked at me with that arrogant smile, and I felt fear and tried to conceal it as much as possible, and it said to me, “You are afraid of me, aren’t you?” And I had to collect myself and remember who was there with me: that it was not only her and me, but also the Holy Spirit whom I had invoked and God’s angels, before beginning the session. I collected myself, rebuked it, and declared the authority of Christ. We became locked in struggle, as so often happens in these situations, for about 45 or 50 minutes, while different demons came out, displaying different levels of arrogance, understanding, lucidity, and all sorts of things. But in the end, the last demon had to leave, and that woman was left completely free, saying, “I can even see the colors; I see differently.” I have heard so many times of people who are set free seeing life as if it were new, like newborns. But when the enemy looks at you and pierces through you with that gaze, if you let it, it freezes you inside, because it is a gaze that knows who you are. It knows that you are simply a fragile and sinful creature, and it wants to frighten you with that and fill you with guilt and fear. But you have to know that God is with you and that He who is with us is more powerful than he who is in the world. Yet sometimes God allows us to look at the enemy and allows the enemy to brush against us, and the serpent to open its mouth so that we see its venom-filled teeth, so that we will learn not to fear it and will know that our God is more powerful.

So that is why God sometimes allows adversities, difficulties, failures, and mistakes to come into our lives along the journey, because that is part of the training and part of what God wants to show us. And that is why we must not be afraid to undertake the journey. We cannot be afraid to launch out into the water, undertake new things, try to do things we have never done before, test our wings at an altitude where we are not accustomed to testing them, take new risks, and experiment with new ministries and new ways of doing things, because that pleases the Father. The Father is infinitely creative, and He likes it when we are creative too, inventing new things and experimenting. He loves that game, and He sits with us on the floor and says, “Go ahead; I like what you are doing.” Because God is a God of processes, and He loves them more than the results. He loves the journey more than the destination. How interesting! But we are often thinking more about the destination than the journey, and God says, “I already know what the destination is. What interests Me is the journey: looking out the window and seeing things, and watching you, My creature, interact with the world and with the experiences that I allow to come into your life, and seeing what you draw from those experiences.” That is what God likes, because God is infinitely creative.

There is nothing left that you can teach Him. God is entertained by our games and our funny little ideas, just as a father is entertained by a baby’s amusing antics when the baby says a new word, gets into mischief, or does something different; he delights in it and bursts into laughter because his child surprised him with something new. And that is what the Father likes. The father does not want the child to be born after nine months of pregnancy and then, overnight, already be a great big fellow with a full beard or hair on his chest, or whatever. The father wants to see his child grow from a baby to an infant, to an adolescent, to a young adult, to an adult, and sometimes even to see him there in old age. That is what the father likes: the play, the delight of interacting with his creature and watching it develop into..... Why is it that women often want to have a baby? It is because they want the joy of seeing that creature, conceiving it in their womb, and then interacting with it through all its stages, feeling that they are part of that life, feeling that they too are a creator of that life, and finding fulfillment through their interaction with that creature. Yes or no? That is what fulfills the mother, and the father too.

And it is the same with our Father. Our Father is immensely interested in and delighted by what happens on the journey when we get on board with Him. And He wants to have experiences together with us, and that is why we must not fear the journey, but must enter the vessel confidently, because He who began the good work will be faithful, and is faithful, to complete it.

On God’s sea there are very few shipwrecks, and the shipwrecks are those of people who stopped trusting in Him because they took Him out of the boat. But those who kept Him in the boat never suffered shipwreck and never will, because while He is in the boat, the vessel cannot be shipwrecked. That is why we have the story of when the Lord sends the disciples on one of those journeys found in Scripture and tells them, “Get into the boat and cross to the other shore, where I will meet you.” Do you remember that passage? Look, once the Lord had given them the command to travel to the other shore and told them that He would meet them there, there was already an implicit promise that they would arrive. Because He would not have told them, “Go to the other shore,” if it were not going to happen, because He knows everything. Therefore, if He had known that they were not going to make it, He would not have told them, “Go to the other shore.”

