You Are Not Who You Currently Are

God, help me to get my eyes off of myself and on the cross.  

What does that even mean?  

It means to trust that Jesus died for me.  While I was a sinner, he died.  I did nothing to earn or deserve it.  Nor can I do anything to earn or deserve his grace and mercy and love today.  I am free.  

The cross summed up in one word is freedom.  It was because of love that God sent his only son to die.  But to me, freedom is the manifestation of that love in my life: Freedom from sin and its consequences.  Freedom from my own negative thoughts.  Freedom to be who God created me to be.  Freedom from condemnation when I fall short, which I always will.  Not a picture perfect model.  Not a perfect clean house.  Not a perfect mom or wife.  My kid may throw fits,  I may overreact with my husband, and I may berate myself in my thoughts.  None of that matters because it doesn’t really matter when compared to the infinite value of knowing Jesus.  He offers me freedom from those things so that I can enjoy my life.  

Life may be messy, but I am not a mess.  

Jesus is bigger than your current reality.  

I’m going to say that again: Jesus is bigger than your current reality.  

All of those things that we hate in our lives and about ourselves fade away.  Jesus and the cross eclipse them so they can not be seen when you take your eyes off of yourself and look to the cross.  They may never go away while we are on this earth because we live in a fallen world, in broken bodies, but one thing that is true is that the imperfect will fade away when the Perfect comes.  Jesus is perfect.  

So stop trying to be perfect.  Stop beating yourself up for not being perfect.  Stop analyzing everything.  Stop seeing yourself from other’s judging eyes and start seeing yourself as God sees you.  When you look in a broken mirror the image reflected back is broken as well.  Stop looking in a broken mirror to tell you who you are.  Start looking to God who is the perfect reflection to tell you who you are.  You are not who you currently are. Let that sink in.  You are not who you currently are.  So stop looking at yourself and start looking to the cross.  

Christ arrives right on time to make this happen. He didn’t, and doesn’t, wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn’t been so weak, we wouldn’t have known what to do anyway. We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him (Romans 5:6-8 MSG).

We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith. Because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross, disregarding its shame. Now he is seated in the place of honor beside God’s throne. Think of all the hostility he endured from sinful people; then you won’t become weary and give up (Hebrews 12:2-3 NLT).

So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law (Gal. 5:1 NLT).

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16 NIV).

But when completeness comes, what is in part disappears… now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known (1 Corinthians 13:10,12 NIV).

For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God's glorious standard (Romans 3:23 NLT).

Yes, furthermore, I count everything as loss compared to the possession of the priceless privilege (the overwhelming preciousness, the surpassing worth, and supreme advantage) of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord and of progressively becoming more deeply and intimately acquainted with Him [of perceiving and recognizing and understanding Him more fully and clearly]. For His sake I have lost everything and consider it all to be mere rubbish (refuse, dregs), in order that I may win (gain) Christ (the Anointed One) (Philippians 3:8 AMP).

The Stuff Life is Made of

I love to reminiscence about life and look at pictures and the way things were. I love how just a scent or a picture in my mind can remind me of how I felt at a certain time in my life. I also love to daydream about what the future holds and make plans for fun vacations that I want to take or parties that I want to have. But life is really nothing more than memories and dreams if you don’t have Jesus to give you peace, hope and love.

And what about the bad memories? I wish that sometimes my past hurts and traumas would just disappear, but we can’t just sort through our memories and forget the bad ones or take them out with the trash. Sadly enough, it’s the bad memories that seemed engrained in our minds. It’s the bad memories that change us the most. But what we can do is take all of our memories—good and bad to the Cross and give them to Jesus and see what he would have us do with them. With Jesus, memories become your testimony that speak out power and encouragement.

And what about the dreams that don’t come true? The Bible says that hope deferred make the heart sick (Prov. 13:12). We all have a sick heart caused from things that we have hoped and prayed for that still did not come true. But with Jesus, dreams become your hope and future for a better place than this sick and fallen world.

So be encouraged. The stuff life is made of really is mainly memories and dreams. But the Bible tells us that "no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived the things God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Cor. 2:9). Jesus came to give us an abundant and full life (John 10:10). When life is full of bad memories and shattered dreams and seems so hard and pointless, just remember that Jesus came to give us more and one day it will be ours!

