Soar Like an Eagle
I want to teach you to fly. Seriously! I want to teach you to soar above the storms of life like an eagle, not flap around the chicken yard like a chicken Christian.
I want you to think for a moment about the difference between chickens and eagles. First, let's take a closer look at the chicken. Imagine a chicken yard in your mind with chickens all over the place just scratching and pecking at the ground. Now imagine a storm coming on the horizon…it starts to rain. What do the chickens do?
Now imagine an eagle. The lone eagle sits high on a cliff overlooking a vast valley. Can you see him? A dark storm begins to march across the horizon. The thunder starts to roll and echo throughout the valley. What does the eagle do? It certainly doesn't run and hide, flapping its wings.
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The eagle has no fear of adversity. We need to be like the eagle and have a fearless spirit of a conqueror! We need to see ourselves as overcomers, not people who are overcome by the trials of life. We don't need to live in fear.
We're all going to face adversity in our lives, and it's the hard times that we go through that will eventually make us "eagle Christians." This is because we grow through adversity. And God wants us to grow and be all that we can be. It's God's will for each of us to reach our full potential in life.
Adversity doesn't automatically make us grow and become stronger. It's the way we respond to adversity that determines whether we grow or not. When you are facing a difficult situation, if you make the decision to behave in a godly way through it, you will grow. And you will probably have to do what's right for a long time before you get a right result. For example, there may be someone in your life who doesn't treat you right and you may have to treat them right for a long time before you see any change in their behavior.
There's an encouraging scripture in Isaiah 43 that talks about God bringing us through things. Verse 2 says, When you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers, they will not overwhelm you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned or scorched, nor will the flame kindle upon you (The Amplified Bible). This verse makes it clear that we are going to go through things, but the important thing to remember is that we're going through! That's the good news: We're going to go through and come out on the other side better than when we went in.
This is true because as we go through times of trouble, times of loneliness, and times of being misunderstood, hurt, betrayed and rejected…that's when God changes us. That's when we find Him with us, in the middle of our mess, helping us through and making us overcomers. Then we can soar like an eagle, using the storms of life rather than running from everything.
We have to stop running from things. Everything you run from, you'll eventually have to go back and face at sometime in life. Moses ran from Egypt and spent forty years in the desert where God prepared him to be a great leader. Then, when God appeared to him in the burning bush, He told him to go back to Egypt.
My dad abused me, so I had a hard time with people who had a personality like his. And it seemed that God surrounded me with people like that sometimes. Every time it happened, I would react with old learned behavior for dealing with someone who was controlling and manipulative. This caused me to cry out to God for help and truth about myself, asking Him to change me. God used the situation to reveal a weakness in me and then make me better.
So when we're going through hard times, we need to say, "God, if this is something I have to go through, then I'm going through it. I want to go through in victory, and whatever You want to do in me through this, I want You to do it. The one thing I'm asking You, God, is to help me behave in a godly way all the way through." Our goal should be to behave ourselves in a godly way while we're "going through," and not run from the trouble.
The eagle never runs from storms. The eagle has a conquering spirit. Just like the eagle, we can embrace adversity because discipline in adversity will bring us to full potential. We can soar like an eagle!