When God sends you, His very command, His very order, is already a guarantee of success. Because God never sends you to do something without committing Himself to bringing you to a successful conclusion, if you follow the manual of faith. But what happened on the journey? The disciples encountered something they did not expect, and the sea became stormy, and the Bible says that they spent the whole night rowing in the middle of the sea—which I visited just recently, when I was in Israel—and it is interesting because the Gospel says that He was praying in a high place, in one of the versions of that event, from which He could see them. And it is interesting because when I recently went to the Galilee area, if you look at the Sea of Galilee, which is an immense lake, there are mountains and hills around it precisely where a person, if standing there, even though the sea is quite..... they do not call it a sea, but it is a large lake.... it is not so large that you cannot see across it; there are places from which you can see almost two-thirds of the lake, and so it is just as the text suggests. That is why the Bible is so real, isn't it? I mean, there are places like that from which you can see everything. And the Bible says that the Lord was there praying and watched His disciples row all night because the current was against them; a storm broke out, and He remained there praying and watching them. And I imagine that if the camera now moves from Jesus watching the disciples to the disciples inside the boat, it is a cut like in those movies..... isn't it? There is Jesus praying, completely calm, quiet, silent, peaceful, and suddenly the camera cuts and there is the noise of the storm, the disciples shouting: we are going to sink, bail out the water, this and that, and a tremendous racket..... and the Lord there watching them. And they are not aware that the Lord can see them from His height. They are not aware that the Son is there praying, perhaps interceding for them. And that the Son also knows that in a moment He is going to come down from that mountain, step onto the water, and walk toward them. And that He is not going to allow them to sink in the boat. And that He has allowed that storm to break out because He has a purpose in it. And when He begins to walk on the water and they begin to see Him, He was giving them a tremendously important lesson that they were going to need as founders of the universal Church of Jesus Christ. And it was this: He wanted to show them that He is Lord of the storms, that He is Lord of nature, that He is Lord of the force of gravity, that He is Lord of all the laws of the universe, and that He is above any stormy situation that any of His children may go through. And that He is always watching them from on high, and that His eyes never turn away from those who love and serve Him. And when He came walking on the water, He was giving them an eminently visual and graphic lesson that would be engraved upon their hearts for the rest of their lives. That Christ who walks on the sea and does something that is totally inconceivable to the human brain, and when He gets into the boat, He speaks a word to the storm: Be still, and in an instant the sea clears, the wind grows silent, the waves become gentle, and there is total calm, because the Lord is the Lord of nature and the Lord of the storms.

That time of panic and terror that they experienced, those hours that were probably around two or three in the morning, according to the account. They spent some four or six hours at sea, struggling against the storm. And I imagine that those six hours must have felt like an eternity to them, and while they were inside that storm, inside that bubble of panic and terror and uncertainty and helplessness, God was working in them to shape their character, shape their attitude, shape their ministerial mindset, shape their understanding of who Jesus is, because the Lord is concerned that we know who He truly is. That He is not simply a prophet or a very powerful person, or a great thinker or a highly developed spirit; He is the Son of God, God Himself, the way, the truth, and the life.

And that is why at one point He asks His disciples: Who do men say that I am? And some say that You are John the Baptist, others say that You are Elijah, this and that. And He says: well, and who do you say that I am? Because until we resolve that issue—who Christ is to me and how I conceive of Jesus in my life, His role, His involvement in my life, His detailed watch over every event in my life, His control over all the events of my life—until I am thoroughly imbued with the idea that He truly does control every aspect of my life, He will do everything possible to teach me that this is who He is. And He will take me through different experiences so that I may know Him in His totality—not in His totality, because we will never fully know Him—but at least in what relates to me, what He wants me to know about Him: His mercy, His love, His power, His justice, His holiness, His grace, His creativity, His wisdom. These are elements that He wants us to know, and that is why He is continually exposing us, in different ways, to different aspects of His personality, as when one takes a statue and moves it around to different places or looks at it from different angles in order to see it in its entirety, because we can never see it through 360 degrees.

In this way the Lord is continually teaching us different facets of His being and of His relationship with us through experiences that can only be gained on the journey. And sometimes those experiences will be experiences of failure, betrayal, sins, ignorance, illness, financial crises, marital problems, problems with our children, so many different things, because remember what I was saying: the journey takes place both outside and inside, so that we may not only know Him, but also know ourselves. And that is why God sends us on journeys: so that we may know Him and so that we may know ourselves. Because the man who does not know himself, the woman who does not know herself, will have problems in service and ministry. God needs you to know yourself, with all your wrinkles and warts and all your virtues as well. He needs you not to deceive yourself and to know who you are, because when a person knows himself, he knows what to guard against, and he also knows what he is capable of, and he has no illusions about himself; he does not become excessively proud, but neither does he heap dirt upon his own head, because he knows what he is and knows what God has given him, and he does not become proud because of it, and he knows that everything comes from God and that when he does not behave properly, God will take it away if He has to.

Look at the Apostle Paul; he was a man who knew himself very well. Paul did not suffer from low self-esteem, folks, let me tell you. Paul sometimes even sounds a little proud and very self-assured, but he was also an immensely humble man, and that is why God confronted him as well. God also sent Paul—Saul, in this case—on a journey. One of the various journeys on which He sent Saul was when.... in Scripture there is a passage where Paul says, I believe it is First Corinthians 12, or Second Corinthians 12, where Paul says that God took him to heaven, to the third heaven, and there he says that he saw things so sublime that he was not even permitted to share them with other human beings. And then he says: and so that the greatness of the revelations would not exalt me beyond measure, God sent me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me so that I would not become proud, concerning which I asked three times that He deliver me, and three times He answered me: My grace is sufficient for you, because My power is perfected in weakness. Paul says: well, then, if when I am weak, I am strong, I will glory all the more in weaknesses. He learned a lesson about himself. God allowed Paul to enter into an area that we have discussed; people have tried to sanitize what Paul's problem was, because they cannot imagine that the great Apostle had some kind of spiritual or emotional struggle. And they have said that it was that he suffered from blindness in his eyes, and this and that. Look, that is nonsense, that is false; that is us trying to help God. God does not need us to help Him. God has always worked through impure people who were prone to failure.

