Thana Rolph on Faith & God As Best Friend
This morning as most mornings my prayer time, my dialogic, two-way conversation with God was all about the future of Full Measure the ministry placed in my heart years ago but, begun in 2021. I was yesterday I was musing about the next lesson/sermon on our new series “Thy Kingdom Come: What it Means To Be a Citizen of the Kingdom of God.” Last Sunday’s lesson discussed that our entry into citizenship in the kingdom of God comes through faith in the salvific work of Jesus, God’s Christ rather than through following a moral code. There are to relationships with God show in the Bible, a rule keeping, law abiding relationship mediated by angels given to Moses at Mount Sinai and a full adult relationship with God wherein the Spirit of God lives in us and we are adopted into the Beloved relationship that God the creator, God the ancient of days, The Eternal One, has with God’s Offspring Jesus the Christ and the Animating Spirit of the God-head. We enter into the latter relationship, released from the law that acted as a tutor and safety net until God was manifested in human form as Jesus, through faith in the personhood, divinity, ministry, crosswork and resurrection of Jesus, God’s Christ or Anointed one.
So, ask I prayed this morning, I felt it confirmed in my spirit that th,e next lesson was to examine faith. I woke up and eventually check my phone to reset an alarm set on the wrong date. In my messages I found a Facebook post of a memory 6 years ago. It was a post I had asked my late friend Thana Rolph to write for the Full Measure website or for Advent, I am not sure and it was posted on Facebook. The article was on Faith.
Wow! What a confirmation, that indeed God plants vision in our hearts to be manifested in the earth. Indeed, was supposed to continue to preach, and indeed Full Measure was God’s idea. I am blown away by the faithfulness of God. God has faith in me to do God’s will. Wow! Thank you, God! Thank you friend and servant of the Living God, my dear friend Thana Rolph for your legacy of faith that lives in the earth, as you reside in the presence of the Christ. Enjoy!
My friend Jennifer Cumberbatch asked me to write this for her blog. My daughter asked me to post it on Facebook:
Best Friend By Thana Rolph 2020
How did your best friend get to be your best friend? I’m guessing that you spent a lot of time together, that you shared many adventures and misadventures. You listened to one another, encouraged one another, sometimes corrected one another. You were there for each other in good times and bad. You got to be best friends by sharing life together.
How do you develop that kind of relationship when one of you isn’t visible, when you don’t speak his language, when he comes from a different culture? You must learn to “see” with different eyes, “hear” from a different place, and come to realize that you’re going to have to learn the rules of a different culture, because he isn’t going to bow to the standards of your inferior world.
You can know God on many levels. You can know him as Father. Many times, in my sanctified imagination, I have found myself snuggled in his lap, safe in his arms, listening to the sound of peace. How do you hear peace? You can, but it’s a sensation in your deep inner being rather than a sound in your ears.
How do you see something that has no physical substance? You can, but you have to learn to trust and move with the picture you find dropping into your thoughts. I struggled to know what to do with those kinds of pictures. Once, I told God I didn’t want to make anything up, but he said that we are created to make things up—to make them up out of our sanctified imaginations and birth them in with our faith and the word of God. Hebrews 11:1-3 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen…By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible. Indeed, we are made in the image of the Creator of all the world.
I am beginning to interpret that relationship with God as Husband. He drops the seed of something he wants to create in or through me into my spirit—a stray thought, a song, a picture, or a word. I lay hold of it and meditate on it, ask him questions about it, and let it grow. I write it in my journal, along with the answers to my questions as they come. Often they come more as impressions or feelings than as actual words. An uncomfortable or uneasy feeling is a caution. Don’t go there. I measure everything by God’s character and his word. Sometimes, I will remember scripture that fits, like the Hebrews 11 passage in the paragraph above. Together, the Lord and I create substance or perhaps capture substance and bring it from the unseen realm to the visible realm. We give birth to an idea or a dream. For me, partnering with God in that manner has produced books and changed lives and given me more satisfaction than any other thing in my world.
So many times, God’s people fail to move beyond petition prayer. It’s okay to make requests of God concerning the needs and issues of life. He wants us to do that. But he wants relationship with us. He wants intimacy. He wants us to partner with him to do the amazing things he created us to do. Petition prayer won’t get us to that place. We must listen for the silence deep within that is pregnant with his dreams for us. We must grasp and step into the pictures that float our way.
What are the “unrealistic” dreams that lie deep within your heart? What’s hidden under the “must-dos and can’t-dos” of this world? What if you ignored, just for a while, the rules of possibility our world says must be followed, took your invisible friend’s hand, and explored his culture where nothing is impossible? Try it! You might discover a new Best Friend.