DARK DAYS ARE FOR HIS GLORY!
(by E. H. Maze)
Chapter 2
Sprained - Dark Days can come in the middle of the day!
For this next miracle I will
have to first beg your forgiveness by skipping the last twenty years. I promise, on the other hand, to offer the
history of my life (that lead up to the event I am about to tell you) later in
this chapter. There are a few miracles
back there that are necessary for you to learn about and, I dare say, were
essential to my being in a place to receive the miracle I lay before you
now. As you read the following “word”
from the Lord, I am confident that you will understand what I mean when I say
that Dark Days (and, therefore, miracles) can come in the middle of the day. Even though this “word” came to me at two
o’clock in the morning, it refers to an event that happened to me at eleven o’clock in the
morning – right in the middle of a
The Word of the Lord came to
me, saying:
“Do you remember when your
ankle was sprained? You were my young
servant, your heart was filled with desire, but your heart was also filled with
weakness. That sprained ankle caused you
to walk with a lack of faith. You hobbled
up and down the altar week after week, limping and crying, thinking you were
sacrificing through your pain as a witness of me. Then, I showed you that your lack of faith
bought into the lie that you might always be crippled, that a sprained ankle is
worse than a break, and that you might never be able to walk uprightly again.
Do you remember the day I
rebuked you, telling you that you were not walking in faith? I called you to be healed, but first you were
to repent before my people to show them that I am not honored by anything but
your best. You repented before your
people and me, and then I directed you to have hands laid upon you to be
healed. Do you remember that day? I healed your ankle immediately and you were
leaping and laughing. Was not your ankle
stronger than it had ever been? Have you
had any problem with that ankle since that day?
I did a permanent, finished work in you.
Today, I rebuke you for your
sprained heart. You limp as badly on
your heart as you did on that ankle.
Everyone sees your limping heart and it does not honor me. You cannot hide how crippled you have become
and it is not to My advantage that you make people
feel sorry for you and your bruised heart.
It doesn’t matter how your heart has been broken. It doesn’t matter who, what, when, where or
why. All that matters is that now I call
you to repent and to confess to your people that you have shown a lack of faith
and have believed a lie that you must carry that pain in your heart
forever. If you will confess this and
ask publicly for hands to be laid upon you, I will heal your sprained heart.
I will do this for you
because I love you. But, I will do this
so that others might know that the things that have crippled them do not need
to continue. I will heal those who, with
their brokenness in their hands as a sacrifice, come to me. I will make their hearts stronger than
ever. If they will humble themselves,
confess their weak faith, repent before my people, then, I will heal them.
Do not choose to remain
broken and crippled, hoping that your suffering will somehow honor Me. What will honor
me is for you to walk in wholeness. So,
come to me and receive your new heart.”
Let me put these two events
together for you. The first event was
the time I sprained my ankle at youth camp.
The second (the sprained heart) occurred twenty years later and was the
impetus for writing this book..
One day I was a brand new Christian and (it
seems like) the next day I was a Youth Pastor taking teenagers to summer
camp. What did I think I was
doing?! Nevertheless, I was as excited
to be a leader. I was going to be a
great leader! Billy Graham, watch
out! Thirty minutes later, I sprained my
ankle while we were playing basketball.
Registration wasn’t even open and I was at the nurse’s station. The diagnosis: A sprained ankle. I was shocked! Not because I sprained my ankle, but because
everyone (even the nurse) told me that a sprain was worse than a break. My ankle could be like that forever. I limped around on crutches the entire week
of camp.
When I got back home, where I
was responsible for leading worship on Sundays and Wednesdays, I was a
mess. I lost the crutches after a week,
but the pain in my ankle nearly immobilized me.
It was all so inspiring to some people.
I got a lot of “thata boy” from so many
good-hearted people as I hobbled up and down the steps of the platform week
after week. The pain was unbearable, but
I thought I was doing God a favor working through the pain. One morning, after limping my way down to the
front row of pews, I heard the voice of the Lord. It wasn’t a good voice. It was king of like when someone clears their
throat to get your attention and then looks down at you, where you discover
that your fly was unzipped the whole time.
Only, of course, this was worse. God tore into me. If God has never
tore into you, you may not understand what I
mean. We Christians call it a rebuke, so
that is what we will call it now. But,
it was a butt-kicking from the Lord, just the same.
In essence, I was thinking
that I was witnessing for Him, using my pain as a point of reference. Yes, my heart was right (sort of) but my
witness was not right. God had something
better in store for His church and I was hindering Him by my pain.
