This blog will be incredibly
hard to publish because it requires me to admit that my desire for praise and
admiration has been deeper than my desire to give praise and admiration to the
Most High God. But, I believe God is calling me to be honest about who I am and
where I am and I trust in His plan. I have been humbled in heart and spirit by
His steadfast love and jealousy for what is rightfully His. I am ashamed. The problem,
I know, is that I have forgotten that my worth is not tied up in all the things
I do for God and those things make me no more worthy of love or favor, because
everything I am or hope to be is in Him alone.
“I
will not boast in anything, no gifts, no power, no wisdom. But I will boast in
Jesus Christ, His death, and resurrection.”
God brought all of this to my
attention within the past month through a series of events. The first event being
that I quit my job and have found myself wondering every day what do I do? I
struggled with feeling like I needed to be doing something to be somebody.
Where does this come from? The enemy, I presume, because the whole time in my
chest I felt like God wanted me to be still. I know His voice and I know what He
was telling me was in contrast to the notion to be busy.
Next was the realization that
when I do work I have a deep desire to be recognized as good and accomplished.
There is a song called Lament by Audrey Assad and the very first verse goes
like this:
“I'm Mary and I'm Martha all at the same time;
I'm sitting at His feet and yet I'm dying to be recognized. I am a
picture of contentment and I am dissatisfied. Why is it easy to work and hard
to rest sometimes, sometimes, sometimes “
This
breaks, genuinely breaks my heart. One of the guys involved with a worship
night we put on every week was sharing what he learned at a recent conference
and he said this “ Is our desire to serve God greater than our desire for God
“. I thought about five seconds on this but it wasn’t until later that I really
had to dwell on the answer to that question. The answer is how I am living and
my motivations for what I do are not where they should be. This swelled within
me heartache and disappointment.
Finally,
after a few days of praying and seeking, during worship, God pressed on my
heart and a flood of sorrow, love, mercy, peace, and conviction poured over
me. The spirit revealed that I am what
is keeping me from deeper walk with Him. He demanded my full attention even if
it means stepping away from things that are good works. They are as filthy rags
if they still my affection and my motivations.
And while the summary of Philippians was rich in wonderful verses these
really captivated me:
Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of
knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all
things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found
in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that
which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on
faith— Philippians 3:8-9
So
as I awoke today, being realigned and revived by God’s mercy and love, my
desire to seek Him in my day was being attacked by fears that I would not be
able to move past old habits, and that insecurities would rule my motivations
and steer my course. But God, all knowing and sovereign in every way, knew
where I would be and what I would need to hear because when I picked up to read
today’s scriptures this is what I read:
“Stay with me; do not be afraid, for he who seeks my life seeks your
life. With me you shall be in safekeeping” --- 1 Samuel 22:23
He is jealous for me. He
knows me and loves me anyway. He is fighting for me. I want to fight for Him.
