If You Ever Feel Like a Broken Record

To be completely honest, this blog post is really hard to write, mainly because I feel that I keep saying the same things over and over again. I was about to write about how through the In the Garden study so far I have been so convicted about my love for this world, my love for the creation instead of the creator, but then I stopped and thought I may seem like a broken record.

Just the other day I was confessing to the Lord during my quiet time that I value my schedule and to-do list over Him, that I spend more time planning in my head how I’m going to get everything crossed off my list for the day than I think about His Word or how I can bring Him glory. What makes me sad as I write this is that I know I’ve confessed that same thing to the Lord before and I know I’ve even confessed it through this blog before. I really don’t want to be all talk and no action. I want to live what I say I believe.

Feeling like a broken record to the Lord is something that I battle a lot. I feel like I confess the same things over and over again, but true repentance doesn’t take place and then I get frustrated, and then (and I know you’ve heard this from me before) the focus is on me. I fear that the Lord just has to be getting annoyed with me and that was the same fear I was having about presenting yet another post about how the same sins keep appearing in my life.

As I sit here and write, I believe I see how I still question God’s love for me, or maybe just don’t completely understand how it’s possible. Do you ever question if God loves you?

Throughout this week of doing In the Garden there are certain parts of Scripture that the Lord keeps bringing to mind: “to live is Christ” (Phil. 1:21); “I have been crucified with Christ” (Gal. 2:20); “…count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ” (Phil. 3:8). There’s a key theme in these snippets of Scripture—Christ. I wonder a lot why the Lord doesn’t just take all of our sinful actions away immediately when He opens our eyes and gives us faith. Why do we still have to deal with our flesh here on earth? Wouldn’t it make it easier to show people Jesus by being completely changed all at once? It’s because this life is not about me being perfect and overcoming all my sin—it’s about the fact that Christ has already overcome it! It’s not about me, it’s all about Jesus and His love for me that was perfectly shown on the cross.

So maybe I am a broken record. Maybe you feel like you are sometimes too. Maybe you question if God could still love you sometimes. I’m asking God for grace to stop looking at my sin and to start looking to my Savior, for help to cling to His cross, not just in my quiet time or when I’m writing blogs, but throughout my entire day—and not for my glory, but for His alone.

Let’s all ask for grace to say with Paul in Philippians 3:12-14, “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

Planted for His Glory