What Has God Prepared For You To Do?

What Has God Prepared in Advance For You To Do?

Interview with Lorilyn Roberts: Part Five of Five

Question: To my last question, you have survived a divorce, single parenthood, international adoption, late-stage breast cancer, and a career reinvention, all while writing, homeschooling, and building a publishing legacy. What is the one thing you want every woman reading your books to walk away knowing about herself?

Answer: I’ll begin with this. If you have not accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, do it today. All you have to do is acknowledge you are a sinner, ask Jesus to forgive you, repent (which means changing the way you live), and make today the first day of the rest of your life. Technically, when you accept Jesus into your heart, you are born again and an ambassador for the Lord.

I always present the Gospel in my books. That is God’s call on my life—to reach those with no hope and give them hope. I’ve been there. I know what that is like. I love this verse that I have claimed many times, Isaiah 42:3: “A bruised reed he will not break…”

We must remember we are sojourners. This is not our home. Jesus is coming back, and when He returns, He will take us with Him to heaven where He has prepared a place for us to always be with Him. Nothing must happen before we are raptured. We don’t know when that will be; the Bible doesn’t tell us, so God meant for us to live each day expecting Him to return at any time. Today is the day of salvation.

Fruits of the Spirit

If you are a Christian, I would encourage you to go to Galatians 5:22-23, where Paul lists the fruits of the Spirit. According to the King James Version, they are love, joy, peace, long-suffering (patience), gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance (self-control). Ask God which fruit He wants you to work on, and learn everything you can about that fruit. I asked God which fruit I needed to work on, and He told me self-control. Then the Holy Spirit tested me immediately.

But as I was tested, God began to reveal some truths to me that I never would have learned in any other way. These fruits represent God’s character in the face of evil. In our lives, God is the vinedresser, the gardener. He prunes the trees and their branches, just as God molds us into the people He created us to be.

Jesus is the vine, or in a tree, the cambium, that provides the nourishment to the branches from the roots. Jesus is the conduit. If insects or disease destroy the cambium, the branch dies. In the same way, without Jesus, we can do nothing. We will spiritually die without His life-giving nourishment, which comes to us through the Holy Spirit.

But the neat thing is that we can produce many fruits, not just one kind. Those fruits result from the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives, which is present only in a believer. The Holy Spirit is like the “deposit,” a guarantee, the seal that we belong to Jesus and have been adopted into His family.

That’s why when we sin, we grieve the Holy Spirit, and so we need to ask for forgiveness. It’s the only way to live because if we live any other way, we are trying to earn God’s favor. We can’t do anything to earn salvation. It’s a gift. We are saved through faith in Jesus Christ, not by works.

Growing in the Fruits

So, let me give you an example from my own life. I totally failed at self-control and had to ask for forgiveness from God as well as the daughter I offended. After I did that, I truly believe the Holy Spirit gave me more self-control, also called temperance in the King James Version.

So, I moved on to the next fruit of the Spirit I felt God wanted me to work on: Meekness, as it’s called in the King James Version. I didn’t clearly understand the definition of meekness, so I did some research. I was blown away by what God showed me.

Meekness is power under control. It’s knowing you can step in at any time and take control, but refusing to. It’s an internal restraint that works with long-suffering and self-control, but others don’t see it because it is an unseen power.

Now, how does meekness manifest itself in God? We see it throughout the Scriptures in Jesus, but I discovered something that fascinated me about God’s divine nature regarding meekness.

The Gap Theory

Between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, something happened. Some Christians call it the gap theory. Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth,” and Genesis 1:2 says, “Now the Earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Genesis 1:3 says, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”

Bible scholars have shown that a better translation of Genesis 1:2 is: “Now the Earth became formless and void,” or “chaos and empty.”

Something happened after God created the heavens and the Earth, and everything became formless and empty. The Hebrew phrase is ‘tohu and bohu.” I believe what happened in between these two verses is that Satan rebelled, and he and one-third of the angels were cast out of heaven. In that process, because of this epic battle between God and evil, God destroyed everything He had created in Genesis 1:1.

And I believe that desolation lasted for a long time, perhaps millions of years. Why do I say this? Because God wanted to show that Satan could not recreate the heavens and the Earth that He had created in the beginning. He couldn’t reconstruct the universe; he couldn’t create light; he couldn’t create life; and he couldn’t undo what God had destroyed; so during this period between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, there was nothing but darkness.

That is meekness on God’s part. God could have immediately destroyed Satan and his angels; He could have snapped His fingers and put everything back in order; He could have done anything He wanted because He had the power to do it. But He chose to let everything remain formless and void to prove that Satan could do absolutely nothing to restore the universe that God had created in the beginning.

And then Genesis 2:2 says, “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” God’s voice, His Word, is all that was needed to recreate what had been lost. John 1:1 says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

And then John 1:3 says, “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”

We Are God’s Handiwork

All power is in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. How does this relate to us? Ephesians 2:10 says, “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

So, I would ask your listeners: What good work has God prepared in advance for you to do? Break it down into the fruits of the Holy Spirit and ask God which fruit you need to work on so you can do the good works God has already prepared for you.

God made me to write. He also made me a mother, a daughter of the King, a sister in the Lord to other members of His earthly family, and a future heir when Jesus returns as the King of kings and Lord of lords. God has given all of us many roles. I would tell your listeners this because they may not realize it. If they belong to Jesus, they are ambassadors for the Lord. We may not have much time before Jesus returns to meet us in the air.

Ambassadors before the Day of the Lord

Let me share a story to illustrate my point. I was in Israel at the start of the 1991 Gulf War studying at the Institute of Holy Land Studies. While there, the United States called home all its ambassadors and strongly encouraged Americans and non-essential personnel to leave Israel. The powers that be at that time knew that war was imminent. I did the smart thing and left, taking the last commercial flight out of Israel, and I went to Switzerland. The war started a few hours before I landed at the Atlanta airport.

That always stuck with me. God will call home His ambassadors before the Day of the Lord, before Satan unleashes his death blows on the world. We don’t know when that will be, but until we are called home, either raptured or naturally, we need to do the work that God has prepared for us in advance. Through prayer, the Holy Spirit will reveal what that is for each one of us. And to God be the glory!