SteemChurch: The Three Valleys

Crisis situations usually surprise us because they come without warning and tear the plan to pieces. You have more or less programmed life and a disease, a diagnosis, a financial problem, it completely blurs you.
On many occasions the crisis is related to a valley that we must cross until we reach the other shore, a sign of having survived the situation.

I have had to cross these valleys many more times than desired by me. That is why I can tell you about it with authority, because I come from there, to cross deserts.

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Throughout this message I will guide you through three valleys, to each of them I know them very well and I want you to be able to identify them and discover that each crisis has a purpose. That will help you to travel the road faster.

The secret is to know how to differentiate them and not confuse them.

To the first, "the valley of tears" you will go alone, life takes you there, and you must cross it. The second, "the valley of death", God himself will take you. The third and last, "the valley because of the anointing," will come because of your calling, of your ministry.

The valley of tears

I called this first "the valley of tears" because it is the passage through pain.

The word says: "Blessed is he who dwells in your temple, for he is always praising you. Blessed is he who has in you his strength, who only thinks of walking your paths. When it passes through the Valley of Tears it becomes a region of springs; also the early rains cover the valley with blessings "(Psalm 84: 4-6).

Many of us have had to cross this first valley. It emerges in the path of people who, after a traffic accident, find themselves mired in sadness and have had to change priorities in their lives. People who have lost children and entire families. So, suddenly, overnight, one finds an episode like this where the Lord says: "Happy is he who can go through a valley of tears, and pain, when so many questions arise and there are so few answers, it can transform that sadness in blessing, and still learn something ».

I have known men of God who pray for healing and they themselves have had to cross the threshold of death because of the disease. Then the question arises: "Does God protect me?" Yes, God protects you, but he values ​​eternal life, independently of the fact that in his sovereignty he makes decisions that we can not or do not understand.

If we believed that God always heals and always works miracles, funerals should never be performed. We would not have to give condolences or words of consolation to a person who lost a loved one. That does not necessarily mean that that person lacked faith or that a curse came to the family. The Lord tells us that we will have to cross valleys of tears and transform them into springs of blessing.

My parents are old people and I know that at last I will have to dismiss them. God has not promised me that they will stay for eternity or that they will be immortal. The logical thing is that when they have to leave, I have to cry.

There is a woman in our congregation who lost her sister in Argentina as a result of an illness that snatched her from one month to the next. She asks herself: "Why does something like this happen when we believe in a God of power?" My question is different: "How many have experienced physical miracles, not only in their own bodies, but in the lives of loved ones because of prayer?" Surely it has happened to you. This gives us the pattern by which we believe in miracles.

Sometimes there are valleys of tears to go through, not only because of an illness, but because of a son who is not as smart as you would like and suffers from some syndrome. Moms cry when they realize that their son is not happy with the woman he married. We cry when we face a divorce. There are tears. There is pain.

Crossing the valley is logical, one has to go through the desert. The issue is that there are people who stay to live there, in the valley of tears, and instead of learning something and transform those tears into laughter, they believe that it is a curse and that it did not help at all. We have all been through tears. We all have a sad story to tell. A moment in life that was not the happiest. But God is not only the God of the mountains, but also that of the valleys. The God of the saddest moments.

On one occasion, someone told a king of Israel: "God is with you because you are in the mountains. But if you go down to the lowest place, God will abandon you ». But God declared: "I will also give you victory in the valleys."

Friend, even if you are going through a time of tears, I hope you can find the purpose for which you are spending that moment. Do you remember Sara, who could not give birth to children? When God told Abraham: "Your wife is going to get pregnant," she laughed. And God said: "Sara will have a son who will be called" laughter "». In the original Hebrew, when the name of Isaac is pronounced, it does not literally mean "laughter" but is the onomatopoeia of that word. For example, God told him: «Your son is going to be called: Ha ha ha ha». And every time he called, he said: "Ha, ha, ha, ha, come and eat. Ha, ha, ha, ha, go to study ». Every time Sara named him, she was forced to laugh.

At the moment we are crossing the valley of tears, we can not see what God is bringing into our hands. Those who write the story never know they are doing it. None of the great heroes of history knew that he was writing an important page of the history book.

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When Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son; when Noah raised the animals in the ark two at a time; When each one of them went through difficult situations, they will have asked themselves: «What now?». They did not imagine that God had a panoramic view of their lives and that they were writing history.

But the questions also arise in our interior: «And now what? After this, how do I recover? How do I get up? How do I live? I do not think I can recover after what has just happened to me ».

