It’s funny how you can have a “quiet time” without actually having
a quiet time. How you can sit at the
table and open your Bible or your devotional and just be glazing right over
having actual time with God. You’re reading
but not really receiving. You’re yawning
and fighting the temptation to do other things.
It’s also funny how often this sort of “quiet time” correlates
to you allowing sin into your life. Pride.
Not admitting that you are a child and you need His help. Not grabbing onto His hand that fights for
you, pleads for you, created you.
Allowing yourself to grab other things and justifying or ignoring the
fact that they are sins. Sins that you
were, at one point, aware of and trying to crucify. Sins you were willing to go through the
difficult process to remove, humbling yourself like a child to be healed. But suddenly, or maybe gradually,
your heart shifted. You weren’t willing
to stumble and fall and trust God throughout the process. You didn’t give yourself the grace to learn,
nor did you admit the dependence on God you needed. And so, you
have slipped back into yourself rather than Him. Sin crept in.
And quiet times just don’t seem to have the same significance...
The brutal truth: What
is the point of the cross if not to give Him our EVERYTHING? Our whole hearts and minds and strengths and
souls and SINS at the foot of the cross,
where Jesus bled out and died. Where He
was CRUCIFIED to give us the hand that heals us. It is almost not worth it to have a quiet
time unless we are willing to surrender it all. Everything. Because if our sin is more
valuable to us than His awful death, we may as well just hang on to it instead.
But I say “almost” not worth it because I know He fights for
us even when we hold on to our sins, that He waits for us to turn to Him with
unlimited patience. Such a gentleman is
our God. Slow to anger, quick to
forgive, always compassionate...always loving us despite us. And there is value in going to Him exactly
where we are, even if we’re not willing to surrender, even when we raise our
stiff necks to Him. When we clench
our fists in anger, when we fight Him tooth and nail, and when we slip into the
passively mundane. Rebellion, defiance, complacence.
Because He brings us to the TRUTH eventually. And eventually, hopefully, we are willing to
hear it.
Oh, how good it feels when we finally let go of sin. What new life is breathed into our time with Him. Such a sweet surrender when we trust Him at His WORD. A little scary…a leap off of a mountain. But as the air flows in our faces, we feel His
freedom. We feel ALIVE again, like a stream of water has touched the desert place of our hearts, where we may not have even
realized how parched we were. That
living water is a humble place of repentance that only He can bring so
directly, but also so lovingly.
I will become like a child.
I will humble myself like a child.
I will give myself the grace He wants to give me when I fall, but I will
also be willing to stumble and fall and make sure that I do this the right way. Not be prideful enough to think that I have
my own methods to “cure” my sin. Not be
avoiding the road He has planned for me.
My father in heaven is the only one that can guide me down this road,
pick me up and dust off my knees when I fall, and lead me to streams of
living water.
