This morning’s word is What the Designer Built In.
The anchor verses are Matthew 11:28 and Exodus 15:26.
Last week researchers published a study showing that bumblebees can pass a cognitive test once thought to belong to chimpanzees, elephants, and large-brained birds. Named for German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler, the test involves figuring out how to manipulate objects to reach an out-of-reach treat. Köhler called this insight learning. For over a century, scientists thought it required a large brain.
In the new experiments, published in the journal Science, untrained bumblebees were given a Styrofoam ball and a reward they could not reach. On their own, without being taught the solution, about eighty percent of them rolled the ball into position, climbed on top of it like a stepstool, and reached the treat. The lead researcher called it a first for an insect with a brain the size of a sesame seed. He had not expected the bees to solve it, and certainly not spontaneously.
This is striking. For as long as we have studied bumblebees, they have been carrying this capacity inside them. We just did not know to look for it. The bee was not taught it. The bee did not develop it on the spot. The capacity was already there, woven in by whoever wove the bee.
This is the rhythm of the daily word here at Grace and Peace Studio. Each morning, readings get gathered from several sources and walked until they reveal the single thread they have been weaving. This morning’s come from three. Katie Hauck Ministries, Day Five of “You Are NOT GOD!,” a teaching called “Flip the Script.” A new sixteen-day plan that opens today, “Does God Heal Today?,” establishing Scripture’s consistent witness that GOD has always healed. And Ignatius of Antioch, the second-century bishop and martyr who wrote seven letters on his way to Rome and execution, here in the closing of his letter to the Magnesians.
Read together, they point at the same thing the bumblebee just showed the world.
Katie Hauck, a Bible teacher who writes on the life of faith, names the trick the enemy has been playing on us for our whole lives. He has flipped two truths upside down. He has convinced us that we should have GOD’s attributes that belong to GOD alone. Control. Justice. Understanding. And at the very same time, he has convinced us that we cannot have the attributes that actually are ours. Joy. Peace. Rest. Love. Mercy. Patience. Goodness.
Hauck calls these the communicable attributes of GOD. She lists the Scripture passages where they are promised to us: love in 1 John 4:8, peace in John 14:27, joy in Nehemiah 8:10, mercy in Luke 5:36, patience in 2 Peter 3:9, goodness in Psalm 34:8, rest in Matthew 11:28. These are part of our spiritual DNA, she writes, placed there when the Holy Spirit came to live inside us.
Then she writes the sentence that lands: “You do not have to chase them down. You do not have to earn them. They are yours.”
This is the same teaching the bumblebee has been carrying around its whole life. The capacity was always there. The Designer wove it in. The job was never to invent it. The job was to discover it, to trust it, and to use it.
The new Does God Heal Today plan asks a related question. Day One walks through Scripture’s consistent witness that GOD has always been the healer. Exodus 15:26 names HIM directly: “I am the Lord God who heals you.” Psalm 103:2-3 says HE heals all our diseases. The Gospels record twenty-seven individual healings by Jesus. Acts 10:38 sums up the whole ministry: “Jesus healed because God was with Him.”
The Designer who built in the bumblebee’s capacity is the same Designer who built in our capacity to receive HIS love, HIS peace, HIS joy, and HIS rest. The same Designer heals what has been broken in us. None of this is being invented from scratch. All of it is being uncovered.
Ignatius writes that we should “study, therefore, to be established in the doctrines of the Lord and the apostles,” so that all things we do prosper in flesh and in spirit. The word he chooses is “established.” Not informed. Not aware. Established. Rooted. The capacity is yours. The establishment in the capacity is the work of staying close to the truth long enough to live from it.
This is what today is for. Stop trying to acquire what GOD has already placed in you. Stop letting the enemy convince you that joy is unrealistic, peace is impossible, or rest is irresponsible. Stop reaching for the things that belong to GOD alone, and start receiving the things HE has built into you for this very moment.
The bumblebee did not have to become a chimpanzee to solve the puzzle. You do not have to become anyone other than who GOD made you to be in order to live what HE has already placed in you.
The capacity was always there. The Designer built it in.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.