At the risk of sounding like Captain Obvious…it’s been a long time since I have blogged.
Not because I haven’t written, mind you, but simply because I have not posted the many things I have written. You see, I have a format in the nice, neat little world of my mind that I like to follow when writing my devotions or blogs and I put a lot of pressure on myself to adhere to that standard. There are times I lie in bed and write in my mind…I even go back and make corrections on the rough draft in my head until it’s just like I want it.
But I have come to realize that sometimes, God just wants me to write my insides out.
He doesn’t care how pretty it does or doesn’t look or whether it looks like the last thing He asked me to write or not….He simply desires for me to say YES to what He is asking me to do. To genuinely pour out what He pours in.
For all you other control freaks out there…you know what I am talking about.
We want to have everything labeled, sorted, grouped, filed away before we get before God or take an issue to Him. We even like to take in a typed, double spaced report of our well meaning attempts to rectify the situation at hand. We work ourselves to the bone to “handle” it all so that we don’t have to bother God with it in the first place.
The problem is that this desire for perfection ends up weeding God out of it all because we are so busy trying to achieve that perfection BEFORE we willingly and wholly place ourselves in His presence.
Here’s the irony: achieving anything even close to perfection outside of His presence and power is IMPOSSIBLE…so the reality is, we’re just setting ourselves up for further failure- the very thing we are killing ourselves to try to avoid!
Romans 5:8 says, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners Christ died for us.”
Still sinners…STILL SINNERS. He loved me BEFORE I even knew how to love Him. He loved me BEFORE I even knew I needed to love Him. He loved me BEFORE. Before I was cleaned up at all…He loved me in my mess in order to make a way for me to receive- not achieve- His perfection, His righteousness, His holiness.
“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.”(Romans 5:6)
His free grace is yours and mine in spite of who we are. He sees us and knows us fully…imperfections and all. He isn’t afraid to look at your junk. He saw it in its fullness and STILL sent His Son to die on the cross in spite of it!
Focusing on how to fix what is wrong, rather than on the only ONE who can make it right, is paralyzing. Trying to do it in our own power is doing it with no TRUE power at all…and that is certainly destined for failure. We "were powerless", not "are powerless" according to verse six. We can have the perfecting power of the Holy Spirit right NOW...completely available to us when we make ourselves completley available.
Go ahead, face your junk…surrender.
Control’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
Perfection is an elusive ideal.
And Jesus…well, He even loves and sees hope for the weirdo that writes herself to sleep and uses the backspace key over and over again in her head.
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