Month: July 2016

There are impressions that have been made upon my soul over the years, dark recesses where wounds once took place…and in these places the lies have formed. Fear and anxiety, worry and distrust…all of this wells up from somewhere that seems to be within me, but it’s just an illusion. It is not coming from within me, for You are within me now, and the entire kingdom of God is what would flow freely through every crack and wound in my soul if that realization were ever to be made complete.

I struggle with it, though. For some reason it’s difficult for me to remain steadfast in this confidence that You are for me, that You are with me, that You are madly in love with me, and that we were meant to be amazing together forever.

For some reason, the lies and the pain seem so much more familiar and natural to me. But that is all changing now. Jesus, Your peace is beginning to become my natural habitat, and to seem more normal to me than the things that I came to believe were the real me for all those years.

I rest now in this knowledge, in this perfect assurance of Your good will towards. me. I soak in it. I wait here and allow it to seep into every part of me that still hurts and weeps.

I am Yours, and You are mine.

I want to stay here forever…and the beauty of it is, I never have to leave.

God, you are everywhere. You see all of me. Every part. There is nothing that I can hide from you, and I repent for ever trying. I repent for holding things in myself back from you. Part of me seems certain that you are a big, angry monster with a huge stick, just waiting to beat me with it once I’ve screwed up badly enough. The Spirit testifies with my spirit that this is not the case, and tells me that’s not who you are, but it still seems so real, the parts of me that have those ideas impressed upon them, programmed into them. I bring you all of these confusions and complications, and I choose to focus on the real you, no matter what my feelings try to tell me.

There is a whole different dimension where this focusing happens. It’s like I’m looking at you with a different set of eyes or something. Maybe it’s my spirit’s eyes. I don’t know. All I know for sure is that I can choose to simply ask myself at any given moment, “What would the Christ in me do in response to this pain, in response to this fear? How does the Christ in me want me to choose my thoughts and actions in this particular case?”

I remember before I knew you. I had a conscience, sure, just like everyone else, and there was a deep down piece of me that “knew better” with regards to a thousand different things. But once I asked you to come into my life and to save me…once I reached out to you, Jesus, and gave myself to you, I was suddenly awake in a way that was so deep that I didn’t even have the ability to be aware of it, mostly. My flesh was still who I thought I was, and the voice of the Spirit was a completely new thing.

I began to be certain that you wanted me to change things about the way I was living, and I knew that this would require a lot of me, but somehow I wasn’t worried about it. I felt you assuring me that you would take care of it all, if only I stayed on track and followed your voice. Still, though, there was this altogether lighthearted assurance…

When you did begin to lead me into those places of change, I fought it tooth and nail at first. Every demon that had ever been attached to my life wrestled and screamed with all its might, and strove to pry me out of your hand. I did my best to go along with all that, too, but you reached right down and spoke to me so clearly. You told me in no uncertain terms what I needed to do, and where you wanted me to go.

It’s been a long time since then, and it is embarrassing to me how closely the more recent parts of my journey with you have resembled these initial sputterings. I am so thankful that you’ve not let me go, that you have not left me or forsaken me, even though I’ve been anything but faithful to you. I don’t want to delay any more. I don’t want to hold anything back any more. I press into you now with an expectation and a hope for all things to be made new, for my spirit to come into its correct place of complete headship over each and every part of my life.

I come to you here and now, just as I am, and I render full and complete obedience to you in that I accept your love and forgiveness as being complete, your atonement to be perfect, and that your acceptance of me has been final since that place in eternity where I died in Christ and rose again.

Jesus, right here and now, at the point of absolute pain, I come to you. I ask You for help. I’m still not totally sure exactly how this whole thing is supposed to work, but right now I do know one thing: I am in more trouble than I’ve ever been in my entire life. My soul is absolutely crushed. I am thinking about suicide, and not in that dreamy, flirtatious way; I’m actually thinking about how this needs to end, and my mind is lashing out all over the place, trying to wrap itself around just what exactly this is, and what it would look like for this to not stop… and the struggle is just too great. I can’t do it. I need some kind of miracle. It’s just the way it is.

Yet here I am, in the midst of it all, and the only thing to actually do is to drink deep of the fountain, to plunge all the way into the river. Nowhere else to go now. Everything else is on fire. Only you have the words of life. Only here do I find the actual water of life.

Even here and now, in the midst of all this, all things are working together for good. All this thing is doing is pushing me farther and farther into a place where I hate sin and thirst for God more than ever before.

God is saying, “I know the plans I have for you…to give you a future and a hope…” Jesus says, “In the world you will have trouble, but hang loose; I have overcome the world!” John wrote, “Greater is He that is in you than he that lives in the world.”

The circumstances of your life right now might look like anything but the inroad to a good, happy future. God has promised you just such a future in Him, though, so look to that and don’t be discouraged or distracted by the way things are. Coose to trust Him in the process. You might be a mess right now, but choose to trust trust him with your mess, and believe that in His own time, and in his own way, He will craft your life into the future He has promised.