Why do we have Abraham there on his journey, Moses on his journey, and David on his journey, failing God? Elijah, it says, was a man subject to emotions and passions like ours, and he spoke to God, prayed that it would not rain for three and a half years, and it did not rain—meaning that you can do it too; if such a flawed, imperfect being could be used by God in that way, God can use you too. Do not worry. In every creative work there is always debris and waste, but that does not matter. We have to keep moving forward. If one were to worry about the trash generated by a construction project, one would never do anything, brothers and sisters. And when human beings work, they sweat and smell bad, whether you like it or not; even if you are the purest saint on earth, you will still go to the bathroom, you will still sweat, and you will still smell bad unless you bathe again. Because that is..... and God understands that; bad smells do not bother God, because God is down-to-earth—not that He comes from Campeche, just in case anyone here does—but God is a realistic and unpretentious God, and He sits at the table and eats a tortilla just as He also eats chicken cordon bleu. God loves simple people, and He loves things..... like the Lord Jesus Christ, whom I believe would sit down and eat a sancocho like any ordinary person.

And the Lord makes use of every one of the experiences and every one of the things we experience, and that is why we do not have to fear the journey. Paul understood that struggle he had, and he says: since God understood that there was a tendency toward pride in me—and you can see it when you study Paul's psychology, if you analyze him psychotherapeutically through his writings, because God does not remove that part in His revelation; remember what I told you, that God inspired the Scriptures but did not dictate them. In Scripture you can see the character of the writers, their time, their struggles, and other things. The inspiration of Scripture does not mean word-for-word dictation. Why? Because God does not take you away from yourself; God never turns you into an automaton, never turns you into a robot, never takes away your creativity, your personality, your experiences. He loves to work through those things. He tells you: look, what I want to say is this; make sure that is what comes through, but if you want to use a photograph or you want to use a painting or a parable, that is up to you, but make sure My message gets through exactly as I want it to. I delegate the rest to you. Do you understand?

And that is how the Lord works. So Paul had that area in his life, and because God took him so high and gave him so much, He knew that Paul had to be watched over, because what he had received was so exceptional that he was going to begin to grow proud and would then open himself up to a fall and to an attack from Satan that would lead him to failure in ministry. So God takes him and allows it to come, brothers and sisters, and this is another thing that commentators have tried to fix. We try to fix the Bible because sometimes we are afraid of the things God reveals to us, and we sanitize it or clean it up a little, because Paul says: God sent me a messenger of Satan—that is the Spanish translation—a thorn, concerning which I asked Him three times. In other words, God sent it to him; it is not even, as we sometimes say, that God allowed it, as though helping God a little, because the idea that God would send a messenger of Satan frightens us a little because... wow! And then we start trying to fix the picture a little and say: God allowed it. But hey, whether He allows it or sends it, He is still responsible; in a court of law He remains responsible, even if we use a different little word and take the corpse and put a little more lipstick on it—it is still a corpse. And then it says: God sent me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan. I believe Paul was fighting, battling something there that was emotional, mental, spiritual. It had nothing to do with his eyes, and I looked up the word in the original Greek that is translated as messenger of Satan, and the word is angelos santan. You do not have to be a scholar of Greek to know what angelos satan means. The thing is that in the original Greek the word angelos can mean angel or messenger, so the translators chose the word that lent itself a little more to—how shall we put it—being careful about God's personality and His interactions, because we do not like complexity; we Christians do not like neat and simple little things, and God is a God who always pulls the rabbit out of somewhere other than where we expect. And there are strange things in the Bible that, if they were not in the Bible, I would say were heresy, but they are there, and they must be accepted.

What the Bible tells me is what I believe, and I wrestle with what it presents to me, but I do not try to simplify it. So it says that God sent him an angel—I prefer the idea, because the context suggests it, of an angel of Satan, which is what? A demon, a spirit. Now, if you cannot accept that, do not accept it. Your pastor has the final authority on that, but go to the original Greek and look up the words angelos satan. God sent a spirit; you could call it an angel of Satan or a messenger of Satan—it does not matter. Whatever it was, it was a messenger, an agent of Satan. God allowed a spirit, as it were, to harass Paul. Why? Because, look, brother, many times when God wants to train us, He finds us a good opponent. If you want to train a good boxer, if you have a good boxer whom you know has what it takes for a world championship, are you going to put some kid straight off the street in there to train him? Of course not. You are going to find a good boxer, perhaps one who is already a little worn out, who will force that boxer to draw out the very best he has within him so that he can reach his potential. And many times God will allow opponents in your life, struggles in your life, processes in your life that will seem as though they come from hell itself, yet it is God who has assigned them to train you in warfare and take you to the heights to which He wants to take you, because God wants to train warriors. God is not in the business of training parasites. God does not want to train turkeys; God wants to train eagles. Hallelujah! And that is why He designs enemies for us who will train us and take us where we need to go, and sometimes those enemies, I tell you, are sinister. And they are so sinister that one could never imagine that they come from God, but along the journey He has said: I want us to stop at such-and-such a place so that you may see what is there, so that you may learn about warfare and know yourself better, so that when the enemy comes to tempt you in that area, you will already have dealt with it and overcome it, and it will not catch you and destroy you.