Sweet Jesus

I am on a roll today with these blog posts--This is #3! I guess that being snow/iced in is a good thing for creative writing! Here is a new poem (could also be song lyrics!) I just put together today called "Sweet Jesus."

My spirit is free

To pray and rejoice

To flap its wings

For this is my choice

In the Spirit I live

Because you forgive

Oh Jesus, sweet Jesus

To You I give in

You hold me captive

My soul at ease

Because of Your love

It takes me in

And brings me above

My troubles I face

Enemies in every place

Oh Jesus, sweet Jesus

You calm me and keep me

Because of God’s grace

My heart at rest

In Jesus’ hands

The Truth remains

washing over the land

like waves on the shore

I am hungry for more

Oh Jesus, sweet Jesus

You give me what I

Have been looking for

Oh Jesus, sweet Jesus

You are what I

Have been dying for

I Don't Like the Way You are Treating my Daughter

“I don’t like the way you are treating my daughter.” This is what God told me at a two-day church retreat called Kairos, which means “an appointed time with God.” I knew that He was talking about me and how I was treating myself. I am too hard on myself. Way too hard. This often carries over onto other people, especially in my marriage. A few days prior to this I wrote this in my journal:

God just showed me that I still hate myself. I don’t, but I know that He is right. I am constantly irritated or depressed or overwhelmed or angry or hurt. How have I gone on for so long? I need to get set free to BE myself. But who am I?

I am a creative, contemplative free-spirited girl. I absolutely love having fun and laughing. Something inside of me likes the person that I am. Its not true that I am always irritated or depressed, but I feel like something isn’t right inside of me and it has been like that for a long time. As I look back over my past journal entries, I see a common theme: pain, melancholy, doubt and fear. I can’t pin point when all this started. Then the lines I wrote occurred to me:

My heart feels like

Scattered pieces

My mind feels like

A thunderstorm.

This world is fallen

Broken bodies

Fix me, Jesus

Take me home.

We live in a fallen world of pain and death. Life is hard, but we have eternity buried deep with in us which makes us yearn for more. Surrender what you have, everything you can see for what you can’t see. Give it all away, all of the hurt and pain inside of you.

“So we don't look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.” (2. Cor. 4:18, NLT)

Don’t you just love God’s Word! It is my Rock and my Sanity in this fallen world. I just can not get enough of it! Not only everything that I see now, but those feelings of hurt, pain, fear, doubt, anxiety, depression and insecurity will soon be gone! Hallelujah!

Lord, let my eyes be fixed upon you so that I can endure until this fallen world has passed away and everything in it. FIX ME JESUS, TAKE ME HOME!

Personal Truths

Life is so amazing. Our individual lives are uniquely made up of family and loved ones, good times, bad times, hopes, dreams and wishes. Sometimes God grants us our prayers and sometimes he doesn’t. The best thing about life is that no matter what happens, God is in control.

“I know that there is nothing better for them than to rejoice and to do good in one’s lifetime” (Ecl. 3:12).

Our job is not to worry or to get upset. God wants us to enjoy life (Joyce Meyer is great on this)! So many times, we get caught up in circumstances in our lives and we are like the rocky soil or among the soil with the thorns.

“In a similar way these are the ones on whom seed was sown on the rocky places, who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy; and they have no firm root in themselves, but are only temporary; then, when affliction or persecution arises because of the word, immediately they fall away. "And others are the ones on whom seed was sown among the thorns; these are the ones who have heard the word, but the worries of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful. "And those are the ones on whom seed was sown on the good soil; and they hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold." And He was saying to them, "A lamp is not brought to be put under a basket, is it, or under a bed? Is it not brought to be put on the lampstand?” (Mark 4:17-21).

Jesus is our light (John 8:12). He has overcome the world and since we believe in Jesus and are children of God we have too have overcome the world (John 16:33, 1 John 5:4-5). I believe that while Jesus is the light, we are the lampstand. He uses our circumstances to shed light on the truth. I don’t think that knowing the truth is the hard part. It is hard to accept the truth in our hearts so deeply that the thorns or hard times do not choke the fruit of God’s seed out of our lives. Now, if the truth is life, what is death? Jesus said, “Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life” (John 5:24). Death is the opposite of life or truth. While there is one Death and one Truth, I believe that there are many deaths and therefore, many truths. Let me explain.

