How can you function well, with intentionality, and with meaning…?
… if you don’t move?
Flipping through my journal, the pages gently fell open to what I had written one year ago this week, July 14, 2021, and that is the question I asked myself.
I had scribbled “Acts 17:28” with no explanation of what led me to read that part of the Bible but underneath it was the words, “In Him we live, and move, and have our being”, followed by the word kineó that took up three rows of space on my lined paper instead of one.
Kineó is found in the New Testament, including Acts 17:28 and this Greek word means to move, move forward, move on.
“Certainly, we live, move, and exist because of Him.”(GW)
“We live in God; we move in God; we exist in God.” (Voice)
“It is through Him that we live, and function, and have our identity.” (TPT)
Those translations of Acts 17:28 I had written in my journal; followed by the questions you read at the beginning of this post.
How can I function if I don’t kineó? If I don’t move?
You know move is used in many ways:
Move forward.
Move away.
Move in.
Move your body.
Move over.
Move on.
Move again.
Move anyway.
Move up or down.
Remove.
Move forward is the kineó that spoke the loudest to me that thunderstorming, summer evening. I continued to journal, asking what you may also be asking yourself: in my life, does that mean to move on from what used to be? Move forward and welcome renewal or change, or take a step and move into the unknown with faith? It could also be God gently telling you to move away from what if’s, poor choices, the need for approval, and the desire for comfort more than the desire for faith.
I want to never want to stay the same – God creates our souls to want and need continuous growth, strengthening our faith, relationships, and souls. Lord, please help us kineó closer to You. Set things in motion and encourage us to do our part. Stir up things that have become dormant, lifeless, and stagnant. Move us to move forward with open arms, acceptance for change, and with excitement that comes from Your Spirit when we trust You.
And here’s the heart of God: when I finished my journal-writing that July evening last year, I looked out the window and this is what I saw.
It was an obvious sign, a visible promise from Him that He will move with me, and you, as we move forward.
But y’all, it’s not until I looked at this photograph after I took it did I see the second rainbow. I couldn’t see it with my own eyes. It was the invisible God telling me what I see ahead of me is not all that I can see; sometimes God’s revelations must be seen when we’re looking through a different lens – through a desire to see things the way God sees them.
One year later, I can now see how God has been preparing me to kineó – to live, and move forward, and know my identity in this time and place where I am right now.
What about you? Can you think back to a year ago and look where you are now and see the ways God has moved you to live and have a fuller identity of who you are? With a deeper relationship, a new job, a specific choice or decision, a renewed calling, and purpose?
Maybe you’ve been longing to move forward or move on from something that’s been holding you back or down. That thing that holds you captive from functioning with joy. Friend, remember that God, Who “made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth…He himself gives all people life and breath and everything else…and he determined the times set for us and the exact places where we should live. God did this so that we would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:24-28)
Yes. Every. Single. One of us has the gift to live and move and have our being WITHIN Jesus. Whether we’re feeling moved to move forward or feeling moved to move nowhere right now, we are still created in His image – God the Creator of all things - is also intimately close with you and me, when we believe and live in Him.
Kineó!
Beth Hildebrand
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