A Fall from the Upstairs Window
Seated in a window was a young man named Eutychus, who was sinking into a deep sleep as Paul talked on and on. When he was sound asleep, he fell to the ground from the third story and was picked up dead. Paul went down, threw himself on the young man and put his arms around him. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “He’s alive!”
Acts 20:9-10 (NIV)
What if, instead of making your pain, your struggle, your anger, or your fear a bully, you allowed it to highlight your weaknesses and your vulnerabilities? What if you consecrated these things and made them like a holy offering to God?
Stop blaming Satan for every slippage. Don’t feel less than a Christian because you have questions, doubts, and suspicions. In fact, don’t demonize your struggle. Make it sacred. Consecrate your struggles.
This is how we grow through our experiences. We don’t abandon or negate them; we consecrate them and make them sacred so we can imagine them as ways that God wants to bless us. The one conviction we must carry is this: there is no second of any day and no circumstance where God is not in control.
And if God is in control, that means you may not have chosen the struggle, but God is not ignorant to the struggle; He is working it together for your good. He’s ordering your steps. You’re living according to His providence. He has plans for you and He’s leading and guiding you. Don’t make your struggle a satanic attack; make it sacred and decide you’re going to be great for God even in the midst of it. Make it holy.
In fact, surrender it to God so that you learn to thank God that He has graced you to see His goodness in a new way. This is how God originally intended for us to think about these hard falls.
Eutychus’s fall was not to demonstrate the power of death. His fall was to teach us the power of life and that God can bring us back from anything, even if it stretches all the way to the reality of death. Now, if God can do that, He can also turn your pain around. He can turn a distraught emotionality around. He can bring you back from slippage. He can satisfy curiosity. But you have to make your thoughts sacred and consecrate them and make them holy.