Sometimes things happen in your life that God is looking at from ten years away and preparing now, because God is a chess player who has a board with millions of pieces, and He can play all the pieces at the same time. And He can play against a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand other players simultaneously, like those great chess geniuses, and it does not trouble Him. And God is always thinking about eternity, and sometimes He makes a move in your life that will not even have to do with you, but with someone who will come three generations from now; and He needs you now, at that specific moment, to prepare ten or twenty moves ahead so that something He wants farther down the road, a hundred years from now, may be fulfilled. And you are important now, and perhaps you will die without knowing that God used you strategically at a given point, and you may die saying, ‘God never used me.’ But look, He already used you; you just do not know it. Because on that journey you will make stops that not even you yourself know you made.

Someone was telling me yesterday about the great painter Van Gogh, one of the great geniuses of painting. Today he is recognized as a great genius of painting, and I have seen his paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and there are museums in Europe devoted solely to him. Van Gogh died without having sold a single one of his paintings, and he thought he was a complete failure as a painter, and he committed suicide because of his failure, utterly depressed. Yet today a Van Gogh painting, a little Van Gogh sketch, is worth millions of dollars, because he was too far ahead of his time—that was the problem. The man was too brilliant, and he created combinations of colors and images that were simply too advanced for his time. It has taken society almost a century to catch up with the genius that was in Van Gogh. Yet he was unable to see it.

You see, there are passages in the book of faith, in Hebrews 11, that say some died without having seen what had been promised to them and died simply greeting those things from afar; and today we are the ones enjoying the investments they made. Because they too went on their journeys. And I believe that when we embark on God’s journey, we must know that He holds the helm, not we ourselves. We cannot control the experiences. We simply have to trust that He knows what He is doing, that every aspect of that journey makes sense, that He has wasted nothing, and that He will know how to arrange it and how to bring it to completion. We must trust Him absolutely and place ourselves in His hands, and although the storm may rage around us, we must say, ‘Father, You have promised me that I will reach the other shore’; then hold on tight, put on a good raincoat and pull it over your head, and let the storm blow. Do not worry: you are going to make it, and you are going to arrive stronger than before, more confident than ever, and more certain of the God you have.

Sometimes Scripture says, for example, “My little children”—there is a passage in the Old Testament that says, “Go into the chamber for a little while until the wrath has passed.” And sometimes it will be like that, brothers and sisters. Sometimes God will be at work in your affairs and dealing with your life, and a storm and persecution and warfare will break out around you, with terrible gunfire, and the only thing you will be able to do is go into your bedroom, lock the door, board up the windows, and hold on there in faith until the storm passes; then take the boards down, open the door, pick up the little bits of debris that remain, and keep moving forward, because God is a tough trainer. Sometimes He puts you in situations where you are standing there with your tongue hanging out, saying, ‘I cannot take any more,’ and He tells you, ‘You can take more; there is more in you, and I want to draw it out. I know that you have what it takes for greatness, and if I do not push you, you will not bring out what is in you.’

My wife is an occupational therapist; she works with children who have neurodevelopmental problems. And there are children, for example, who sometimes cannot move their little legs properly and have low muscle tone and other things, and I have learned that vocabulary by living with her. And sometimes she goes to their homes, and she was telling me, for example, about a little girl who has low muscle tone. She cannot move her legs very much, does not yet have much strength in her legs, and she is chubby and very fond of being comfortable; she only wants to sit there, without moving, without anyone pushing her much or anything, because she is very content just sitting there quietly, since her body does not demand that she do more. So my wife has to come, take hold of her little legs and move them, stand her up and sit her down, and make her move; and sometimes the little girl begins to scream and protest, but she makes her do it. And she sees how, as the days go by, the little girl has already begun to sit up by herself and move around. But she made her do it; she had to make her do it; she had to take her out of her comfort zone. Many times God takes us out of our comfort zone and leads us where we do not want to go, because He is in the business of getting the most out of His children and bringing hidden greatness to light. And that is why He often puts us in tight situations: to bring to light what we need to know about ourselves, because it is also a journey within ourselves.

A pastor brother here was telling me how he began his church in a house that someone rented to him. And he says that after he had been there for about two or three months, with two or three people coming, four people, the lady suddenly told him that she wanted the house back. He said to her, ‘But you promised me a year,’ and she said, ‘No, because you are here preaching the Bible and this and that, and I do not want you here, and you have to leave.’ And she treated him badly, and he said, ‘Well, all right.’ He paid her what he had to pay her. He felt desperate; he questioned himself. Lord, either You are going to bless me, or You did not call me into ministry. He threw himself down on the floor. He says that he clearly heard, in his mind or in his being, the word ‘hotel,’ and he began searching, but all the hotels were too expensive. Finally, he came to a hotel owned by one of his relatives, and they gave him a hotel room for a ridiculously low price, and now he has about forty people—40 or 50 people—there. If he had remained where it was comfortable, he might still have only seven stray souls with him. But God took him out of his comfort zone to another level, and we have to understand, brothers and sisters, that God is a trainer whom you cannot bribe with protests, tears, cries of ‘It hurts,’ and ‘I can’t’.... He says, ‘Yes, you can, because I created you and I know exactly what is inside you, and you are going to enter into greatness, even if you go kicking and screaming; I am going to take you there.’