That moment, in the clearness
of a Sunday morning, was one of the darkest days of my life. I was going to have to stand up in front of
nearly three hundred and fifty people and tell them I was a phony. I was to tell them that God wasn’t pleased
with my “suffering for Him” and that I needed to repent before them. He told me to interrupt the Pastor’s sermon,
beg for forgiveness and ask for hands to be laid upon me for healing.
You don’t always know that
it’s dark until the light shines. And,
you don’t always know when that light is going to shine until it comes on.
A sprained ankle was keeping
me from leading God’s people into true worship.
The problem wasn’t the sprain in my ankle; it was a sprain in my
faith. I thought I was doing God a favor
by working through my pain - yet all the time He was not willing to bless me
when I limped up and down the platform thinking I was giving Him all the
glory. I didn’t even know it was a dark
day until He told me so.
I obeyed. To obey is better than sacrifice, isn’t
it? I repented, asked the Pastor to pray
for me and “Poof!” my ankle was healed.
Instantly! In the twinkling of an
eye! I was like the lame man in the
Bible who went leaping and jumping and praising God.
The physical miracle was the
healing of my ankle, but the greater work (the real miracle) was that He had
established an area of Lordship in my life.
Before that I had never a doubt in His ability to heal.
But, that day, I discovered that I can only claim my healing because it
is His purpose. I was not walking in
faith. He settled that immediately. Once settled, I could walk again. He didn’t have to heal my ankle to prove His
point. He could have rebuked me and made
me pay for my lack of faith with a permanent limp. I would have settled for that, because I have
always trusted Him. But, He had a plan
when He healed my ankle.
The ultimate goal of His work
in me that day was to use that sprained ankle to heal a bigger need in my life
twenty years later.
A sprained heart was holding
back the anointing in my life. I thought
that everyone should feel sorry for me because, well, they should just feel
sorry for me. When I came to the Lord, I
spent twenty-five years trying to be a living witness of how God could use a
pitiful, needy person such as me. Well,
He was not glorified by that in the least.
So, one night He woke me up and explained to me how my sprained heart
could be healed just like my sprained ankle.
It was that simple. I will never
be the same again.
This is how I was before that
2:00am meeting:
The
Old Heart
This is how I felt while He
was speaking to me:
A New
Heart
This is what happened to me
the moment I received His truth:
A
Clean Heart
God wants to
create in you a clean heart. The heart
becomes dirty in the dark. When the
heart is dirty (with sin, sadness, depression, etc.) it doesn’t function
properly. To put it in spiritual terms,
if your heart is “sprained” (like mine was) it doesn’t know how to reason. The heart can control the mind and,
therefore, the emotions. The heart can
bring great darkness into your life to match its own dark nature. The only hope is to have the light shine upon
the heart. Once the heart is open to
what God wants then the mind, will and emotions will automatically follow. Your mind, will and emotions will follow your
heart. That is why the scripture says in
That bears
repeating: A person with a heart fixed
on God
will have a fixed heart!
Right now –even in
the midst of this dark moment – receive a clean heart from the Lord. To receive a “new” heart will require of
you only one thing: Listening to Him
whispering in your ear. The moment that
you hear Him the miracle happens.
Did you hear that?
What are your dark days
like?
Dark days can be seen in two
different ways:
1. You are walking in the Lord, but not walking
in the Light of His Word. In other
words, you are not walking in the way He wants for you. It doesn’t matter whether the road you are on
is leading to dark days or the road is already darkened by “how” you have been
walking.
Some would suggest that dark
days are caused by events of the past: drugs, depression, divorce, job-loss,
etc. To some extent, that may be
true. But, the reality is that you are
facing dark days - Does it really matter how you got there? Maybe someday, when you are able to sit down
and think about it, or talk to someone about it, it might help you to go back
and retrace your steps to see if there are things you can do different now, but
I don’t really see how that will help.
You see, once you have seen the light and can get back on the right path,
the only thing looking back can do for you is to drudge up the old dark
steps. Of course, you want to learn from
your mistakes, but you want to learn from them going forward not backward.
2. The second kind of Dark Days are the ones
where you are so lost that all you have left is to cry for mercy (in the
midnight hour). I have been there many
times. Some of those times have been
less significant than others and some have been totally life-altering.
Sometimes, I was able to see
the victory during daytime (when the sun was shining, but my heart was
darkened). At other times, the victory
came in the middle of the night – literally at 2 or 3 o’clock in the
morning. There have been nights when I didn’t think I
could take another day, when my world was crumbling, when all hope was lost,
when my plans were failing, when everyone around me was getting on with life,
but I couldn’t. A popular book came out several
years ago called “God Works the Night Shift” by the late Ron Mehl. In my case, it
seems that He works only the night shift.
