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  

Let us weary in the world rejoice!

O Holy Night! The stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of the dear Saviour's birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining.
Till He appeared and the Spirit felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.
Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices!
O night divine, the night when Christ was born;
O night, O Holy Night , O night divine!
O night, O Holy Night , O night divine! 

Today as I sat in Christmas chapel and listen to Josh Junyor play "O Holy Night" so magnificently on the piano I started singing the lyrics in my head along as he played.  This is one of my favorite Christmas songs so I had sang the words hundreds of times, but today I actually meditated on them.  The lyrics that made me stop and think were "Long lay the world in sin and error pining till He appeared and the Spirit felt its worth.  A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn."  It just kind of all clicked in my head at that point.  Before Jesus there was only hope in following the law and trying to redeem your unrighteousness with obedience.  The law was to show their lack of holiness and they were to follow it to work towards being holy as God is holy.  Jesus arriving on this earth and then dying for us should, as the song says, make us the weary rejoice because hope is here!  A new day has come. Christ was here among men and for that we should be celebrating!  

"Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.  And we boast in the hope of the glory of God.  Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character, hope.  And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us." Romans 5:1-5

As I feel weary and a little hopeless at times this gives me hope.  In John 1:14 it says "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth."  Jesus is the grace and truth that that we need so desperately.  My worry about my future, my mom being really sick, my relationships, weariness, and just being tired are all soothed and relieved by how vulnerable, and how much suffering and hardship Jesus endured just for me.  I don't deserve to be blessed, but because of Christ's grace I am so I will rejoice extra loud this Christmas season as 

"I celebrate the day that You were born to die so I could one day pray for You to save my life" -Relient K

Transparency

Transparent is to be easily seen through, recognized or detected, to be open, frank or candid.

After I attended the girl's retreat I have seen the need in my life and the lives of us all, actually, to be transparent, to be real with one another.  To stop smiling and pretending that everything is fine when its really not.  A few months ago I met a freshman on the sidewalk and asked him how his day was.  He replied, "Do you want the real or the fake answer?"  His statement struck me and caused me to think about how many times I ask people how they are doing and not really caring how they really are, but just as a conversation filler.  I am expecting a "fine or good" and if I get anything different I am caught off guard as I was with this freshman.  The more we pretend that everything is okay in our lives all the time the more we shut out people and stop investing ourselves in them.  I have caught myself doing this exact thing this semester.  When I have dealt with things I have hid that from most people I interact with and even my closest friends. I guess admitting I wasn't okay and for me to stop smiling would have been to admit that my life wasn't great and that I did indeed have problems.  But isn't that what our brothers and sisters in Christ are for?

"Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.  The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective." James 5:16

I am not saying tell everyone everything about you all the time.  I am just trying to convey that we need to utilize each other for strength to make it through those rough times. Invest in people and they will invest in you.   It is okay to have bad days, but we need to try and not wallow in them, but instead see God's purpose in them.  On the bad days see them for what they are a chance to grow, to depend on God and the people He has placed in our path to assist us and to show us His truth when we might not be able to see it.  I am experiencing this lesson daily.  I am writing this because I am convicted of it and so I can read it to remind myself of what I should be doing to make it through this season of my life.

"I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us."  Romans 8:18

Oh the winds of change....

I have always had bangs. (Yes I know this is a weird thing to talk about in my first ever post on my blog but hey hang in there I do have a point).  For some reason I decided that this year I was going to grow my bangs out. I needed a change. I needed to make something different about my appearance.  I had this whole feeling of staleness and the need to be unique.  Well same goes for my life.  I am experiencing change on a grand and massive scale in my life this year.  As a senior I am graduating so with that comes the future and its endless list of possibilities that are overwhelming and frightening to even start to sort through.  The decision of should I go to seminary, graduate school, take a year off or just get a job is looming ahead of me.  Change from my safe and comforting nest of Willliams and my family here that gives support and unwavering encouragement to a whole new phase of my life.  

My walk with Christ is ever changing.  The patience and willingness to wait for Him to be my Sustainer and my only Constant.  To be able to trust that God is providing for me in all ways and I have to release my useless pride and fear to Him and let Him take complete control.  So much easier said than done as I have been learning these past three days.  The change in relationships in my life from the dependency on someone and now having to let that go and just lean on Jesus.  

Oh change is painful and can be annoying and is most certainly never easy.  It is usually uncomfortable and at some point in the process we want to give up and go back to the way it used to be.  But as with my bangs you have to commit to change and commit to seeing it through and trusting God to "be my rescue, for where else can I go?  My conclusion to handling all this change is found in the words of one of my favorite hymns.

"Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him.  How I've proved Him o'er and o'er.  Jesus, Jesus, Precious Jesus. Oh for Grace to trust Him more." Amen.