Thoughts from That Moment

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Before we start our journey together I ask that you take a minute to stop and pray. My prayer is, “Lord, please give us eyes to see, and a mind to take in whatever it is that you may have for us today. May you give us strength and grant us the grace that we need to walk with you, Lord. May we all remember just how much you love us and that nothing can separate us from that love. No matter how dark we feel our sin is, may we be reminded that because you live in us, darkness cannot overtake us. I ask all this in Jesus’s name, Amen!”

The section in this week’s lesson from Heart of a Woman titled “Ask the Father in My Name” is when I had my moment. My moment = a point to where I was so ashamed of my sin that I couldn’t even bring myself to pray. Never in my life had I experienced such a moment. I think I never had such a moment because if I am being real with you, I never mourned my sin before or felt crippled by it in this way. I never had to deal with her, her being the person I was before I sought to live like Christ and truly walk in that. I never, as Laurie puts it, “Took the girl to the back of the barn and dealt with her!” For weeks I would wake up and put my flesh on like my favorite outfit. I was making a deliberate decision every day not to serve Christ with my obedience, but serve my flesh. The crazy thing is, I knew I was choosing these things! Yes, I knew it and I kept going my own way. And what triggered “my moment”? Lesson four and the very first couple of sentences “After several weeks of asking God Most High, the Creator of the Universe, to search your innermost being, it may be appropriate to ask how you are doing. I am concerned about you.”

I immediately felt overcome with a tidal wave of shame, because I knew deep down that I had not asked God with sincerity to search me. At that point I had cracked opened my study every once in a while to complete some homework. After reading these words, I stopped… I laid on my face and I began to cry out to the Lord. I confessed this all to him. “Lord, I don’t believe you can help me now, I am so gross with sin. How could you even let me in your presence? Lord, I don’t believe you’re listening right now because I am so sinful! Fix this, Lord! Take the unbelief from me, take it Father. I am so afraid, Lord, that if I do ask you to search my innermost being it will hurt! And I don’t want to hurt because I am terrified of what you will uncover.” I cried out to Him for some time. I ended up on my knees, I recorded my thoughts, and so this first blog are the many thoughts from that moment.

If I am being real with you, I thought I could hide from God…I know, I know! He is God, there is no where I could go that He wouldn’t see. I didn’t want to confess a thing, I allowed myself to be consumed with doubt, fear, and unbelief (I feel like these three are best friends…seriously they are always together in some way). As these three grew bigger, my faith and hope started becoming smaller. At the start of this study I told myself, “You will put your all into this!” I just knew I would, and um…we are a couple of weeks in and I am on my face, literally. Four lessons in and I feel I have done nothing. I said, “I can’t even beat my flesh in the morning, but you went to the cross with me in mind.” That was heavy for me. He was hung on a cross for my transgression and I can’t even wake up without being consumed with sinful thoughts. By this point I felt like I was in over my head. I said, “Lord, how is it that you give me chance after chance?”

It was then I realized something. It is something we hear often but just think we already know, so it just sits on the surface of our walk with Christ. It’s the thought that I can’t do anything to earn God’s love for me. Yet, I find that is something I try to do. Because showing amazing grace to this or that person should have earned an answer to that prayer, right? Or that awesome prayer should have made the heavens move, right? And because I personally feel (which gets me into trouble) these things don’t happen like I want, I act as a child and get upset with God. I start to fear, worry, and doubt. I start to say to myself, “Well since this praying thing didn’t work then I won’t do that. I mean, I acted in a way you would have wanted me to Lord, but I didn’t get rewarded for that….So I guess I won’t try and do that anymore.”

This attitude about my walk with Christ landed me right in the position I was in before reading the first words of lesson four. I was feeling defeated and discouraged. More than that, I was feeling such a disconnection from what I know to be true. I had become so ashamed about my actions and disappointed in my outright unbelief, that I felt like I really wasn’t so sure how to pick myself up from there and move forward in the forgiveness that was waiting for me.

But how sweet my Father is to me, even in spite of myself. He didn’t cast me aside and say, “Nope! She doesn’t deserve my grace because she’s acting like a child.” He instead so sweetly reminded me of 1 John 4:10: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (ESV). I struggled with this for a long time. How could Jesus love me despite my sin, sickness, and depravity? And die for me, then be an advocate on my behalf? Again! It was nothing I did, it was all because He loved me, and He loves you too! Right where you are, right in the midst of all the brokenness.

Oh how amazing in that moment it felt to be shown such grace in my sinful ways! I asked for forgiveness, and a smile came over my face because after weeks full of my dark sin, it couldn’t take me, it couldn’t have me. Because Christ lives in me, darkness may still be in me, but it will never overtake me. Abba Father, thank you for reminding of this.

My sins have not disappeared in a flash, although if the Lord wanted that I know He could take it all away. But that day will come when I am in heaven. Here and now, I must work out my salvation with fear and trembling and work every day to pick up my cross. If He didn’t want us to work this thing out we would never understand what tastes so sweet about the grace He gives us, we wouldn’t appreciate the beautiful picture of the gospel that is painted before us in His Word.

As we journey through this study we will fall. It will not feel great, but we must continue to lean into Christ for our strength. Sometimes in the last few weeks I have found that the hardest thing to do is simply to believe that all things will work out for my good. So simple, and yet so hard for me. Remember, Christ died so you may live, Christ died so that through Him you can be free from sin. Sometimes sin can be overwhelming, especially when we want to be the author of our own story. We can get so caught up in wanting to control how we “earn” His love, checking off our list of things we need to do to make this happen. Then when the disappointment comes we can almost spiral downward. We feel like we didn’t do good enough, or maybe didn’t do this or that right to get a certain result from God.

For weeks I was so set on doing it my way, suffering the entire time. I was unwilling to get on my knees because I believed the lie that I wouldn’t be heard. I was burden by my behavior that followed when I felt like the Lord just didn’t hear me. But once I cried out and approached His throne with a heart that was seeking forgiveness, He gave me hope! He showed me that in all this He never left me, never gave up on me, and never changed his mind–like I so often do to the ones I love.

Now, we must repent and delight in the Lord. He is so much more worthy than that I can express with these inferior words! I am so thankful He is there with open arms. Let me tell you, I have tried a million ways and have failed. It is only because He lives in me that I am made whole and can lay all my cares at His feet. In His strength I will labor through this and seek the face of the Lord. Just think for a moment, The King of kings, Lord of lords, the Maker of heaven and the stars, and the Creator of the galaxy wants a relationship with you! That, my friend, is more precious than anything you have, that is worth more than anything your thoughts could even try and conceive.

Lord, may you get all the glory, all the praise, and all the honor forever, amen!

All for His Glory

 

 

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