Afraid, bound up, feeling condemned, then it was like all the sudden a breeze came upon me and I felt..well, free.
Do you hear the whispers? The whispers you hear all day. The ones that don’t leave you any sleep, lead you to walk around with your head down; the ones that make you want to rip your hair out or just wail. Yes, those whispers. That regretfully familiar voice is none other but satan himself. We know the devil is constantly at work to bring up thoughts of our past and our failures but the reason we become utterly oppressed by them is because we choose to identify ourself with those whispers.
The devil is so sneaky like that, he will slowly blur the lines to the point beyond differentiating. he blurs the lines of holiness to appear to be perfection, blurs the lines of being human to appear as being a failure. he blurs the lines of your past to the point that you start to identify it as your present. I’m not worthy enough. I’m not good enough. I’m a failure. The solution to all of this is God given clarity. This kind of clarity is like no other and is only attainable by continual feeding of Gods word to our spirit.
I sat under a message once talking about our identification in Christ. Something she had said stood out to me above all and I’ve carried it ever since. “When you are constantly focusing on all the negative aspects of life and of yourself, it will cause your spirit to have an identity crisis.” There are those who are bound up by fear and anxiety, carrying the weight of self-condemnation on their shoulders; it’s crippling. That is in no form the way God intends those to live in serving Him. For it is written “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]
“When you are constantly focusing on all the negative aspects of life and yourself, it will cause your spirit to have an identity crisis.”
Jesus never promised an easy life but He did give us the option of a ‘more abundant life’! Did you catch that? He gave us the option of life more abundantly.
Thats where you come in.
This more abundant life Jesus is speaking of is not circumstantial, it’s not based on your abilities, it’s not based upon you.
The whispers will tell you the weight, the weight of all those blurred lines and all those I’m not good enough feelings, is all on you. The ground breaking simple concept that silences those whispers is that it’s not all on you but it’s all in God.
Some Of the best advice I’ve received was when I was down at an altar a person completely ignorant of my situation was pulling down the strongholds of self condemnation in my life. Knelt beside me they whispered “Stop focusing on what you think you are and start focusing on who the word of God tells us you are!”
“The ground breaking simple concept that silences those whispers is that it’s not all on you but it’s all in God.”
In James 1:8 it tells us how a a double minded man is unstable in all his ways. You can not have the mind of Christ and have spiritual confidence if you are condemning yourself. Jesus loves you. He loves you! He knows sometimes we fail or miss the mark. He loves us just the way we are..but he loves us too much to let us stay that way!
The past is the past. The pursuit of holiness is definitely not a path of perfection. And it’s not about who you think you are but what Gods word confirms us as.
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” – [2 Corinthians 5:17]