Apostle Dr. Derrick L. Wallace

touching the lives of people and not only teaching people the truth of God’s word as well as helping them take practical steps to get them there. You would think that everything was going well. However that was a growing sense of satisfaction and hopelessness that I could not quite put my finger on. And what is worse, I thought that the situation I found myself in was either because I was failing to trust God or that I failing to operate with a sense of gratitude. I don’t know if you have ever had one of these moments where there is something wrong deep inside of you even though it appears that you should be content. After all a significant part of the Christian ethos is that we should be content in all things and in all things being thankful to the Lord for our salvations.

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As the sense of despondency grew my commitment to prayer intensified and with it came moments of relief but little comfort beyond the momentary experience of the encounter I had with God as He faithfully responded to my prayers. But as I pushed deeper in prayer I began to realize the source of my despondency, it was an increasingly strong sense of being disconnected from God, at least the sense of the loss of the connection that I had come to know. But how could that be, how could I feel a sense of disconnection when I prayed daily and more often than not three to four times of day. However, what I did not fully comprehend was that conversation does not always result in connection and it is the connection that was missing. What I began to realize is that I spent so much time and effort praying about my survival that I had lost sight of my growth and development. In short I was treading water simply trying to survive and the focus of my prayers had become so focused on the works of my hands that I stopped praying about the content or condition of my heart. To be clear for those of you who may e reading this who are operating in legalism I did not slip into sin, nor did my love for God waine it is simply that I like many in the body of Christ, had begun to look at the world and my life more in terms of my power than God’s promises. 

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The realization of this truth resulted in a level of sorrow that quite frankly I do not have words to describe as I began to be reminded of a prior period of my life when I felt a connection with God that I had come to miss and began to cry out to God for the sense of closeness that I had lost. Even as I write this in hear the spirit of the Lord asking me the question “what good does he it to gain the whole world and lose your soul” and while my soul is not in jeopardy the question raises a question about our priorities.  But as I cried out to God. I hear God say something that changed my life I heard the spirit of the Lord say that it was not His intention for me to continue to worry about my survival and that He was going to stabilize us so He could shift us.Over the next few weeks and months I watched God move in every area of my life that was a concern to bring them to order so that I was free to not simply focus on Him but to experience Him in the way I had longed for. As I began to see God’s hand move I began to realize that what I first saw simply as an encounter was actually an invitation, an invitation not to have an experience but an invitation to learn of Him and by learning Him to trust and love Him. 

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In this season, if we are going to take full advantage of all that God is offering us and to fulfill all that God has promised the world about us we are going to have to represent Him we are going to have to come to know Him in order to love Him and unless we love Him we have no hope of loving His creation. Because the only real love we can ever express is a reflection of Him. As we come to know Him we see ourselves in ways we cannot otherwise imagine and we will see the world as He sees it. For generation we have become so focused on what we need from God that we have failed to accept His invitation to get to know Him but how can we hope to live in the kingdom and not know the King, how do we learn to correctly anticipate His needs and lives lives that reflect His desires if we remain distant and He remains a mysterious stranger.