God has the ability to take the pure chaos of a life filled with divorce, drug addictions, sexual misconduct, mental depression, and every negative experience known to humans, and make a life filled with unending peace and power. He alone has the power to change an unchangeable thing into something that it could never have become by itself. In Finish Me: A Beautiful Revelation of the "Finished" You, Kevin A. Johnson shows that God has a finished plan for our lives, although our imperfect circumstances seem to dictate differently. Just as God took seven days to complete His creation as shown in the Book of Genesis, God works faithfully in the lives of Christian believers to bring them to the "finish" He desires for them. Apostle Johnson demonstrates, through sound wisdom, that the sum total of our lives is not in the way in which our lives might have begun, but is fully discovered in the way in which our lives are finished. He wants us to realize that dealing with the experiences of poverty, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, depression, or rape does not mean that our lives are over. Rather, he implores us to believe that God has a far more perfect finish for us, even though Satan has hit us with such darkened chaos. The author also wishes for us to understand that God has millions of days of continuous sunshine for every infrequent scary and dark moment of our lives. Author Kevin A. Johnson, of Nashville, Tennessee, is a popular speaker and is the author of other books on living a Christian life of vision, purpose, and joy. He is a passionate servant of his God and Savior, Jesus Christ. We must know that even in the midst of our worst chaos, there exists an unseen "supernatural blueprint" of what we are truly meant to become. Kevin A. Johnson's Finish Me: A Beautiful Revelation of the "Finished" You inspires us to believe in and completely accept this truth.

FINISH ME

A BEAUTIFUL REVELATION OF THE "FINISHED" YOUBy Kevin A. Johnson

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2012 Kevin A. Johnson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4772-0261-6

Contents

Introduction...................................................................xiiiOne A Chaotic Beginning.......................................................1Two First Day Christians......................................................9Three Second Day Christians...................................................15Four Third Day Christians.....................................................19Five Fourth Day Christians....................................................23Six Fifth Day Christians......................................................27Seven Sixth and Seventh Day Christians........................................31Eight How to Guard What God Wishes to Finish..................................37Nine Not Everyone Should Be Allowed In........................................43Ten Watch Out for Intimacy Counterfeits.......................................49Eleven Knowing Who Should Be Granted Access...................................53Twelve Whatever You Allow In Is Going to Be Hard to Evict.....................59Thirteen Arming Yourself to Protect the Finished Thing........................65Fourteen Living with God-Breathed Qualities within You........................77Fifteen Recovery Mode.........................................................83About The Author...............................................................89

Chapter One

A Chaotic Beginning

God is able to make the most perfect ending out of the most chaotic and messy beginning.

YOU ARE a beautiful yet unfinished individual. Have you fallen and feel that you cannot get up? Maybe you are a Christian who feels that you have just made the biggest mistake in your walk with God and that there is no hope of recovery. You might just be a person who has been battling a long time with the drug addiction of your past. Or it could be that you have fallen into an adulterous affair and you feel like you just died inside. If you find yourself in the midst of any of these heartbreaking and conscience-rattling experiences and you feel as though you should just put a gun to your head, ending what seems to be an unfixable life, please do not do it! God is able to repair what appears to be beyond fixing. In fact, He remakes things to be as if they had never been broken.

It is so easy for people in today's world to fall down and break into a million pieces. What is far more dangerous, however, is when Satan convinces them to judge themselves right into an early grave because of it. When faithful Christians fall because of a temporary lapse in godly judgment, Satan even convinces some of them that the salvation that God has given them is so weak that one sin destroys it and them. Thus, many Christians never truly come into the full understanding of the awesome depth of God's grace.

Moreover, in the face of their personal failures, they eventually become judge, juror, and executioner of their own existence. Unfortunately, they do not even permit their most passionate defender to come to their rescue and fix their brokenness. They never allow their most-loving God to take them into His strong arms and mend the broken bones of their lives and destiny. How very sad!

God wants all of His Spirit-born children to know that He knows exactly who we are. He is fully aware that even though He has placed His Holy living spirit within us, making us able to fulfill His every command and desire, each of us still wears the ugly body paint of human fallen flesh—which at any time can and will deter us from performing God's most precious will.

When God first found us, He knew what an untidy and ungodly mess we all were. We should not for one moment think that He is unaware of what He discovered when He saved us from the judgment to come. When God saw us from the distant expanse of eternity, He loved us. He adored us even while we were simply common, disorderly dust. God looked past the chaos that our lives were and decided to see the order that He could make of us. He chose us without giving any care to how unfixable we might have appeared to be to others. In truth, God stopped to love us when others ran quickly past us or avoided us. Have we still not figured this out yet?

