It’s one of those emotions that I try to avoid at all costs. Desperation reeks of humiliation. If I’m desperate for something then I have to embrace/admit the truth that I don’t know everything. I have to accept the fact that I cannot do something on my own. Hmm….shouldn’t I already know this? I like to be good at what I’m good at and leave it at that. But it’s those times when I try something new and have a good experience, which in turn reveals that all of a sudden I am in over my head and I want to back pedal and I find that there is no way back, but only the way through. It’s times like these that I am desperate.
Desperate to not look like the fool. Desperate to impress. Desperate that I won’t. Desperate to not fail. Desperate to know the outcome. Desperate.
It’s a state of mind and heart I try to avoid.
But…..
What if?
What if I have it all wrong? What if desperation is actually a good thing?
What if desperation positions my heart to receive the power of Christ in my life?
Multiple times this week the Lord has brought the story of ‘a dead girl and a sick woman’ to mind. It is found in three out of the four gospels. Matthew 9:18-26, Mark 5:21-42, and Luke 8:40-55 if you would like to read it.
These passages showcase two very different people. We have the woman–‘unclean’, isolated, bereft of physical touch, broke, bearing the burden to announce her uncleanness wherever she went to protect the integrity of other’s cleanness. Then we have the man–synagogue ruler, wealthy, respected, keeper of the rules, and well-known.
Two different people from two very different walks of life yet they shared a desperation. Each was desperate for Jesus.
In their desperation they received. They received life from Jesus.
Sustaining life.
Physical life.
Emotional life.
Spiritual life.
Could it be that what matters most in Kingdom Economy is desperation, not position or lack thereof, but a desperation for God himself?
This is desperation that we should never be ashamed of. This should be desperation that we cultivate. This desperation is life-giving desperation. Desperation for God himself.
I am desperate. I am desperate for God to come into my circumstance. God is attracted to a humble heart and if my heart is desperate then I come to him in humility, eyes open waiting to see him move, arms open to receive whatever he wants me to receive, and finally to have my desperation met.
I come from a line of frugal, do it yourself, ‘where there is a will there is a way’ kind of people. It’s a legacy I appreciate as it has served me well. But like with all good things, there can be an edge to it. An edge that says, ‘I’ve got to take care of this’. In reality there is nothing wrong with having a get it done kind of attitude, but it turns into self-reliance and self-sufficiency God is edged out of the picture and we set ourselves up in an illusion.
We hear of wars and rumors of wars. We hear of Iran testing missiles. We hear of doom about our financial stability. We hear of scandal. We hear of socialism. We hear of conservatism. We hear of racism. We hear of devestation. We hear of things that shake our world such as a diagnosis of defeat, of cancer, or of death.
The illusion I spoke of? It gets revealed when we get hit with news that no amount of will or determination or do it yourselfness can begin to improve.
So what then? Do we try harder? Do we do more? Do we deny the circumstances?
Do we find our trust in God wavering?
It’s situations like these that reveal exactly whether we truly mean the words: ‘I trust in you, God’.
Have I merely given lip service to my God? Do I even understand what it means to trust Him? There was a time in my life that I underlined or circled every time the word trust was used in the book of Psalms. I needed to see just how important trust was in the lives of believers and how important it is to God. I don’t want to give lip service to my God, He means too much to me to do that and yet….sometimes I do.
This is the deal….
Confidence is one of those words whose definition gets infused with our humanness and can be translated into arrogance, or self-reliance, and maintaining control with God as our back-up.
Holy confidence, however, is putting God between us and our circumstance. Let me restate that. Holy confidence is not blindly saying that I believe God will take care of it. Holy confidence is putting God between us and our circumstance and seeing him.
It’s seeing his strength. It’s seeing his goodness. It’s seeing his provision. It’s seeing his righteousness. It’s seeing his power. It’s seeing his healing. It’s seeing his mercy. It’s seeing his freedom.
It seeing all these things first and then seeing your circumstance. I am awed that when I focus on my God’s attributes and care and concern for me, my circumstances seem small because my God seems big. But when I focus on an overwhelming circumstance God seems small. And my trust wavers.
It’s not me and God working out a problem. It’s me behind God. God behind my circumstance. My circumstance cannot overwhelm me because it has to go through God first. I cannot affect the outcome of my circumstance because I have to go through God first. When I step out into self-confidence — two things happen to me. An illusion is created and I take responsibility for bearing the burden of my circumstance.
Holy Confidence is placing God between you and your circumstance. Keep your eyes focused on him. Look at your circumstance through his strength and not your own. Look to him for your every breath and move. He never fails and is faithful.