We are each called into a personal relationship with God through Jesus. If each of us is a unique individual part of the Body of Christ; our personal relationship with Jesus is just as unique as we are. God created us. He knows our inmost workings. Therefore, there are also many individual truths in our lives. Before my dad passed away, he said that his “greater truth” is that he has three daughters who pray for him. He had received salvation by asking Jesus to be Lord of his life before he died. Jesus was his Truth, but his personal truth that helped him through the hard times was that he had 3 daughters who loved him and prayed for him.

Our personal truths are those things that Jesus has made dear to our hearts so that we better understand the love that he has for us. Our personal truth is God’s gift to us that make each of us different. It is what makes us feel alive. There is always the Truth that Jesus is our salvation, but Jesus loves us so individually, we have personal truths that work like a knowing wink or understanding hug to encourage us when we are struggling.

I compare deaths to daily deaths to the flesh and struggles that we each go through every day. If we do not die to these hard times in the flesh then our spirit will die. Either way, there is death. Our personal deaths are our unique struggles that we endure and overcome during our walk with Jesus. They are our crosses to bear. If we die to the flesh then our cross is freedom in Jesus (Gal. 5:1), but if we die to the Spirit then we suffer death.

The following Scriptures have helped me understand what it is like to have a personal relationship with Jesus.

“I call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised,

And I am saved from my enemies.
The cords of death encompassed me,
And the torrents of ungodliness terrified me.
The cords of Sheol surrounded me;
The snares of death confronted me.
In my distress I called upon the LORD,
And cried to my God for help;

He heard my voice out of His temple,

And my cry for help before Him came into His ears” (Psalm 18:3-6 emphasis mine).

One day God showed to name my specific struggle in place of “Sheol.” It was very liberating to see that God cares about my personal struggles. These struggles may not mean much to others, but to God they are a matter of life and death.

The Easton’s Bible Dictionary defines Sheol as:"the all-demanding world, "the unknown region”, the invisible world of departed souls

This is also translated as as “Hell” which means:

(1.) Sheol, occurring in the Old Testament sixty-five times. This word sheol is derived from a root-word meaning "to ask," "demand;" hence insatiableness (Prov 30:15,16). It is rendered "grave" thirty-one times (Gen 37:35; 42:38; 44:29,31; 1 Sam 2:6, etc.). The Revisers have retained this rendering in the historical books with the original word in the margin, while in the poetical books they have reversed this rule.

In thirty-one cases in the Authorized Version this word is rendered "hell," the place of disembodied spirits. The inhabitants of sheol are "the congregation of the dead" (Prov 21:16). It is (a) the abode of the wicked (Num 16:33; Job 24:19; Ps 9:17; 31:17, etc.); (b) of the good (Ps 16:10; 30:3; 49:15; 86:13, etc.).

Sheol is described as deep (Job 11:8), dark (10:21,22), with bars (17:16). The dead "go down" to it (Num 16:30,33; Ezek 31:15,16,17).

(2.) The Greek word hades of the New Testament has the same scope of signification as

Sheol of the Old Testament. It is a prison (1 Peter 3:19), with gates and bars and locks (Matt 16:18; Rev 1:18), and it is downward (Matt 11:23; Luke 10:15).(from Easton's Bible Dictionary, PC Study Bible formatted electronic database Copyright © 2003, 2006 Biblesoft, Inc. All rights reserved.)

What has been your Sheol or your “personal hell”? Beth Moore’s wonderful book Get Out of that Pit discusses what a pit is like and how you know if you are in one. The definitions of Pit and Sheol are so similar, they can be interchangeable. Try it for yourself and insert your personal struggle in for “Sheol” everytime you see it in the Bible. It has really helped me know that God cares about my personal problems and that he hears my voice when the cords and snares of my struggles overwhelm me.

On the bright side, what are your personal truths that keep you running the race that you were called to run? Is it a bubble bath will always calm you down? Is it knowing that your mom is always ready to listen with a sympathetic ear? Is it how fresh you feel after worshiping God at church? Or is it that when you are around friends and family you know that you are loved? What ever “it” is--it helps me to see life as it really is-- family and loved ones, good times, bad times, hopes, dreams and wishes—and who is at the center of it—Jesus!

Be blessed!