"The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly." (John 10:10, NKJV)
Have you met Alison? You should. She knows what she thinks about stuff. She likes tree houses and making coffee and walking with people. She works at Trader Joes just because she likes it. She went to Australia to learn to be a midwife and delivered babies in India, "out of the jaws of Satan," as she puts it. She is warm, inviting. You can rest in her presence, because she is not striving to be anyone she is not. She’ll tell you what she thinks about stuff, but instead of feeling put down, you feel more excited to experience life!
We all like people who are confident (Let me make a distinction right now between pride and confidence, they are two very different things). They know what their tastes are and what moves them and what they like and what sort of a person they are and who they want to be. Yet for all that, they never have to prove anything to anyone. People like that are attractive because of their confidence, their security. They are satisfied. We think to ourselves that they are so assured of who they are… and then we start to wonder what the heck we're doing wrong.
For some reason, I used to think the Lord was separated from the part of me that obsessively exercised, always thought about looks and weight, and felt guilty about everything I did. I tried for years to wrest confidence from my unwilling brain, and with little success. No matter how confident I tried to feel in myself, some deeper issue would always arise, leaving me empty, wondering if I would ever be that confident woman I longed to be. Instead of being warm and inviting people to experience Jesus, I was often overpowering, loud, and controlling. I stared at myself in the mirror and felt a twinge of guilt when I realized I had become vain and self-obsessed, but I didn’t even know where to start fixing it. I started to wonder why the heck I felt this way if I was supposed to be a Christian. I wondered if Jesus dying on the cross could save me from feeling like I always had to fix something about myself. Could that one act change that dissatisfaction I felt in the very core of me?
The thing is, it’s been whispered in our ear our whole lives that the Lord's arm only reaches so far, that there is a limit to His goodness. We think that that stuff is our own responsibility to fix. And women, let’s be honest, there are some fears deep in your chest that you don’t think anything can remedy. But the Lord was not crucified so that we could live in fear or dissatisfaction from anything. Any thing.
Well, it turns out there is NO limit to His goodness. Turns out that true confidence is only found when you find out who God really is (like, you know Him as your best friend) and what He thinks of you. It's found when you allow the Presence of God into your life. I've found that a lot of people I meet seem initially confident, but this emotion soon fades in the face of fear. (Being overpowering or loud or controlling are the world’s version of confidence, but in reality they are only reactions from fear). But the ones like Alison who were transparently free, the ones who truly had nothing to hide, the women who were not proud but confident, not sexy or pretty but lovely in all their ways, the men who were patient and strong, these were the people that were not just intermittently confident, but even in their worst times they were totally free.
He says He want to transform your life into abundant life, freeing you from anything that will hold you back from Him. That thing you think you’ll never have… that assurance you seek and you think you’ll never find, it’s only possible by allowing the Presence of God Himself into your life. By seeking Him and Him alone, for anything else will only lead to being dry and empty.
People tell me I can't be free. The world tells me I am asking too much of Him. But I am assured that He is the God who Saves. I am convinced that He is the God who Lives and sees me. I am convinced that nothing will separate me from the love of my God. I have been called out of my old life into His Light, and in that light there is NO room for fear. Darkness flees. Fear is no more. And that little nagging voice inside you telling you that you need to be something else? FORGET IT!
Walk in that truth today,
B
No comments:
Post a Comment