Do you remember the drawings of children's books in which you must join the numbers with lines and at the end you see a finished image? Life has a lot of dotted lines to join. But it is likely that when you are crying in front of a coffin and want to draw a dotted line to the future, you do not know where to draw it. Because in that moment of the valley of tears it is difficult to join the points forward.

Years later, when you are living a victory, you will draw the dotted line backwards and it will take you towards that place of pain, towards that moment when you thought that you had not learned anything, but then you will understand that it served for something.

Many years ago, at the company where I worked, they accused me of being a thief. I was unjustly detained for a whole night. He had not stolen anything, he never would have. However, the owner told me: «You stole me», and deprived me of my freedom. That night was very cold, I do not know if it was intentional or nobody noticed, but they turned on the air conditioning in the room where he was locked. I was dead of cold! I did not know what to cover myself with. To all that, my wife did not know where I was, I thought she had disappeared. All night I was locked up praying and crying.

At that time, I first became angry with God. Then I said: "After all, if things are good for something, I'm sure this is not going to help me at all." The Bible says: "We know that God arranges all things for the good of those who love him, those who have been called according to his purpose" (Romans 8.28). I was so angry and so cold, I thought that this experience was not going to help me at all.

The next day, after such torture, I signed my resignation, I wanted to go home and look for a little warmth. It was my most painful moment. My wife was waiting for me on the balcony of the apartment in which we lived, we were newlyweds. It was raining I got off the bus, had a two-day beard for not shaving, and walked leaning. She saw me and started crying.

That day God broke me. I recognize that a while ago I had been calling to serve you and I was deaf, probably used a painful situation of tears (in which all Christians who knew me said: "stole") to work on me.

The valley of death
"The hand of the LORD came on me, and his Spirit took me and placed me in the middle of a valley that was full of bones" (Ezekiel 37.1).

There is another valley where God himself takes you. It is not a desert where your daily life took you. It is not a valley caused by an illness, by a death. It is a valley, a desert, to which God takes you for a definite purpose.
When God wants to place you in the middle of a valley of death, as he did with Ezekiel. But there was a purpose. There you do not go because you were wrong, because you did something bad, but because God wants to contaminate life where there is death.

When I was invited to pastor a church, everyone said it was a dead church. In my interior I asked the Lord:

«Why did I get here?». His response was: "You did not arrive, I put you there because I will bring life," my life, "to that place," and in a short time we became thousands.
Never curse the company where you work. God put you in the middle of dry bones, that have no life, with a purpose. At one point Ezekiel said: "He made me walk among them, and I could see that there were many bones in the valley, bones that were completely dry. And he said to me: "Son of man, can you revive these bones?" And I replied: "O LORD almighty, you know it" »(vv 2-3).

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They were not corpses, they were bones, and God asked him if he believed that those bones could live. The prophet's response would determine what would happen next.

That's why I think it's necessary to ask you the same question. When you look at your broken marriage, when you say that there is no more solution, the Holy Spirit encourages me to ask you: "Do you think your marriage can be revived?"
When you declare: "I am totally in debt, I have no way out, I can never get out of debt" I have to ask you: "Do you think your dead finances can live?" It is the question that God always asks you: "Do you think you can be healthy? Then, be healthy. "

God told Ezekiel: "Prophesy on these bones, and say to them, 'Bones dry, listen to the word of the LORD! Thus says the LORD Almighty to these bones: 'I will give you the breath of life, and you will live again. I will put sinews on them, I will make flesh come out, and I will cover them with skin; I will give them the breath of life, and thus they will revive. Then they will know that I am the LORD '"(verses 4-6).

God could have done it himself, but he told his servant to prophesy. Go ahead and prophesy about the dry bones that surround your life. While Ezekiel did what God told him, a noise was heard that shook the earth, and the bones began to unite with each other. Tendons appeared, and flesh came out and covered themselves with skin, but they had no life!

Then the Lord said: «" Prophesy, son of man; conjure the breath of life and say to him: 'This commands the LORD Almighty: Come from the four winds, and give life to these dead bones so that they may revive.' " I prophesied, as the LORD commanded me, and the breath of life entered into them; then the bones revived and stood up. It was a numerous army! "(Verses 9-10).

Have you let the dream that God has given you die? Have you buried it and have a grave instead of a vision? Is your marriage no longer alive? God tells you that he brought you to that crisis, to that valley of dry bones, which will remain dry until you stop in the middle of death and prophecy looking at the documents that you can not pay or the letter from the bank that wants to take the house away from you. Go to the door of the company that is going to close and prophesy that the doors will open only because you are there.