Who is shaping who?

Exodus 20:25 If you make me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn stones, for if you wield your tool on it you profane it.

When my brother and I were young, we used to love to try to dam up small creeks. There was one in particular, in Jackson that was pretty shallow and during the summer of 1983 we dammed that creek up a dozen or so times. It took a lot of work carrying clay and sticks and tactically forming the dam. It was a great challenge, but we always got a little bored once the dam was built and water started to collect as we hoped it would. As you might expect, eventually the dam would give way and the force of water would reestablish its original path. We would go back a couple of days later to find little to no trace of the work we had accomplished. Looking back it is easy for me to see that God designed that creek to flow and no matter how much we tinkered with that design, His design would always win out. Even though we had brief moments celebrating our success, they were temporary and days later that success evaporated.

In the passage above God is forbidding Moses (and man) to build an altar of stones that have been shaped by man. Why? The altar in the OT was were God and man met and He did not want us to defame that meeting by shaping our image of Him and His will to fit our life. Go look at it and pray through it and ask yourself what that looks like in your life.

Looking through my life, it is filled with my attempts to shape Jesus to fit my life until I finally allowed Him to be Lord over it. I still face that temptation but I pray that I dare not try to alter Him and His will to fit my life.

If your walk with God is a routine who is leading you or God? There is no neutral in our walk with God. We will shape Him to fit our will or He will shape us to fit His will. One of those two things is going on in everyone of our lives right now. If you are unable to sense Him changing your heart with His love that should be disturbing to you.

One question: Have you ever asked God to give you an assignment of His that is to big for you or does your conversations look like you begging Him to bless your plan?

One more question: does your life with Christ have striking similarities to our dams? Moments of apparent victory that quickly fade back in to God's original design? High points of sensitivity that only a few days later are evaporated?