God loves to begin a most beautiful work of creation right in the face of the most dark and gloomy presence of chaos. Therefore, if we ever feel as though our walk with God has come to a very familiar and chaotic place, let us not give up hope. We must get up out of the dust of emotional anguish by realizing that God has not finished finishing us!

He is the master maker who paints the priceless works of art on the most empty and rough canvases of life. Thus, the chaotic darkness of our failures affords God the opportunity to remake us in ways that are beyond our abilities to think or reason. He makes the loveliest fragrances out of the most pungent, nasty odors of our lives. Hallelujah!

In the book of Genesis, we discover that when God first began the process of creation, nothing but confusion and chaos existed. The Genesis account informs us that the norm was utter darkness and emptiness; there was no distinctive shape or fixed form. What a depressed state!

The Genesis account also says that the Spirit of God was moving and caressing all this chaos. It is almost as though God is not only in love with the wonderful beauty that He can make but also is in love with the chaos that He intends to transform into a beauty that never existed before. This shows us that God is excited about getting His creating hands on the deformed clay of our lives and then shaping and forming it into a sculptured image that shows off His creative power.

The reasons why our God of order chooses to play in the dirt of our chaos are simpler than we would have imagined. The first reason why God chooses to make a play-date with our chaos is that no one else can handle it. God has the ability to take the pure chaos of a life filled with divorce, drug addictions, sexual misconduct, mental depression, and every negative experience known to humans, and make a life filled with unending peace and power. He alone has the power to change an "unchangeable" thing into something that it could never have become by itself. This is what God has done for every Christian on the planet! He turned strangers into His children! He transformed darkened lives into lives of radiant light! In addition, He forged dying sinners into eternally living saints!

The second reason why God loves to perform His greatest creative works in the ugly vacuum of chaos is so that when He has finished, there can be no disputing who performed the work. When God gets through finishing what others have confirmed to have been an impossible project, based upon the material with which He had to work, no one else in heaven or earth can take any credit. God alone reserves the right and deserves the right of all praise for any work that He has done. By using what nobody else can in order to create what nobody else could, He ensures that no one else can ever receive any praise for His works.

This should remind us not to be too hasty to throw away our lives when we have failed somewhere in our lives. We are too quick to give up our walk with God or our walk with humanity because of our own personal failures or the failures of others. We must stop beating ourselves up over every mistake or sin in our lives. We should feel sorrow over these sins and confess them to God, so that we can walk in His forgiveness and in a state of repentance. Let us be confident in the truth that God has not finished working out all the rough edges of our lives. His Holy Spirit is constantly endeavoring to paint out the ugly image of sin from the canvas of our destiny. We are just not finished!

Although we, by the Holy Spirit, have a new and living inner spirit of God's character and order, we have a mind that is still very much chaotic in the way it thinks and functions. Therefore, even though we have a spirit that cries out to know God, we also have a mind that has never known God nor does it even care about the things of God. We have a war raging on the inside of us—pitting God's spiritual order against the chaos of our own defiled minds.

We do not need to panic, however, seeing that we have a God capable of doing for us all that He did against the chaos revealed in chapter 1 of the book of Genesis. According to this biblical record, God took on a chaos that would have been too overwhelming for any of us to have handled, and He created a living and breathing world right in the midst of it. What an awesome God! If God was able perform such a great and impossible feat, then surely He can do it again. He can beautifully create total peace and order within us.

Genesis 1:2 shows us how God manipulated three aspects of chaos, transforming each into something different in nature and appearance. This shows us that within every human life these three aspects of chaos also exist. Since God does His best work in the midst of the worst chaos, it is safe to assume that human chaos does not chase Him away. Rather, it draws His miraculous creative power close to it. In addition, once God has begun to work on our human chaos, He will not stop unless we walk away from His creative process or until He has finished making us into all that He has desired.

The very first aspect of chaos, as seen in Genesis 1, is that of formlessness. This word seeks to describe an existence without shape or structure. This is the reality that God met at the beginning of the creative process. All of us have experienced this aspect of chaos when we had neither any godly shape nor any form of holiness. Some of us might have suffered from some illness that ravaged our bodies and left us with no structure of health on which to rely. On the other hand, it could be that some of us have lost jobs and savings, leaving us in a shapeless world of chaotic depression. Yes, my friends! No matter how we try to avoid the chaos of formlessness, it still manages to find our zip code.

The second aspect of chaos is that of emptiness. This is a lonely and depressing pit, filled with the cries of rejection and hurt. When we suffer this chaotic reality, we lose close and dear friendships. We also feel as though we have lived too long and accomplished too little. We work dead-end jobs for dead-end pay! This leaves us looking up to heaven and wondering why we were even born. Many of us are at this chaotic place right now. We wake up throughout the night with anxiety attacks, as if our hearts are about to explode. What a tremendously gut-wrenching feeling.

