May 12, 2013
Lord, here I am. Wanting to be very raw and real. Plow the soil of my heart. Deal with me. Bring things up by Your Holy Spirit.
I haven't been listening. My spiritual ears are deafened. I haven't been believing. Why? Where has my faith gone? I've brushed so many things aside, so much I just made head knowledge.
So many callouses. So much hard heartedness. And so much insecurity about my weaknesses and insecurities.
God, break me open.
I am so selfish. I have reverted inwards to where I am the center. This should not be!
God, shine Your light into me. Into every crack and crevice of my soul, every corner of my mind, every part of my being. Shine into me, illuminate and expose even the very dusty corners. Illuminate and expose the dark and secret places of my innermost self. Penetrate to my very core. Your word can do that. Your Word is a light and a sword and I pray that it would cut into me and expose me. Past the layers. Past the self-defenses of image and sarcasm and goofiness. Through the insecurities and doubts and fears. Through the tough shell and the soft shell. Through my desires and hopes and dreams.
What are You saying to me? Open my ears. Open my eyes. Soften my heart.
Plow the soil of my heart.
I want to know You.
And I want to be whole again. I want to be holy. Because You are holy.
Yes I did.
I wrote all that. In my journal. Last May, after my Junior year at New Hope.
I go to Bible college, y'all. I know the Bible. I'm learning to study it. I'm learning all the right answers. I'm learning how to do ministry, how to lead, how to worship, how to read the Bible, how to apply it to my life. I'm learning about God.
But I realized I was missing something.
And it wasn't anyone's fault but my own.
When I got to the end of the school year last May, I felt so dead. Did you know that you can spend ALL your time around God's word and His people and even in His presence and still miss something? Did you know it's possible to lose passion for God in a Bible college? Did you know it's possible to read His word and it not change you?
It is.
I had it happen.
Here's what I missed:
I missed the relationship part of my relationship with God.
Sounds crazy, huh? How do you have a relationship with God and yet miss the relational aspect of it?
Exactly.
I had made my Spiritual life with God an academic exercise. When I read my Bible, all I tried to do was extrapolate whatever I could out of it and then tried to cram it down my own throat. I never took time to really listen to what God would say to me. I never spent time just worshiping Him in private or secret. I never spend time alone with Him. Not quality time. I always put it off. I always put off the still, small voice that would say "Come away with Me." I stuffed things down, thinking "oh, I'll deal with that later. I'm too busy to let God speak into that now." And after stuffing things down for so long, always being too busy to spend real time with God, I reached the point where I just couldn't hear or be still anymore.
It was like being in a relationship you're too busy for. I knew so much about God. But I forgot to make effort to know Him, not just about Him. And there is no one to blame but myself.
It isn't Bible college that does this to us, guys. We do it to ourselves. It's the condition of our own hearts.
So at the end of last year, I found myself putting on paper the words you find above. It was a prayer I really meant. I realized I couldn't fix myself or undo what I had done. I couldn't rescue myself from the point of numbness I had reached. And looking back over this past summer, it's a prayer God has been answering. Which means I've experienced some "good pain" this summer. Because when God exposes what's wrong in you and then moves to fix it, it means peeling off some scabs and doing some surgery. God brought me through some circumstances that did just that. And through it all, I had to seek Him to get answers. I had to seek Him to understand, to process what was going on.
So what is my point? I have three. They are these:
- Life is about relationship with God. If we make it about anything else, we miss something.
- Regardless of where you have been or are now in your relationship with God, you're not too far gone for Him to heal. And He is the one who does the healing. We can't heal ourselves. We can't open our own ears. We can't teach ourselves lessons. We can't do surgery on ourselves. If we try, we'll just mess ourselves up more.
- Surrender is a beautiful word. It's the point I came to last May. It's where I came to the end of trying to fix my relationship with God and finally just submitted myself to Him again.
Surrender. That's where I met Him. He was always there to meet me, but that's where I met Him.
Hope this encourages you. :)
