Trying to fix ourselves

Lately I’ve been feeling tired and cranky and frustrated and overwhelmed and then the other day I suddenly realized what was making me feel that way. I want to please Jesus so much that I often have a tendency to mentally make lists for myself of what I should and shouldn’t do and how I can improve myself.

I tell myself that I need to do this more, do that less, be more like this, and be less like that. And on and on and on until I'm drowning in a sea of unmet expectations of perfection. When I see a Godly Christian woman or hear a sermon about the apostle Paul I think, "I want to be like that." When I look at Jesus I think, “I want to be like that.” And so I try and I try and I try. I determine that I will try really hard and put my best effort in to become the person that I want to be. It becomes, memorize this, read that, listen to this. And while all of those are good things to do, we can't let it become a routine instead of a relationship. 

I like to try to fix myself. But I cant. I can't fix myself. I'm just a human who fails and falls short everyday. Jesus says to me that I don't have to work harder. He tells me to stop striving so hard and just rest in His grace and peace.

He tells me that I can stop trying to be perfect once I realize that I am already loved perfectly.

 I struggle with the lie that I have to prove myself worthy of His love. The truth? I'm not worthy of His love but He loves me anyway and refuses to let me work for it.

A truth that He has revealed to me that I find so beautiful and I hold onto everyday is this: Although I am not fixed, I am loved.

Sanctification doesn't happen by us trying really hard to make ourselves more like Jesus. Sanctification happens when we take all of our junk, all of the pieces where we don't measure up and bring them to the foot of the cross. When we confess to God that we are not yet what we would like to be and ask for His help to change.

Healing begins when we drop our disappointments and unmet expectations at Jesus' feet and refuse to pick them up again.

Healing begins when we acknowledge that we cannot fix ourselves.

They way we become more like Jesus is by abiding in His love and cultivating intimacy with Him. And the way that the intimacy is cultivated will include all of the routine things such as bible reading, prayer, and meditation, but our motives will be different. No longer are our motives to try to fix ourselves, but instead our deepest longing is to be more closely connected to God. Our desire for those things will come out of the overflow of a heart that is saturated in intimacy with God.

It's not wrong to desperately want to be more kind and honest and loving and merciful. But we get ourselves in trouble when we try to do the work on our own. That’s when our relationship with God starts to feel dry and lifeless.

No longer am I going to start my day willing myself to be more loving and patient and then being overcome with frustration and defeat when I fail at being competent all on my own. Instead I am going to start my day by making time to fall more deeply in love with Jesus and let His kindness, goodness, and love flow through me.

I think I'm overdue on some time abiding in Jesus' love, how about you? 

Finding Joy

This week God has flooded me with joy and now I am joyful, very abundantly joyful.

I am joyful because I have finally got into both my head AND my heart what God was trying to tell me about embracing the sad parts of life. I’ve finally realized that sometimes you’re going to hear something sad or see something sad or think about something sad and that it’s okay to take time to be sad about it.

Becoming a Christian doesn’t mean that God flips a switch and all you are is happy and will never experience sadness again.  In fact, as Christians, knowing the heart that God has for the world, and seeing the state that our world is in, we SHOULD be feeling sad.

BUT in the midst of our sadness, we feel HOPEFUL. Hopeful because Jesus has overcome. But I think that a very necessary part of showing the world around us the heart that their heavenly father has for them, includes showing them how he feels about their suffering.

Romans 12:15 Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.

But I was afraid to be sad. A big part of the battle was over control. I told myself, ‘You can be sad about these couple of things and that’s it. Or you can only be this sad for this long.’ I wanted to protect my tender heart.

I thought that if I started to be sad that I would never be able to stop. After all,

Human trafficking generates 9.5 billion yearly in the U.S, half of the world lives on less than 2.50 a day, and in the U.S domestic violence occurs every nine seconds.

And how does one ever stop being sad about those kinds of things?

But Jesus wept. 

John 11:33

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked.

“Come and see, Lord,” they replied.

Jesus wept. Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”

Imagine being Mary or Martha watching Jesus weep. Imagine how much love they must have felt for their savior, seeing how much He cares for them. That the God of the universe would shed his tears for us.

My God is a God who feels deeply. Every day we are being made more and more like our savior. And our God is a God who weeps over tragedy and poverty and homelessness and abuse. And so we must be those kinds of people too. People who have the same heart towards others that God has. God weeps with me when I am hurting and I should weep with others that are hurting.

Once I finally completely embraced the sadness, the oddest thing happened. I was filled with joy. Instead of being overwhelmed with sadness like I feared I would be, I was so incredibly comforted by God.

He whispers to me, “Yes I understand. That is how I feel about this too.”

I feel so much closer to God, finally grasping a bit of how much He cares. I am filled now with so much joy and hope. Now I call it, “hopeful crying.”  

Embracing sorrow, finding joy. Doesn’t seem like it should work that way. But that’s my God. He doesn’t operate the way the world does. Us with our bumper sticker sayings such as, ‘don’t think about bad things that happen, just focus on the positive.’

God works in ways that seem backward to us.

Ways like,

The first shall be last and the last shall be first

You must lose your life to find it

A man cannot enter the kingdom of heaven unless he is born again

From an increase in allowing myself to be sad at sad things, the amount of hope I had increased as well. The more acknowledgement of truth, the more hope that God gives.

An increase in allowing myself to feel honest and deep emotions, the closer I felt God’s presence, and the more hope and joy that flooded my life. I realized that by refusing to acknowledge sorrow, I was also depriving myself of finding hope and joy in the midst of sorrow.

I want to practice ‘hopeful sadness,’ which is to greive over sorrow and injustice and then hand that greif over to God and allow him to hand back hope. 

