Someone wrote me recently and asked me what the title Altar Survivor meant. She was referring to an article I wrote from one of my books. This is my response to her.
All of us have people who hate us, who would do us harm. We even have people that love us that do us harm. Hurting, and in pain, we have been forsaken for dead. However, God was good to us and allowed us to survive on an altar prepared for our demise. The altar may have been a plan to stop us from college. It may have been a trick to destroy our marriage. It may have been a scheme to ruin us financially. The altar was to be where you would be sacrificed and your life taken away from you.
You did not go there willingly and if you survived, you will never forget. But it is also a place of grace and mercy. It is where you can experience the love of God and understand more fully how He protects those that are His. It is a placed that if survived, you can leave it confused, but yet encouraged. Confused, because you do not understand why you had to experience the pain, but encouraged because you were saved anyhow.
Isaac, even though loved by his father, Abraham, was put on an altar by Abraham to be sacrificed at the request of God. The testing of Abraham's faith came at the expense of Isaac's well-being. Life is like that too many times. It took decades for Isaac to get over the pain of his father almost killing him. However, the lesson to be learned was that Isaac had survived a brutal experience on the altar and even though he escaped physically, mentally he spent too many years lying on the altar he survived.
If you have been on an altar that introduced a struggle into your life that you cannot seem to shake, you too can feel the plight of Isaac. Here is what you should always remember. It is not you that belongs on the altar, but rather, the struggle . As long as you stay on the altar and feel sorry for yourself (better known as a pity party) nothing gets better. It is not until you get down off the altar, leave the pain and anger behind (forgive) and move on with your life that a bad experience can be turned into a good one.
n Genesis the Fiftieth Chapter , Joseph, in effect, told his brothers – you tried to kill me. You put me on an altar and left me for dead. You robbed me of my parents, my youth, my peace and my freedom. But what you meant for evil, God meant it for good.
Joseph got down off the altar and became the deliverer of a nation. Isaac got down off the altar and became a deliverer of a family that would birth a nation.
Get down off the altar and become the change agent needed to deliver a generation. It is time to use your pain to the benefit of your ministry to others. But you can't do it lying on the altar. Get down from off it and stand before it. Turn you altar from a place of sacrifice to a place of worship. Be a true Altar Survivor that turns complaint into praise.
