Pure and Perfect Love

God is love and loves us. This statement would seem to be a very easy concept to understand especially for me considering I have heard this truth as long as I can remember.  For whatever reason I have always had an issue with feeling unworthy of God's love or love from others as well.  This week I was reading "The Christian Atheist" by Craig Groeshel and God just showed me this truth in a way I have never understood it before. In 1 John 4:8 it says 

"Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love."

Craig Groeshel goes on to explain:

"There is nothing we can do to earn God's love.  We are already and always loved simply because God made us and he loves each and every one of his creations.  There's nothing we can do to get God to love us more, and there is nothing we can do to cause God to love us less."

This just made me stop and start crying.  I was overwhelmed with the magnitude of God loving me.  When I sin it doesn't change God's opinion of me. Thinking that it does is putting God in human terms.  Human love is conditional.  When we sin against each other relationships are broken and have to be repaired or sometimes they are not fixable.  With God is completely different than that.  When I sin against God it hurts Him, but His love for me is no less. It doesn't change.  This concept is totally freeing.  I am not saying that I am now going to do whatever I want because "God loves me regardless".  My relationship with Christ creates obedience, but when I do mess up (which being human I will) God is right there to take me back as if nothing happened. This feeling of freedom helps take away the worry  I have always had of pleasing others.  With God I am loved just for being me.  I sang the song "Cannons" by Phil Wickham today at church and the lyrics ring true.

"You are holy great and mighty
The moon and the stars declare who You are
I'm so unworthy, but still You love me
Forever my heart will sing of how great You are"

 

Struggling for Words

I have been literally avoiding blogging for a month now.  I just feel like there is so much going on in my heart and my life.  Break was amazing for me.  I started out the break determined to really study my Bible and I picked the book of James to invest into (and I had forgotten about it being our study this semester in Collide. Oh how God works).  I was doing so good in being consistent in my walk with God and letting go of baggage that I have been carrying around since even high school.  I was letting go of self-image issues, feelings of unworthiness, needing affirmation from others to feel good about myself and I was beginning to address this habitual sin in my life that I have been hiding from for a while now.  I read the book "Lies Young Women Believe".  It really helped me see that all those issues are lies that are untrue but I choose to believe them and let them hinder the person in Christ that I can be.  Then the new year arrived.  For a few reasons I became bitter and really apathetic.  I was going backwards instead of forwards like I had all planned out for myself, but that was the problem.  I had it all planned out for me instead of listening to what God's plan for me was. I had tried to be all perfect without consulting God.  I was leaving the one who is perfect out of my perfecting of myself so it was doomed to fail from the beginning.  So I slipped back into that sin I mentioned struggling with and just kind of gave up for a week.  The turning point for me was when I was in my car driving to the third church service that I had no interest in going to and the song "Remedy" by David Crowder Band came on the radio.  I just broke down in tears, because I realized that I was broken and confused as the song says and Christ is the only remedy.  The sin that I was holding onto was no solution and certainly no substitute for Christ.  Jesus is "the one who has saved us, he is the one who forgave us.  He is the one who has come and is coming again. He's the Remedy."  And that night I went back to James the book that I had started out in and read

"Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters. whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.  Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.  Blessed are those who persevere under trial, because when they have stood the test, they will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him."- James 1:2-4, 12

I felt like I was failing under my trial and I refused to continue on like this anymore. So I made my "new years resolution" that I was going to have good habits and not fall back into my old patterns of allowing the same sin manifest in my life in the same way it has for a while now.  I know what to avoid to keep that sin out of my life and I can only do it with a continual relationship with Christ and being consistent in that. I am still in the slow and beautiful process of letting things go.  It is difficult, painful and challenging at times but the result will be amazing and completely worth it.

"If everything is Yours, I'm letting it go. No it was never mine to hold."-Audrey Assad