I've hit this topic of offense towards God in recent posts, but I feel the need to go after it again for the sake of reminding myself that blaming God will never enable me to carry what I cry out for. Why? Because there are these hurdles of offense that we must overcome to come into a greater anointing. You must be able to bear up under the weight of the pressure that comes with the anointing you're asking for. To be able to bear up under the call that God releases upon you is huge because He will not bless you with something that will crush you. In Matthew 15 there's this amazing story of a Greek woman who comes to ask Jesus to do a miracle for her demon posessed daughter. Jesus answers her twice with what sounds like a cruel rejection. I'm not giving the children's bread to dogs, He says. What does she do? She goes right over the hurdle of offense and says, but even the crumbs from the table are given to the dogs. And Jesus goes WOW. He's so impressed that He makes sure that her story is told forever as a high water mark of how to do life. Understand that when Jesus said what He said to this woman that He did not intend to heal her daughter. He wasn't being deceptive and doing reverse psychology.

It was her ability to deal with issues of the heart where she refused to live with personal offense that qualified her for an expression of the Kingdom BEFORE HER TIME. (Please read that again until it soaks in.)

She wasn't a Jew and Jesus was supposed to pour Himself out for the Jews, be rejected by them, so that the Gentiles may be brought in. In refusing to be offended, she brought into her day a New Testament reality. The age to come is available for those who will overcome this hurdle of offense and refuse to live angry at what they don't understand.

"Well I don't know why this happened." And you probably won't. It will be explained later and that needs to be ok with you. God is releasing this to us in this day because He's trying to condition us to come into the stewardship of something really significant. We are forced to live with questions that we do not have answers for. Are you willing to live without answers? Can you live with mystery and not cancel out the revelation? It doesn't mean there are no answers? It means that things don't get solved by what you understand.