Influence

Who has the most influence in your life? Is it your friend? Is it your parents? Is it your wife or your mother? For most of us, the answer is our wife or our mother, or both. We learn many things from our mothers while we are growing up. Whether we are home-schooled or not. We see how they handle situations. We hear their opinions and their advice, whether they intended for us to hear it or not. Some of us learn from our fathers and our grandfathers some important lessons. Sometimes they are good lessons and sometimes they are lessons that we would rather forget about, but they are learned nonetheless.

Occasionally, the lessons that we learn are from life itself. Schoolmates and friends teach us things. Some of which we shouldn’t have learned but in some ways, these “life lessons” help to make us who we become later in life. Then there are those lessons that we learn by trial and error. These lessons also teach us and make us into the people that we will ultimately become.

I’ve often wondered if God has a hand in all of these “teachable moments” and in the last decade I’ve come to realize that He does indeed have a hand in guiding us through them whether we know Him as our Savior…yet, or not. Especially when He has a plan and a purpose for your life that you may not know about yet. I mean, He does place kings and Presidents in their places because He is working through them to bring about His will for our planet and the people on it. So, why wouldn’t He have a hand in each of our lives even when we haven’t come to the place where He is our Savior and Lord?

Sometimes we go through some dark times in our life so He can show us the way out of the darkness. I went through a time of depression while I was a pastor of a small church. Brought on because I wasn’t sure that my message was making any difference. But God brought me through it and gave me a message to put out there so others could find it and hopefully find Him as well.

Jesus said, “Seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened, ask and it shall be given“. Don’t go through life without Him. When you feel that you need His help and you don’t know where to find Him, pray. Seeking Him through prayer will allow you to find Him and then ask Him for your salvation and your strength will be given to you as well. Will your life become easy and wonderful from that point on? No, because when you belong to Jesus, Satan will try to ruin your witness in front of your family and friends. So keep seeking Him every day and you can overcome those hard times that Satan is throwing your way.