Where He is during the daylight hours I can only guess (I know He is
with me always), but I am certainly glad that He can find me in those wee hours
of the morning when my spirit is quiet and my need is greatest.
The Dark Days of my life have turned out to be my greatest moments because they brought me to a
desperate need to meet the Friend who, in the darkest part of the night, has
come to me with a Word to revive me. I have
grown more in the few moments sitting up in the darkness surrounding my bed and
listening to the Lord than I have in the many years of preaching, listening to
preaching and taking advice from my friends.
Of course, my friends would continue to advice me that if I had listened
to them, none of that darkness would have ever happened, but I think they are a
bit full of themselves - don’t you think?
I am certainly glad that He
can find me in those wee hours of the morning when my spirit is quiet and my
need is greatest.
Anyway, the point is to allow
the Lord to turn your dark days into brighter days. I wish I could tell you that the Lord speaks
to me every night, between the hours of 2:12am and 3:45am (except
Saturdays). And I wish I could tell you
that your dark days could be over tonight if you would prepare yourself for it
this evening. Go to bed early, here He
comes. Actually, I could tell you that -
it just might not be true. But, this I
can say; for me and for you there is a God who is waiting for you to come to
the place in your darkness where all that you can hear is His voice.
He is waiting for you to come
to a place where all other voices are tuned out. For me, in another time of my greatest need,
it was when I was alone in a hotel room - [Yes, I have been quite the needy child!]. After two years of trying to figure out how
to deal with the worst situation I had ever faced in my life, He met me. And,
another time, it was in a small apartment bedroom (nearly twenty-two years ago)
when the spirit of nicotine had such a grip on me I had to be reminded by the
Lord (at 2am in the morning) that He wanted to be “completely” Lord. I had not realized that those cigarettes had
been a Lord in my life. One other time,
it was in a lighted sanctuary during a morning church service where my limping
in pain with my busted ankle was so agonizing to the Lord that He rebuked me
publicly. Take my advice on this, by the
way; if the Lord wants to rebuke you, would you rather He do it in front of
everyone or in the privacy of a 2:00am rendezvous with the Holy Spirit?
Allow the Lord to turn you
dark days into brighter days.
Let me give you another
example from my own experience how Dark Days can become Brighter Days.
Plain and simple: A spirit of Nicotine ruled in a place where
Jesus wanted to be. What good would it
do for me to suggest that what the Lord wants me to do (or not do) is not the
same as what he might ask you to do (or not do)? With that said, this story (turned miracle)
is not about any judgment toward how a person walks out his own salvation –
what I mean is that I am not making any judgments about smoking, drinking,
etc. The Church creates its own list of
“dos” and “do nots” so I will steer as far away as possible. However, if the Lord uses this story to help
you, then we are the better for it, aren’t we?
I was a brand new
Christian. When I became a Christian, the
Lord seemed to do something special in me – you know what I mean, because He
began doing something special in you the moment you gave your heart to Him. What He did for me was to take away some
pretty nasty habits. With only a few
exceptions (most of which are discussed elsewhere in this book) He did it
immediately. Drinking and drugs, for
instance. From the time I was in Junior
High School I was a heavy drinker and made drug use more than a casual
acquaintance. Then, at the age of 27, I
quit as they, cold-turkey. But, it
wasn’t my decision. It was that same
night when I was reading the book of John.
When I understood the sacrifice that Jesus made for me and how dependant
I had been on drugs and alcohol, the “desire” for those things vanished like
the changing of the wind that would one moment blow from the garbage heap and
then blow from the flower garden. To this
day, I have no craving for either drugs or alcohol.
But, for a reason I didn’t
understand at the time, I couldn’t break one of the nastiest habits (for
me): Cigarettes. If you smoke or ever have smoked then you
know how addicting nicotine can be. It
is an evil monster when you are trying to drop the habit. I still recall the day I drove to town (in
the dead of a winter afternoon snow storm) just to buy a pack of
cigarettes. On the way home I opened the
pack, pulled one cigarette out and threw the rest of the pack into the ditch,
seriously intent that “this will be the last cigarette I ever smoke, Lord. I promise you, this time!” Around midnight I was back in the car,
driving slowly along the shoulder of the road, desperately looking for that
tossed pack. I spent the next month or
two digging for cigarette butts wherever I could find them.
I was about to give up
altogether trying to quit when something “miraculous” happened.
Here is Miracle #2.
Your power is limited
by the degree of Lordship you allow to rule over you!
