Thank you God for exposing my sin and self-righteousness. Thank you for reminding me that I'm just a broken and beat up soul in need of your mercy and grace. Thank you for seasons of being out of sync with routines and normalcy. Thank you for rock bottom where I can get real and stomp on all my pretentious masks. Thank you for the freedom to have no hope but the grace of God.
When my daughter was in tears over her frustration about not being able to keep her room picked up, I shared with her how I understand. The Mt. Everst-sized pile of laundry I had avoided all week was in plain view for both of us. I told her that I didn't know what to do, but that Jesus said,"Come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden...take my yoke upon you and learn of me...and I will give rest to your souls." While she and her brother were drifting off to sleep I sang, “Come Unto Me” by Jami Smith.
Come unto Me, all you who are weary.
Come unto Me, all you who need rest.
Take up My yoke and learn all about me and I will give you rest.
It made me cry.
I cried more after I got in the bed and started re-reading a great book. I've never been more "ripe" to read The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning. Here's an exerpt from the beginning:
"The Ragamuffin Gospel was written with a specific reading audience in mind...it was written for the bedraggled, beat-up and burnt-out...
"It is for the wobbly and weak-kneed who know they don't have it all together and are too proud to accept the handout of amazing grace...
"It is for the inconsistent, unsteady disciples whose cheese is falling off their cracker...(That made me laugh.)
"It is for the poor, weak, sinful men and women with hereditary faults and limited talents...
"It is for the bent and the bruised who feel that their lives are a grave disappointment to God...(I had to raise my hand on that one.)
"It is for the smart people who know they are stupid and honest disciples who admit they are scalawags...
The Ragamuffin Gospel is a book I wrote for myself and anyone else who has grown weary and discouraged along the way."
--Brennan Manning
That's good stuff. The crux, so far, is that though we're so very flawed, we are absolutely accepted by God.
I've been reading in Galatians and thinking on the good, good news that we are justified by faith and faith alone. Galatians 2:15
By faith, not works we access His presence. By faith, not good behavior, we can enjoy Him and allow Him to enjoy us. By faith, not by earning it, we can access His provision for our lives.
The troubles come when we put more focus on what we've done wrong than on what He has done to make things right. Nothing we can do can outweigh His finished work on the cross. It's not like the scales are tipping and our relationship with God is in the balance. It is tough, though, when the enemy tells us that lie everyday--he's got some pretty convincing arguments and we stumble so often...
We may each feel that we're a disappointment to God and that we've already exhausted His patience, but the TRUTH is that we will never exhaust His grace and that His mercies are new every morning and that we STILL have access to "every spiritual blessing in Christ (Eph. 1:3)." Our opinions of ourselves may change like the shifting of shadows, but there is no shadow of turning in Him.
So, what's the application, right? How do we live this out. Well, I'm still trying to figure that one out, but what I've gotten so far is that our focus and thoughts determine EVERYTHING. If I'm agreeing with the enemy in my thoughts and words then I'm empowering him and souring my own existence by coloring everything with a shade of failure and a sense of being a disapointment to God, but if I'm agreeing with God that He has justified me and that it is not contingent on my behavior, then I'm able, by faith, to tap into Heaven's reality. I can, by faith, KNOW His love and acceptance even in the midst of what I percieve to be failure. First forgiveness and then "right living."
As humans, we probably tend to want to address our behavior first. "As soon as I get my act together I'll be happy and be able to hear God's voice again and know that He's pleased with me." But the reality is that we are qualified by Jesus to hear God's voice now and know that He is pleased with us now even if our behavior isn't what we think it should be.
So, rather than trying to pull ourselves up by our boot straps AGAIN, we've got to trust, rest, wait (Psalm 37) on God and get our thinking straightened out. The behavior isn't stressing God out. He already dealt with our crappy behavior when Jesus died for us on the cross. Jesus said our work is this: "Just believe."
As a Christian, my aim needs to be in getting my thoughts lined up with God's reality. That happens in the Word, but not in just with words on a page. The reality can only hit when we come to Jesus the person and He reveals His truth to us.
Barry's good advice to me during this "down" season has been for me to meditate on scriptures like Phil. 4:13 "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" and to focus on what's going right instead of on what's going wrong. That's so hard to do when you feel beat down. It feels ludicrous to say, "I can do all things through Christ" when you can't even seem to get your bed made up or cook a meal. But, there's more power in the TRUTH that there is in the mere "facts" of our circumstances.
Another cool thing the Holy Spirit has been reminding me of is that the gifts of faith and repentance are for right now--at the present moment. If I'm feeling mopey-popey and defeated and God's given me the grace to see that, then I can change my thinking (repent) deliberately on the spot and by faith, I can choose to rejoice and begin to thank God for what's going right and to the best of my ability correct my behaviors so that they line up with truth and goodness.
The moment I see sin I can repent and by faith in Christ I can change. That's awesome! Because of the cross, I can completely bypass the "frying pan episodes" of trying to beat myself up and wallow in my failure. I can know that it's paid for and that faith and repentence are for NOW. That's good stuff!
I've died to sin and it doesn't have the power to control me anymore. I have the gifts of faith and repentance to bring my behavior back in line. I'm free to obey righteousness now, instead of perpetually obeying sin.
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