I take comfort in knowing that you too have a little mess-up in your life. It makes me not feel alone. And yet that solidarity can be a trap. It can fool us into thinking that we are on the same team that must win at being screwed up. It can trick us into the comparison game: ‘Well, I am not as bad as so and so’, or ‘boy, I really screwed up, look at her, she’s messed up too, but is making good, I don’t think I can have the life change she has’.
What if we accepted ourselves as wholly screwed up while at the same time embraced Christ for what he did for us? Which is the removal of our sin, our shame, and our guilt. What if we took the truth of God’s word and wrapped it around ourselves like a mantle and let the truths settle on our shoulders and actually felt the weight truth?
I think I would be wholly changed.
I think that my messed up soul imprint would begin to take on the imprint of God himself and then I must ask myself if I am really as messed up as I believe or is my mess somehow being made beautiful.
Or I am just seeing myself, without the guilt and shame, as God sees me.
Wholly loved.
Wholly messy beautiful.
Can mess be beautiful? I must believe it or I would be crippled by the weight of regret and bitterness and unforgiveness. Every time I have turned over my regrets to my Abba Father, I come away encouraged that there is redemption. Every time I let go of bitterness I smell the fragrance of the rose rather than feel the prick of the thorns. Each time I choose forgiveness I am reminded of my own forgiveness.
Every time I offer my mess-up soul to him, I receive grace in return and that is wholly beautiful.
Receive grace. Will you offer your messed-up self to him and open your arms to receive his grace? Grace that changes us into a new kind of beautiful we cannot even begin to imagine. Grace that reveals truth. Truth that reveals grace.
Have you ever felt like you are standing with your hand waving in the air, ‘pick me, pick me?’ Maybe as adults we don’t really do that but I think we all have that desire to be picked. Chosen. We ask: Pick me for the job. Pick me because I have something valuable to offer. And sometimes it seems that everyone else is getting ‘picked’ except for you.
I can remember those school play yard games where two kids were picked as ‘captains’ for a rousing game of dodgeball and then proceeded to pick team members. I hated those days.
I was usually the last of the kids picked. It could be because I hated the thought of throwing a ball– hard!–on purpose at someone and having it thrown–hard!–at me. Ouch!
It’s not that I didn’t try at athletics. In middle school I tried track, basketball, and volleyball. I discovered I didn’t like running. Ugh. And I really didn’t like having a ball flying through the air at me. That ball always seemed to connect with my nose as evidenced by a permanent black and blue mark across the bridge of my nose that shows up when I am exhausted. I know, I know…my hands are for catching the ball, not my face.
But really? I think it was those traumatizing days of school yard dodge ball that made me hate trying to catch a ball or toss one over the net. Suffice it to say–I was not in the first round pick or the second or the third, but dead last. I tried not to let it hurt, I mean I completely understand why I wasn’t picked first, but being last? over and over? It felt like rejection to me. I was in a different elementary school every year, and every year became a year I could ‘start over’, but the outcome was the same: ‘last pick’.
It’s funny how we carry childhood wounds and hurts into our adult lives, some of those wounds being pretty obvious, but the innocuous ones, the ones that are easy to hide beneath bravado and arrogance and pride and independence, those are the ones that affect our lives in a subtle, but significant way.
One of the ways this epidemic of being picked last in is evidenced in the difficulty in accepting the truth that I am chosen by God–because he wants me not because he has to.
‘For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight,’ Ephesians 1:4. How about if we replace the pronoun ‘us’ with our name? What if we read it like this: ‘For he chose Jessica in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight’. Try reading it with your name in place of the ‘us’. What is your reaction? When I first allowed that truth to be revealed to me, I followed it with a ‘but…’.
But as I go deeper with God, this truth becomes something I cannot ‘but’ away, but need to face head on and decide if I am going to embrace this truth that God chose me, long before I raised my arm, waving, ‘pick me, pick me’. For this truth to become embraceable I need to lay aside the identity of ‘last pick’ and decide that God’s opinion is ultimately the most important one there is to cling to. He calls me chosen.
He picked me. He picked you. Long ago. Before we even got to the playground of life we were ‘picked’. Chosen. That’s part of your identity. That’s part of mine. That’s one of the words we should hear when we look into that mirror. Will you open your ears to hear that truth or are you stuck following it with a ‘but…’.
Friends, I pray that you will embrace ‘chosen’ as part of your identity and if embracing chosen is an area where you are strong in, find someone to encourage in that truth. Tell them God chooses them. Tell them that God picks them first. I’ll go first….
You are picked! By our loving, loving God. In fact he says:
Mirror mirror on the wall who’s the fairest of them all….
The face looking back at me runs through the litany of comments….
fat
ugly
selfish
prideful
wounded
graceless
blunt
tactless
opinionated
dominating
controlling
manipulative
jealous
this list could grow and continue and morph into whatever you see or hear when you look into the mirror.