That is why the Bible says that no discipline is pleasant while we are enduring it, but when God has completed it, it yields the sweet and peaceable fruit of righteousness. Nobody likes discipline. A soldier does not like discipline, but discipline will save his life and enable him to make an impact against the enemy. And God is creating soldiers, warriors. God is not creating golfers; He wants to create people who know how to use a sword, who know how to use a bow. As David says, ‘He who strengthens my hands to bend the bronze bow.’ God wants men and women who can bend the bronze bow. Do you know how difficult it is to take that bronze implement, bend it like this, and put the string on it so you can shoot the bow? That is not developed by clutching pillows; it is developed by lifting weights, by exercising. That is why God is always telling us, ‘Look, have I not commanded you to be strong and courageous?’

He told Joshua, ‘I have given you every place on which you set your foot, but I tell you just one thing: be strong and courageous.’ He told him three times; look it up. Because He says to all of us, ‘I am going to send you on a journey, and you are going to have to work hard on that journey. I am not creating parasites; I am not creating people who are comfortable.’ God loves hardworking people, courageous people, enterprising, entrepreneurial, creative, restless people. The Kingdom of Heaven advances forcefully, and the courageous—or the violent, in another version—take it by force.

God is in the business of journeys. There is a text that is one of my favorite texts in Scripture, and it speaks to us about... and puts very eloquently what God’s journeys are. Look, turn to Deuteronomy chapter 8. ‘God sent the Jewish people on a journey, a 40-year journey through the wilderness,’ a journey that really should not have taken more than about three weeks; it took them 40 years. ‘Before taking them to the destination He had appointed for them.’ He knew that He was going to bring them into the land of Canaan 400 years before they arrived there, when He called Father Abraham and told him, ‘I am going to give this land to you,’ and He simply had Abraham walk across the land on his own journey. Because God told Abraham, ‘Leave your land and your kindred and go to a land that I will show you.’ And Abraham entered upon his own... which was really his journey within himself.

And 400 years passed, and God already knew that He was going to bring them to that land, but He did not take them there right away. And after those 40 years, when they were near the land, He did not give them permission to enter but kept them on a circular journey around the wilderness. And look at what He tells them after the 40 years have passed and they are close to arriving, when only a short time remains before they enter the Promised Land; and look at how He speaks to them. Deuteronomy 8 says, ‘You shall be careful to put into practice every commandment that I command you today, so that you may live and multiply and enter and possess the land that Jehovah swore to your fathers.’ And look here at verse 2. It says, ‘And you shall remember the whole way’—there is the journey—‘the whole way by which Jehovah your God has led you these 40 years in the wilderness.’ What for?... ‘To humble you, to test you, to know what was in your heart’—there is the inward journey, the journey within, the inner exploration—‘whether or not you would keep His commandments. And He humbled you and made you hunger, and He sustained you with manna, food that neither you nor your fathers had known, to make you know that man shall not live by bread alone, but man shall live by everything that proceeds from the mouth of Jehovah’—there is God, the journey that teaches you who God is and what your relationship with God is.... ‘Your clothing never wore out’—again, there is God the Provider, the faithful God—‘it never wore out upon you, nor did your foot swell during these 40 years. Know, therefore, in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so Jehovah your God disciplines you. I want you to know and understand who I am, how I act, so that in the future you will not make a mistake, because if you do things that are outside My approval, I will discipline you. For Jehovah your God is bringing you into the good land, a land of streams, waters, springs, and fountains flowing in valleys and hills,’ and so on.... In verse 10: ‘And you shall eat and be satisfied, and you shall bless Jehovah your God’ for the good land He has given you. And then there are a number of things. It says, ‘Take care not to forget Jehovah your God’; verse 12, ‘lest you eat and be satisfied’; verse 14, ‘and your heart become proud and you forget Jehovah your God,’ who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. God was already seeing what was going to happen to these people. He knew what He was warning them about; He knew what they were going to do. He knew there was pride in them. He knew there was rebellion in them; He knew they had a tendency to criticize God and quickly doubt Him. Look at verse 16: ‘He sustained you with manna in the wilderness, food that your fathers had not known, humbling you and testing you so that in the end He might do you good.’

So we understand that the 40 years in the wilderness were not necessarily just a coincidence; they were not merely the result of the Jews’ sin. Rather, God was deeply involved in those 40 years. He wanted this nation that was going to be born—a founding nation, an apostolic nation, a spiritual mother nation that would serve as a model for countless generations of believers throughout history—and He had to use this nation to display certain principles of the way He deals with mankind, to reveal certain aspects of His personality, and to establish legal and judicial precedents so that, when He judged them on other occasions, there would be evidence that He was acting justly and fairly toward them. Because that is how God is: God is always looking at things from a thousand years away, a hundred years, ten years.