This emptiness is that which appeared in the Genesis chapter 1 account. It meant that at the inception of creation there was no life form besides God. Therefore, although God's fullness was present at that time, the emptiness of chaos was still very real. This lets us know that just because God is with us and working within us, it does not mean that we will not go through lonely moments and empty testing in the wilderness. Sometimes we are going to feel as though life has punched us so hard that we have no more creative breath of God within us. Some of us might have experienced a divorce that took away all our confidence, leaving us emotionally wounded and crippled. Some of us have experienced the death of a child or spouse and we feel emotionally abandoned.

If you are one of the many going through this personal hell, please know that you do not have to rescue yourself. God knows where you are and how empty you are. He feels your pain right now! Moreover, He is the master of turning this aspect of earth-shattering chaos into a heavenly altering experience. Do not give up! God is bigger than your present emptiness. He is going to show up if you call to Him. He is going to come and breathe miraculous breath into your deflated life—and inflate your destiny. Call to Him and wait for Him.

The last aspect of chaos, as seen in Genesis 1, is that of darkness. This passage of scripture reveals that there was deep, piercing darkness as God was creating His world. Darkness is the absence of light and direction. It makes our bones ache and our vision small. It seeks to trick our minds into believing that there is no God and that we are utterly alone.

Whether we like it or not, darkness is going to be a traveling companion, always lurking in the shadows of faithlessness and deception. No matter how much light of Jesus we possess, we are going to encounter darkness. This darkness might come in the form of rebellious children, the loss of a job, losing a house, a recurring drug or alcoholic addiction, a cheating spouse, or a life-threatening cancer.

These can be some very scary situations. None of these experiences, however, can make God afraid or make Him run away. Moreover, God can break all our chaotic concerns when we cast them into His miraculous hands. God can make formlessness work for our benefit, because the more we lose form, the more God's presence and power becomes formed within us. In addition, the greater our emptiness, the more attracted God becomes to us. In other words, when we lose all those things that we thought were filling our lives, it is then that God will pour into us the power of His Holy Spirit.

Moreover, the greater the darkness that we encounter, the greater is the light of God that is turned on in our lives. When this powerful light of God turns on, it has a far greater impact than the light energy of the explosion of a million nuclear bombs. God is able to squeeze brilliant beauty out of our ugliest chaos. He hovers over the deep, dark waters of our chaos, always working in the unseen to change the chaotic confusion of our physical world.

We must give our God—the master of negotiating in chaotic situations—all the time that it takes Him to lead our ships through the dangerous passage of chaos and onto the safe shores of a "finished" existence.

Chapter Two

First Day Christians

The start of a thing is not the greatness of it. Rather, it is the finishing of a thing that is its true greatness.

It is my hope that every Christian reading this book becomes completely convinced that God loves us in failure, even as He has loved us when we were living under the control of sin. Chaos in our lives does not mean that God is giving up on fixing our lives. It simply means that He is truly not finished remaking our lives.

In addition, when we, by the power of God, overcome any chaotic situation, let us not think that we have arrived at God's mountaintop of the Finish. We must remain humble in knowing that one victory does not mean that the entire battle is over.

Moreover, we must understand that one great day of spiritual transformation does not mean that transformation occurs in one day. As long as each of us are on this planet, God will still be working on us. We will always be a work in progress—that is, until Jesus returns.

When Jesus returns for us, every believer who has remained in the process of God's making by faith shall become totally transformed into a spirit being that can never again sin. This will be a glorious experience for the unfinished Christian.

Whenever God is at work in a person's life, He takes His time. The truth of this appears in Genesis chapter 1. The days of creation reveal to us that God never rushes the brush stroke when He is painting a glorious picture of creative life and existence. Although He could have finished the universe in one second, He chose to complete it in a span of seven days. Therefore, the valuable lesson to all of us here is that greatness takes time.

In addition, we learn that we must pass through a long and treacherous wilderness process before God can fully use us. God, like any great manufacturer of any safe vehicle, will crash test us in order to ensure that we will work according to His engineering design. Therefore, Genesis chapter 1 teaches us that becoming a "finished" product is never an overnight event.

The seven days of creation act as further proof that our maturity in the spiritual character and power of God (Christ's Image) will take many seasons of testing and sacrifice. We definitely are not going to walk and talk like Jesus overnight. Therefore, each natural day of creation acts as a spiritual illustration of our entire journey of faith and spiritual transformation.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from FINISH MEby Kevin A. Johnson Copyright © 2012 by Kevin A. Johnson. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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