"Then you will know the truth and the truth shall set you free." 

Jesus is Freedom!!!!

I have this song in my car I listen to and whenever the singer says, "Jesus is freedom," all this joy bubbles up inside of me. It really does. That phrase didn't used to mean anything to me, especially when I was in high school. The kids from the christian group would always be talking about Jesus and freedom. 

And I always thought, 'freedom?' I'm not in jail or anything, I'm free.'

 I've come to realize more and more that before we finally understand things, we are totally blind. I understand things now that before, it was like a blindfold was over my eyes. Now, the thought of Jesus as freedom makes perfect sense to me. Not only does it make perfect sense, it makes me so incredibly happy. The thing about bondage is, most times when we're held, we have no idea we're in prison. Before I was a christian I thought that I was supposed to be living free and doing whatever I wanted, and that was fine, but it wasn't. 

A lot of people think that christians are so restricted because of all of their rules. They think we must be boring and judgmental and oppressed. But they are dead wrong. I understand that kind of thinking because I once thought that too. I once felt sorry for the christians I knew.

 I thought, 'how sad it is for them to have such a boring life. While I'm having fun and can do whatever I want, they are stuck with tons of rules.' 

But I didn't realize that the life I was living was actually the one in trouble. Despite all their rules and supposed boring lives, I couldn't understand why christians were always so joyful. If they had it so bad why were they so happy and me, living life the way I wanted, so unhappy? I didn't realize that I was in bondage, I was a slave. Satan, the father of lies, had me believing that God didn't care about me, and that everything I was looking for, everything that could make me happy, would be found in the world. 

Looking back I am sad that I was in bondage for so long when I know that God desired so strongly to break every chain. I was in no way free, I was so tied up that I didn't even notice anymore. 

But now, now I am truly FREE. I don't live the same life I lived before, I don't do the same things, go to the same places, say the same things, think the same things. Some people might call my life constricted, but I have honestly never felt more completely free in my entire life. Over the years God has been slowly stripping me of all my bondage and I have watched in disbelief and joy as the chains fall off one by one. 

“So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” John 8:36

Thinking back on high school me I really wish that I could have known what real freedom feels like. 

This is freedom. Freedom is knowing that you have a father in heaven who knows you completely and loves you completely and knowing that that love is never going to end. Freedom is knowing that your value is not based on a single thing except for the fact that you are God's beloved child. Freedom is not having to ever be afraid, because you have complete assurance that God is taking care of you and has good plans for your life. Freedom means no guilt or self condemnation, only grace. 

I wish everyone knew this freedom, I don't know how I ever lived without it. 

Song Recommendation:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppgde6wVwAM

God is Sovereign!!!

God is sovereign. I know this, but for years I hated the thought of it. A lot of times the sovereignty of God is an avoided topic. Because then comes the famous question, “If God is sovereign, why does He let bad things happen?”

And this is exactly what I wrestled with for the majority of my life. I knew God was sovereign. Even as a non Christian, I had no doubt that God was the one in control.

So I thought, if God is going to let bad things happen then he just must not care about people. I was resentful and bitter towards God, picturing Him up in the sky watching our sufferings and shrugging His shoulders indifferently.

Then I became a Christian my freshman year of college. For the first time in a really really long time, I began to see God as loving, comforting, and kind. But with this new, kind God, how was I to explain away all the hurts that I saw around me and felt within me?

Then, in a weak moment, a thought popped into my head, “Either God is not sovereign, and thus too weak to save you, or He is sovereign, and just doesn’t care enough to do so.”

I knew God was sovereign, but I also knew I couldn’t be at peace with a God who plans for my suffering.

I lost a lot of sleep worrying over this, until I was assured by someone very wise that God never plans evil.

When looking it up myself I found the well loved verse,

Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."

But I still had that nagging, painful feeling in my heart whenever I thought about God’s sovereignty. I now know that God doesn’t plan evil, but the though of Him not stopping it, was still too heart wrenching to think about. So I just shoved it to the back of my mind and tried to forget about it. But these past couple months it kept popping up.

I had been very worried about following through on something God was calling me to do but I finally did and found so much peace. And I was so extremely relieved and grateful. I just looked up to heaven and bursting with joy, thought, ‘God you are sovereign.’

And then I had to pause, surprised at my own thinking. Had I just thought of God’s sovereignty with delight instead of horror?

Over these months without me even knowing it, God has been changing my way of thinking. I’ve always struggled with trusting God, and I have learned to without even realizing it. One of the things I struggled with the most now is beginning to come to me as easily as breathing.

I have now began to understand some truths. God has the whole world in his hands. Not in a tight fist, ready to squish it at any moment. But in a gentle embrace, delighting in our joys, and weeping with our sorrows. What really cut to my heart was once having someone tell me, “As painful as that hurt is to you, you will never be able to understand how deeply it hurts the heart of God.”

I still don’t understand why God doesn’t prevent some things from happening, why He allows some wrongs. I know that we live in a broken world and that God refuses to make us robots and allows us to choose to accept Him or not.

But I have come to be okay with that because I know God’s character. I don’t need to know why certain things happen. Because I trust God. God’s purpose is always good! Whatever He chooses to do with my life, I can be assured that it is for my eventual good, and will be used to help glorify His name. Im not so scared anymore, knowing that God has everything under control. I feel safe, like I don’t have to worry.

God can always be trusted to do what is best. There is not a single situation that God cannot redeem, that He cant use for His good purposes. There is not a single thing that happens to us that just goes to waste. God is using EVERYTHING.

God is my father, I know He has my bet interests at heart. So I can finally relax. I can finally stop trying to control every single thing. It feels so freeing to hand it over to God.

God is sovereign, my heart is reassured.

Song recommendation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKJ2hKe2QX4