So those 40 years, that journey on which He led them through the wilderness, were meant to show them, ‘Look at who you are: rebellious people, critical people, disobedient people, people who run away from the enemy when he is very great, as when the two spies came back. You are nobody. You enter this land not because you deserve it, but because My grace allows you to enter. I give you that land. You will drink water from wells you did not dig, live in houses you did not build, be protected by walls you did not raise, and defeat enemies whom you cannot defeat by yourself, but only through My power.’ God had to expose all those things and display them as evidence, because God is a judicial God. And He proceeds like a judge; He proceeds like an attorney who assembles the evidence and documentation before acting, because that is who He is. He does not have to do it, but He is a just God, and it matters to Him that no one be able to criticize or question His justice with contrary evidence. Let every man be found a liar, and Jehovah just and true.

That is why, when David sins and terribly offends God by ordering Uriah to be killed, when he writes Psalm 51, which is the psalm of confession, he says, ‘Against You, You only, have I sinned and done what is evil in Your sight, so that You may be recognized as just in Your word and found blameless in Your judgment.’ David is saying, as it were, that he had sinned so that it would be evident to everyone that God is just when He judges mankind and condemns, that God alone is just, that all of us go astray like sheep, and that He alone remains holy and perfect. Many times God will allow things to happen in our lives so that it will be clear, first of all, that it is by grace and not by works; therefore, there are processes in our lives in which God will first have to take us through failure and suffering before He can use us.

He took Peter on a journey like that when Peter, with his pride, self-sufficiency, and sky-high self-esteem, told Him, ‘Lord, even if everyone turns away from You, this tough guy right here is not going to back down,’ as the Mexicans say. Those cowards over there may leave, but do not worry, Lord; I will be there with You until death. And the Lord tells him, ‘Peter, Peter, little Peter, look, not only are you going to reject Me; you are going to deny Me once, you are going to deny Me three times, Peter,’ because it mattered to God that Peter, who was going to become a spiritual giant and a foundation for His church in the future, could not become the man God wanted him to be with that pride. At the first bullfight, he would be gored, knocked down, and carried out of the ring. And so God had to bleed him, bring his pride down, weaken him, and show him, ‘You are not as tough as you think you are.’ He allowed himself to be intimidated by a little servant girl and denied the Lord Jesus Christ—he denied Him, denied Him, denied Him—and the third time he denied Him with curses. ‘I already told you that I don’t know that...’ Perhaps that was something like what he said. Haven’t I told you that... He did it as though God wanted to underline it, paint it on his face, and paint it on his shirt so that he would know who he was. Because He needed Peter, but He could not use Peter with all that masculine pride, that self-sufficiency, that strength, that self-confidence. God abhors that, and the devil often uses it to destroy us. In His mercy, God sometimes allows us to fall, dirty our knees, and tear our pants—out of mercy—so that the devil will not judge us later. He steps in first and judges us Himself because He does it with mercy and love in order to strengthen us, before the devil does it to destroy us.

And that is why, when the Lord rises from the dead and approaches Peter, I imagine Him coming with a mischievous smile on His face. He says, ‘Peter, do you remember what you said? Peter, do you love Me?’ He did not even mention what Peter had done to Him, how he had failed Him, or how he had denied Him. No, He said, ‘Peter, do you love Me?’ Notice that the Lord could have left without asking Peter anything. But how wonderful and how kind the Lord is: He did not want Peter to remain wounded in his very being because he had denied the Lord and did not know what his Lord thought of him. That would have been a wound that bled him dry throughout his life. So the Lord approaches like a good counselor and says, ‘Peter, do you love Me?’ And he says, ‘Yes, Lord, You know that I love You.’ At another time he would have said, ‘Lord, I love You more than all those fools over there. You know it well; I have proved it to You a thousand times—even unto death. Where do You want us to go? Where are those demons so we can take them on right now?’ ‘Yes, Lord, You know that I love You.’ ‘Peter, do you love Me?’ Lord, I told You that I love You. Notice that He asked him three times—the same number of times that he had denied Him—as though He gave him three opportunities to neutralize each denial with an affirmation of love. And the third time, He looked him directly in the eyes, like this: ‘Peter, do you truly love Me?’ Peter simply threw his hands into the air and said, ‘Lord, the truth is that right now I am not sure, after what I did. You know all things, Lord.’

In other words, brothers and sisters, that is often how we have to be. I say, well, I love God, but the truth is that I am not sure whether I love God or not. If I loved God as He truly is, I do not know—I would have already sacrificed myself or done something to glorify Him. We think we love God, and we think we are willing to die for Him. I do not dare say, ‘Father, I am going to die for You.’ I hope I can do so one day if the need arises, but I am not sure. I think that is often the appropriate answer. Now, if you are secure in Christ and God gives you the grace to know that it is not because of you but because He will strengthen you, then amen, confess it—but let it not be with fleshly pride or faith in yourself. Discern the spirit. If not, there are situations in which it is better, as they say in my country, for people to say, ‘He ran here,’ than, ‘He died here.’ It is better to give a gentle answer that leaves you a little room. Because God needs to take us on those journeys in which we come to know ourselves and discover what we are made of, so that He can then work with us and use us as He desires.