Mirror mirror on the wall….you are a liar or maybe I am the one with the warped perceptions of myself.
I have seen the truth of these words in myself, but also within these words I have seen the lies.
The reality is that I can be domineering. I can be controlling. I can be ugly. I am wounded. I have wounded. I can be graceless. I can be blunt.
But the truth is that my wounds can be used for God’s glory. The truth is that when I wound, I can experience the beautiful gift of forgiveness. The truth is when I am domineering I have the opportunity to submit to the control of my holy, loving, gracious God. The truth is that all the parts of who I am–the good, the bad and the ugly– are all a part of me and who am I to reject what I see in the mirror. Rather than rejecting the ‘less than’ part of myself what if I were to offer those parts of me up to Jesus and surrender to whatever he wants to do to turn those weaknesses into a strength.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am not giving myself license to be the worst side of me, I am giving myself grace to grow into the best side of me and that side is only found in Jesus Christ. If I am going to grow then I can expect failures. But failures are not a sign that I failed per se, they are an opportunity to grow in a specific tangible way. Only in him can we be our best and if we detect patterns of thought that produce our worst, and we don’t hold them up to him like a child holding up a broken lovey and saying ‘fix?’ then I am not submitting to whatever he wants to do to turn those weaknesses into strengths.
the truth within these words is that there is redemption through Jesus Christ.
Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all….
Is it our name that makes us who we are or who we are that marks us with our identity?
How many feuds have been won and lost simply over a name: The McCoys and Hatfields, The War of the Roses, or The MacDonalds and the Campbells. If you were born a Campbell you were feuding with the MacDonalds whether you were aware of it or not. You were entwined into the family feud based on your birth, not by your choice.
Our identity is found in many things: Our family name. Our family history or our lack of family history. Our accomplishments. Our failures. Our fears. Our successes. Our strengths. Our weaknesses.
And it is those very things that can stand in the way of identifying ourselves in Christ. He is where we find our identity, but so often life confuses us and blinds us and we come to Christ recognizing him as our Savior, but struggling to recognize him as Lord. Is this where we fall short in surrendering our identity for his? We recognize him as our Savior, but don’t know how to make him our Lord? The battle for lordship begins and ends with identity.
Who do you say you are?
I say I am a wife, ‘just’ a mom to some, but ‘mom!’ to the four people that matter. I homeschool and in some circles that is celebrated and in some circles it is ridiculed. I am flawed. I find it difficult to forgive myself. I label myself: failure. reject. My mistakes replay in my mind like a broken record.
Who does Christ say you are?
Christ says I am chosen. I am blameless. I am enough. I am approved. I am free. I am righteous. I am an heir. I am a royal priest. I am a minister. I am loved. I am forgiven. I am His.
Did I become each of these things the moment I accepted Christ as my Savior? Yes. However, did I believe them immediately? No. Honestly, accepting my new identity in Christ has taken me many years to embrace, and it has become part of my transformation.
Gideon (Judges 6-7) hid in a winepress while threshing grain because he was hiding from his enemies when an angel appeared to him and called him a ‘mighty man of valor’.This angel proceeded to launch Gideon on a path of bravery and courage. But, Gideon had to be thinking, ‘Are you kidding? I am hiding! I’m too scared to thresh this grain in broad daylight and you call me what?’
Could Gideon have called himself a coward? Did he take that on as his identity? I believe he might have. But God called him by another name. God wanted him to grow into his new identity.
Craig Groeschel writes in his book ‘Altar Ego‘: ‘Gideon, empowered by God, grew into the true meaning of his name. God will do the same of you, but you must be willing to let go of the old name to grow into the fullness of your true identity.’
There are two things that I see in this quote and in the story of Gideon:
Gideon was empowered by the Holy Spirit
Gideon had to be willing to let go of his old identity
We can do nothing outside of the power of the Holy Spirit. Absolutely nothing. We can tell ourselves we are chosen and hope that we will begin to believe it if we repeat it to ourselves long enough, but for that belief to become really real to us we must turn to the Holy Spirit to empower that belief in us. Rather than repeat ‘I am chosen’ we say ‘Holy Spirit, empower me to believe that I am chosen.’
The second thing we have to do is to put aside our old identity. So that means we put aside the label of rejected. or failure. or loser. or successful. We have to be willing to let it go and be willing to grow into the fullness of our true identity in Christ through whatever means he chooses to use.
This is where our identity in Christ and his lordship in our life come to a cross roads because sometimes the ‘whatever means he chooses to use’ leads us down a road that we would not willingly choose to go on if we knew exactly what was around the bend. Sometimes that identity of who we are in Christ comes to us like a sunrise and sometimes it comes to us through a disaster, but the means is not the end goal. The end goal is for each of us to become who Christ says we are:
