God, all at once? (the soap bottle analogy)

August 30, 2002

i really find it interesting how God has been speaking to me lately, just through the ordinary things in life.

i was refilling some of the soap bottles in the house this morning because they were completely empty, so i looked around the house for the big momma refill bottle so i could fill them up. anyway, eventually i found it and i began to proceed filling up the empty soap bottles.

seems pretty normal doesn't it? well it was, but i was thinking about what i was doing, i felt it was another one of those 'special moments'. have you ever looked at soap bottles carefully? the top of the bottles are different shapes and sizes. some of the openings of the top are larger than others, some smaller than others. in any case, they allow soap to be poured into it (or for that matter, any other type of liquid). but that's besides the point. and so i started pouring the soap from the big momma bottle into the little one. it actually took quite some time, and i began to get a bit impatient so i tried to make the process run faster. but i couldn't. there was only so much soap that the little opening could handle and if i had squeezed the bottle to make the soap pour faster, it would have overflowed!

so what's that have to do with anything? it's like this. you know how we all want to know God more? and sometimes, it's like, why doesn't just God show us everything all at once? there's a lot of answers to that, but one of them is this: we can't handle it. we're not ready for it. there really is so much that we could take. and God knows our limits. He knows how much we can handle, and so He reveals that much of Himself to us. i'm sure as we grow in our walk with the Lord, He will reveal more of Himself to us because then we will be ready for it. however, all the while, God has SO much that He could reveal to us. but He just can't cuz we can't handle it.

likewise, we're like those little soap bottles. with different sized openings and we can only handle so much before we start overflowing. and God's like the big momma bottle, with all the reserves all set to go to pour into us, but He controls the flow because He knows how much we can handle! :)

i thought that was pretty cool how God laid that one on me today :)

Posted by Leo Chan at August 30, 2002 1:45 AM