There are moments in your life—and I believe this happens to all of us who follow the Lord—when it is like soldiers in times of peace: they are allowed to stay at home and live comfortably with their families and everything else, but every so often they are called up for training and have to spend two or three weeks in the field, carrying out military exercises, running, studying warfare, and doing all those things. Why? So that they do not become too comfortable or lose the art of war, and also to give them additional training that enriches their military portfolio. They send them to train for battles in the mountains or in the cold, or they have them study strategies and different things so that their military profile can be completed. And I believe that is what happens with us. As we serve the Lord, God periodically says to us, ‘Come with Me. You are doing very well in ministry; everything is going well for you. Come, I am going to put you through something to frighten you a little and take away some of that excess strength and confidence you have gained from your recent triumphs in ministry.’ Then He does this to you and makes you stumble, and you split your lip and tear your pants, and you discover that you are not so great or so strong, nor so... as they say, ‘the last Coca-Cola in the desert,’ as some people think they are. And He reminds us of that and tells us, ‘Okay, now go back....’

In my own life this has happened to me three or four times, more or less—four or five times—when God has placed me in times of trial and fire, as He did Israel, to bring out what was hidden, to show me what I am, to humble me, and to teach me to depend more on Him. And He has sent me back more dangerous to the devil than ever. Because the weaker we are, the stronger we are. The more we allow the Lord to humble us and work on us, the more God will exalt us.

That is what Paul understood when he said, ‘If, when I am weak, then I am strong, I will therefore glory all the more in insults, weaknesses, and trials, so that the power of God may be manifested within me with greater magnitude.’ Because the weaker the vessel, the more fragile and breakable the vessel, the more glory God can express through His children. That is why God says, ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’ Brokenness is the most beautiful thing in a believer. We all have to be broken if we are going to be used. Write that down—it even came out rhyming. We all have to be broken if we want to be used. If you truly want God to use you, get ready, because He is going to test you, break you, frighten you, and put you through times of trial. But do not worry: the Lord knows exactly what kind of wood you are made of, and you are not going to break into 20,000 pieces. He will take you only as far as He can take you. That is why it says that we will never be tested beyond what we can endure. God knows. You do not know, but God knows, and sometimes you will think you cannot take any more, but He tells you, ‘Yes, you can take more; there is still more in you. Do not worry; hold on there.’ We could keep going with this; there is much more, but I think you get the point, don’t you?

Do not fear the journey. Do not fear the God of journeys. Do not fear the God of processes. Do not fear the God who called you. Do not fear the experiences you have been through. Do not look at your past as though you have been a victim. Everything that has happened in your life has happened because God allowed it—even if you were abused by your father, even if you made a serious mistake in your life, even if you were not loved, even if you suffered a serious accident, even if something left you with limited mobility. God was there at that moment, and He allowed it for a sublime purpose that you yourself may not be able to understand right now. But in everything that has happened in your life, in your walk, in your spiritual journey, God was there with you through it all. Even before you received and acknowledged Him, even in your mother’s womb, the Lord was there. And if you went through something and thought that you were alone and that God had forsaken you, know that those drops on the ground are the tears God shed as He went through with you what you went through. And He allowed it for a purpose far beyond anything you can understand.

So do not view your past as a failure or as something without meaning or value. Instead, see it as something God has used—a dark brushstroke in a painting that needs darkness to make its highlights shine. Because a painting cannot consist entirely of light and pale colors, or it will be monotonous and boring. It needs darkness for contrast. And sometimes dark brushstrokes must be added to the painting of our lives so that its beauty will stand out, so that God’s calling can shine and be displayed in all its beauty. But if God allowed it, He will place it strategically so that it works for good and not for evil. When you look at your life from that redemptive, redeeming perspective, then what seemed to you to be a hateful and meaningless act, you will see in the light of God’s positive design, and you will understand that God intended it for good and not for evil.

When Joseph approached his brothers, they thought that, as Pharaoh’s second-in-command, he was going to kill them. But he told them, ‘Do not worry. You did something to me and intended it for evil, but God used it to preserve life. That is why I cannot hate you, because I know that it was not even you who sold me into Egypt; rather, it was God taking me on a journey toward the destiny He had told me about years earlier, when He gave me two dreams in which He told me that my father and my brothers would bow down before me. And you thought you were sending me to my death, but God was sending me to life and to meet my destiny. That is why I cannot hate you. What seemed terrible and inhuman, I now understand was a kindness you did me, because you were sending me toward my destiny as the preserver of my family and as an apostle and patriarch of all the people of God.

And we have to believe that: everything that has happened in my life, everything that will happen, everything that is happening—my Father is using it to lead me to the destiny He has determined for me. Therefore, I cannot hate anyone. I cannot become bitter. I cannot feel like a victim. I cannot rebel against God, because everything God does is, by definition, good, and it is for the preservation of life, or for the glory of His name, or for my exaltation. Therefore, I will not look at anything as meaningless, as a violation. I will look at it as a mystery that God permits with a benevolent purpose in the life of His daughter or His son, and even as He sees it and knows that it is for good, He weeps with me. But He ordains it for something good. May the Lord help us.

