Friday, December 12, 2014

It's about Him

"Lately I have been evaluating my relationship with the Lord and just trying to get a realistic perspective. Most of the time I find myself either demeaning the place I am at or over glorifying it. However, I want to have sober judgement. I want to know the "spiritual muscles" that I need to exercise as well as the ones that are strong. I think that being honest with ourselves helps us to be more useful to the body of Christ. In this process of re-evaluating strengths and areas that need strengthening I found myself getting really frustrated. As I identify the areas that seriously need more Jesus I also start to try to seek out ways that I can accept God into those places. This seams to be difficult for  a few reasons. I realize fully and believe with my whole heart that God is more real then life itself. I believe this to the point of frustration because I am also unbearably aware of the fact that I fail at giving my life to God at the same measure as I believe that he is real.

I feel like I am beginning to more fully understand what PAUL? felt when he said his flesh does the very thing he doesn't want to do. I walk through life in a battle desiring to give God more and more of my life and yet my flesh continually gets in the way by searching for things that the world says is important. How do I live outside of myself? Everything screams at me pointing at where I should find fulfillment but my soul knows its not truth. How do I walk away from everything that says joy and fulfillment come from worldly love and gain. Instead I must choose to beat my flesh into obedience to the groaning of my soul that is calling on the name of Jesus. I know it can't come from striving and it can't come from pure emotion so how do I move? Abiding in the Father; but how do you rest in God while still taking action?? Chasing God quickly becomes striving and working to become closer to him. How do you continue in relationship even when it is a choice to love and not an emotion? Does being in that place make it less of an intimate relationship? Is it more so that our definition of relationship is what is messed up? Do we have unrealistic perspective of what "relationship" with God actually looks like? Especially in this place of limited human thinking? Because sin is present in the world our relationships and ability to accept/ experience love and intimacy must also be broken. So in reality, is it even possible to not strive within this broken way relationships function?

You see I am stuck in a place of wanting to do more to give God those weak areas of my character but how do I do it with out striving."

These few paragraphs are something I wrote several months ago that I had totally forgotten about until a few moments ago when I decided I should write another post (It has literally been one day under a year since I last posted.) To my surprise, as I logged on,  I found this partial post and as I read it I had to chuckle. I was coming to jot down my thoughts on what God has been doing this last season in my life. The chuckle from reading this old post came because the things God has been teaching me seem to bring a little clarity to those questions. God is funny like that.

The last year of my life has been crazy to say the least. Most people would probably look at my life and think I am serving God and should always feel close to him and proud of my relationship with him. The questions above should be proof that that isn't always the truth.  After staffing my first DTS and getting back from Costa Rica I had learned so much about God's faithfulness. Over this past  summer I was in a leadership school and God wrecked me in so many ways; I accepted more of my true identity in Christ. Even though these things had been hard and sometimes painful lessons to learn I was being stretched and growing. When this fall rolled around and DTS number 2 was soon approaching I started asking God what this season would be about. He started talking about things like looking to Him as my teacher, learning how to minister to others, as well as following the Holy Spirit. I was so jazzed about these things; they sounded beautiful. However as I started to walk into the season I began to feel floaty. I was wondering how to take that deeper step. I didn't understand why I felt like I was hitting a plato in my relationship with God. I didn't know how to take another step forward. You see for over a year God has been talking to me about taking that step..jumping a level...going deeper with him. But, because I had no idea what that meant I kept saying yes but didn't really see anything change. I think I was confused about what "going deeper" looked like. I thought it actually had something to do with me. I was wrong. By this time I had sorta forgotten about those things God said he wanted to teach me. Several weeks went past and I met with an amazing lady who also works with YWAM and was telling her about this "wanting to go deeper" as well as the floaty season I felt I was in. She told me to ask God what this season was about. Immediately my mind went back to those things God had spoken to me. It was a season for learning from him about ministry in the Holy Spirit.

Jump forward several weeks. God was teaching me things like crazy. I was amazed and loving the things I was learning. During the school we had the wonderful Jackie Pullinger come speak for a week. She brought with her a small ministry team. (If you do not know Jackie I highly suggest reading her book "Chasing the Dragon". She has been a missionary in Hong Kong for 50ish years.) She was speaking on the very things God had been teaching me more about. It was a mind blowing week but I started learning things that I didn't expect God to bring up in the midst of learning about "how to minister in the Holy Spirit. Through Jackie's team God started speaking to me about Love. About his love for me about his love for people. This was awesome but I was kinda like, "okay Jesus I know that one why are you taking me back to that lesson." As I started asking that question I also started wrestling around with accepting more of God's love in my own life. Funny how that happens. I saw the areas where I have yet to let his love permeate. As love became something God was talking to me more and more about I started asking Him how love and walking in the Spirit tied together. One night as I was laying in bed God said this to me, "Knowing the power of the Holy Spirit is Knowing love." My mind was blown. I knew that God used the Holy Spirit to show his love but I never thought about it in the terms of misunderstanding God's love also meant I would misunderstand the working of the Holy spirit.

The Holy Spirit is with us to guide us, to help us lead people to Christ, to help us know God. What Christ did on the cross was the ultimate act of love; God's perfect and ultimate love was poured out on humanity as Jesus died. Of course the Holy Spirit is going to operate in love. The bible even says so; for if you can prophecy but do not love you have nothing (paraphrase) If I want to go further with Jesus. Know God more. Minister in the Holy Spirit. Understand the authority we have...I must know love. I must know and accept God's love. I must give love.

How does this answer all those questions from the old post. Well it isn't ever about MY love. It isn't ever about my capability to love. It isn't even about my ability to grow in my relationship with God. If it were then it is hopeless and pointless. It is still about him, even when it comes to being loved and loving him. We have to know how to look for our Father in every painful situation, in all our failures to love him as he deserves. We must recognize he sent Jesus so that he could place his love, his actions, his righteousness on our tab. He loves and chooses us despite our ability, or lack there of, to love him. Once again I am recked by the conclusion that it is looking to who HE is that transforms us, not by any thing we can muster up. His beauty changes us by just glancing at it. This relationship may be broken by our limited human thinking but in the end it doesn't matter....because it has never nor will it ever be about us. You see, I couldn't take the step deeper into my relationship with God because I  was too focused on how I was suppose to take the step closer to him. I just needed to look back at him instead of looking at the step saying, "how do I do that?" How magnificent is our Father and how powerful his love. It transforms us when we come in contact with it, with Him. 

2 comments:

  1. Beautifully written, and speaks much to my soul. Thank you for writing this.

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  2. Beautifully written, and speaks much to my soul. Thank you for writing this.

    ReplyDelete