At two o’clock in the morning
I was awakened by a voice. If this were
a movie I would be forced to convince you that one thing lead to another – that
I didn’t know what was happening at the time, who the
voice belonged to, proving that it was not simply to much pizza the night
before. But, that would be unfair,
because the truth is I knew exactly Who it was. It was that unmistakable voice, that still,
small voice that whispers so gently and loudly at the same time. I answered the voice. Sitting up in my bed, wide awake, dreamless,
I answered.
The conversation went like
this:
“Am I your Lord?”
“Yes,” I
responded, feeling the sting of John’s declaration that He would never deny the
Lord. “You know that I have made you my Lord.”
“You have another Lord besides me.”
I knew that was
coming. I didn’t what I had done to have
this early morning visitation, but I certainly knew I must have deserved it for
one reason or another.
“Lord, I don’t want another Lord.” I didn’t know
what was coming next. I was about to
say, “It can’t be so, Lord!” when I
heard:
“Those cigarettes are a Lord in your life.”
There it was. I couldn’t fight the nasty habit any longer – those cigarettes had become my Lord. Actually, it was the spirit of nicotine that had become my Lord, but I knew that the prince of that spirit was called Marlboro and it was demanding my obedience. I was bound to a controlling spirit and was unable to be free – even though I so desperately wanted to be free.
Only by the power of the Voice that spoke to
me, I made a conscious, personal
and heart-felt decision right there – I wanted to be free of cigarettes.
“I don’t want them to be my Lord. I want You to be my
only Lord!”
It wasn’t that I did not have
the strength or the faith to quit smoking.
My inability to quit smoking was not the problem. The problem was my inability to make Jesus
Lord of everything. In an after-midnight
conversation about Lordship (with the Lord Himself) I realized that I needed to
give Him Lordship over that area. I had
made those cigarettes a Lord – I had given them Lordship over me, therefore,
full power.
So moved by the little bit of faith that stirred my heart, I decided to give Him Lordship over that area of my life. He, in response to my faith, reached down inside and took out the spirit of nicotine, replacing it with His Lordship. I have never craved a cigarette since. I can be in a room of smokers and never feel the urge. I smoked a cigarette, as a joke on a friend, and it never effected me at all - I never choked on it nor did I want another one. It has no power at all over me.
Isn’t that freeing?
The power that Jesus has over
things that are more powerful than us is as simple as reaching in and pulling
them out of us. The tree can’t prune
itself. The body can’t fight cancer by
itself. A spirit (whether you believe in
them or not) can’t be commanded to leave unless you have the power to make it
leave. A peasant can’t run a king out of
his kingdom.
The LORD of your life wants to
be LORD of your whole life. If there are
things that you have not yet received victory over, perhaps it is just a matter
of Lordship.
Those were dark days for me –
when I was trying to quit smoking.
Everyday was filled with guilt and weakness. It wasn’t that I was convinced that I was a
lost sinner because I was smoking
cigarettes. It
wasn’t about smoking, it was about Lordship.
The Lord used my smoking habit to teach me a lesson about Lordship. My lungs were saved from further abuse, and
my heart was cleansed from the ongoing darkness of trying to deal with too many
Lords.
The dark days are not
necessarily our problem. What I mean by
that is that it is not always the things you are going through that are your
problem (if you have one, that is - I certainly don’t want to be counted among
your friends who think you have a problem).
The real problem lies within a greater area of darkness. I’ve said this already, but you should
understand that the darkness of your life is ruled by the darkness of your
heart. There is something about darkness
that runs from the light and finds a place to hide in the heart. Don’t blame the day for the darkness. If
there is darkness, it is only because we have not yet seen the light.
Dark Days are, to me, a
beautiful thing. I don’t want them, but
it seems that the Lord moves within them.
So goes the saying, “It is always darkest before the dawn.” The light is coming! Will you be ready for it? The Bible says of those who reject the light
that they do it because “men loved darkness more than the light.” But, darkness doesn’t have to rule your heart. There is a miracle waiting for you in this
midnight hour. That miracle is “The Light.”
There He is, reaching out in
the darkness for your hand.
You cannot see Him or His
hand, but He can see you.
Feel that slight touch against
your hand?
Feel that flutter in your
heart?
That is Him.
Let Him walk you out of your
“tonight” and He will have breakfast waiting – on the other side of darkness.
Please take the time to read each chapter prayerfully -even if, especially if, you are going through the darkest days of your life.
Please let me know if you have read (and enjoyed) this chapter by sending me a quick email to: ehylandmaze@aol.com
end of Chapter (click here to go to Chapter 3)- if link is not active, the chapter is not yet ready. Check back later, please.
bless you.....................................Eugene H. Maze
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