I believe this word is for some of you women and some of you here who have gone through difficult situations in your lives, or who are doubting the Lord’s mercy, or who have experienced some failure in your lives, and God says to you, ‘I have been with you in the ship; you were not alone. I have been there and will be there, and I will fight fiercely for you every day of your life. And I love you, and no one will be able to snatch you out of My hand—neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate you from My love through My Son Christ Jesus, says the Lord. Nothing—not even any mistake you make—will tear you away from My love for you. And no demon in this world, no force within the cosmos that I have created, is capable of violating My purpose in your life. There is no man who can divert you from the destiny I have for you. There is no mistake, there is nothing that has happened in your life; I have handled it all. Therefore, you can rest assured that what has happened to you is, rather, proof of My love—My mysterious love, which is so great, so deep and so wide, so complex and so multifaceted, that you will not be able to comprehend it. Sometimes it will be so mysterious that it will seem like hatred or neglect to you, but it is exactly the opposite: it is a love beyond anything you could ever understand. And you will understand it in the light of eternity.

When you look back and are able to see, as I see, the history you have lived; when you are able to see in all its complexity the beginning and the end, then you will be able to see, as I see, the reality you are living. Right now you are an infant, you are a baby; you can handle only a small piece of My revelation, and that is why there are things I do that seem meaningless to you, like neglect, hatred, unfaithfulness. But when you are able to see, as Paul says, “when I see face to face, no longer as a child, as I now see, then I will be able to understand; I will be able to know as I am known.” In the meantime, the only thing we can aspire to is to say, “Lord, why has this happened to me? Why is this happening to me? I do not understand it. But I am going to trust that You know what You are doing.” And then we leave that in the Lord’s hands and keep moving forward.

I ask the Lord, “Father, if someday something terrible happens to me that truly harms me, I hope You will give me the grace to love You even then, and to believe that it was not because You hated me or rejected me or because You are not as faithful as You say You are. Rather, give me the grace to confess, grit my teeth, and say, ‘I know that my Redeemer lives. Though He slay me, I will continue to confess Him and love Him.’” As Job said when his wife told him, “Curse God and die, because no one can explain what is happening to you. You have behaved well, you have done everything by the book, and yet this is still happening to you.” And Job said, “Look, even though I cannot understand it, and even though I rebel, and even though every day I come and ask God why He allowed it, I will still kiss His hand and say, ‘You are still my Father, even though I cannot understand what is happening.’”

That is what glorifies God, brothers and sisters. We have to ask the Lord to give us that grace so that, until the final breath of our lives, we may confess our love and submission to the Father, kiss His hand when He slaps us, and say, “You know what You are doing; Your will be done, not mine.” And let us throw ourselves into living life with joy, brothers and sisters. That is why this fits very well with what I was saying last night: when you understand that, look, you can let go of the wheel and devote yourself to taking in the scenery and enjoying the journey, because you know that everything is already done. Your Father has already determined everything. So look out the window, roll it down, breathe, open your eyes so that you can see the beauty all around you, because the Lord has already taken care of every detail. Then you can let yourself go, experiment, do new things, and leap through the air, because you know that you will always land in a safety net that God has placed there—His love. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Nothing. Who will accuse us if it is God who justifies? Who can come against a child of God if his Father has already given everything? He who gave us Christ Jesus, how will He not also give us all things together with Him? Everything else in your life is tiny compared with the One who gave His most worthy Son. If He gave you that, how could He not give you other things that are so small compared with how precious the life of His Son was? That is why we can rejoice, laugh, and enjoy ourselves, and that is why the writer Solomon says, “Let white clothing never be absent from your body, nor oil—ointment—from your head. Put on a good perfume, celebrate life, eat a good meal, have a good laugh, go to a celebration in the Lord, because God has already resolved all those problems, your ticket has already been paid for, your passport has been stamped, and you are going to enter the Promised Land, because no one will be able to separate you from the God who called you as long as you keep your hand upon His hand.” And even when you do certain things, the Lord will take you by the hand; He will discipline you, but He will keep hold of your hand and will not allow you to let go of Him, because you yourself are one of those created things that cannot separate you from Him. That is why some theologians have preached this doctrine of eternal salvation, and this is where one can lose one’s way. I believe it goes beyond what the Bible says, but God’s promise is so clear: as it says, “?” Nothing will be able to separate us from the love of God; neither death nor life will be able to separate us from Him. So live life with joy; enter ministry; enter into your calling joyfully; try new things; experiment; engage with new people, new places, new experiments, because God holds you in His hand, and in all the somersaults you perform in the air—like the trapeze artist who spins around but knows that if he falls, there is a net there to protect him—God will sustain you. He will not let your foot strike a stone, says the Lord, for He will command His angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. May the Lord bless us. Listen to sermon by Dr. Roberto Miranda recorded December 3, 2005, at Adonai Church, Mérida, Mexico (77 min.)

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