jesus

Necessary changes

/ Renee / 2 Comments

My life does not look the same today as it did ten years ago. This summer, in July, marks ten years of salvation for me. Ten years of reborn living, ten years of trials that ultimately have led me into the walk I am in today with the Lord. Ten years from now, I pray that my life is marked by ten more years of a daily pursuit of the Lord. The hinge point of salvation marked a point in my life where, from that point forward, the Lord was moving me into obedience. But, it didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen easily.

Ten years ago I was living a selfish, sin filled life. I was regularly using marijuana, and drinking almost every day. My view of God was that He probably existed, and even that He probably created the world -to an extent- but that He had no time or interest in the lives of the people now inhabiting earth. I believed that He’d left us to our own devices and that if He was even aware of our suffering that He didn’t care.

A drastic change was necessary for my view of who God is to change. It started with the near failure of my marriage. I was engaged in an affair, something that is not abnormal for someone who had been the victim of childhood sexual abuse, as I had been. I justified the behavior by blaming my husband for the problems in our marriage, and choosing to believe the lie that the intruder in our life understood me better and would be a better support for me to behave in ways that were ultimately destructive and dangerous. At the same time, I didn’t want my marriage to fail, was afraid of my husband discovering the affair, and lied copiously to him, family, and friends in an attempt to conceal the true details of the nature of it.

When I reflect on this period of my life, I am filled with sadness and shame. I wish I could stop the old me from engaging in behavior that was driven by my flesh, fueled by sin, and in such contrast to the will of God for my life. Change was necessary for me to be brought into the fold of God. That July, God performed a miracle in our marriage. By the grace of God, that came through a conversation with our pastor at the time, communication barriers and walls of self-preservation that I had built with the mortar of conditioned survival behaviors and layered on brick by brick since childhood, were penetrated by the love and grace of Jesus Christ. The day after the transformation of my heart occurred, I broke off the affair. It took ten years for me to fully confess to my husband and seek forgiveness. I also confessed to the pastors and deacons of our church, seeking their forgiveness, which they all graciously granted.

I had a knowledge of God’s word. I’d grown up in church learning scripture and all the Bible stories, I even professed salvation as an eight year old, one year into the sexual abuse that continued until I was fourteen, I was baptized and believed for all intents and purposes that I’d been saved. However, it wasn’t until this point in my life, when my marriage was on the brink of failure, I was engaged in such intertwined sin patterns that I had no hope to unentangle myself on my own, where God began healing the suffering and exposing the sin that was keeping me enslaved to a life of despair and hopelessness that I surrendered to His authority and governance of my life.

From this point forward, the Lord has been moving me further from the darkness and into the light. My life would not transform overnight, there would be more sin patterns, more destructive behavior, and more hardship that, as a result of the suffering, would shepherd me into a life marked by obedience and transparency. But, a lifetime of hiding didn’t morph into a life in full view overnight. Through a series of necessary changes, the Lord moved our life into a place of greater obedience day by day, as we pursued His word and will for our life.

It’s easy to view Christians as if through a lens of having a distance from sin and, therefore, the accessibility to salvation, by someone still entangled in the chains of sin, seems out of reach. However, I exist to tell you, as someone who Jesus burst into the middle of my entanglement, loosed the chains Himself, and pulled me free, there is no place where you are hidden from His sight, no place where He can’t reach you.

The appearance of a Sunday morning sanctuary where everyone is buttoned to the collar, polite, and seemingly unattainable is a far cry from some of the bathrooms floors where I found myself, dirty, broken, and hopeless. But, God was just as present with me there as He is in my row on Sunday morning. He is just as present as I load and reload the washing machine as He was beside me when I was pouring another drink.

The Psalmist wrote in Psalm 139,

7 Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
    If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
9 If I take the wings of the morning
    and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
10 even there your hand shall lead me,
    and your right hand shall hold me.

There is nowhere that is hidden from God. No aspect of our lives that He is disinterested or disengaged from. My life underwent a series of necessary changes for me to realign the warped view the enemy had instilled in my mind regarding God’s position in our places of suffering.

But, I exist as a testimony that the life of obedience is marked by light, peace, and rest in the atonement made by Christ on my behalf.

Today is the day of salvation. If you haven’t accepted Christ as your savior there is no impediment to receiving the gift of His death and resurrection made on your behalf. I was addicted to drugs and alcohol, engaged in an extramarital affair, angry at God for the abuse I had suffered, and conflicted daily by the enslavement to sin, and that is where Jesus met and saved me.

Don’t neglect such a glorious salvation. Receive His free gift of grace, by faith today.

God bless.

The facade of control

/ Renee / Leave a comment

Last night, around 5:30pm eastern standard time, a jet carrying 64 passengers departed from Wichita, Kansas. Sixty four families had someone they loved aboard that aircraft for what should have been a routine flight less than five hours from their departure.

At around 9pm EST, sixty seven families’ lives were impacted in a way that will forever enact for them a “before and after,” phase of their lives. The American Airlines jet collided with a military black hawk helicopter that was carrying three passengers. The collision occurred as the jet attempted the descent to land at Reagan National Airport, just outside of DC, plunging sixty seven people, dads, moms, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers into the thirty seven degree waters of the Potomac River.

One eye witness described the collision as a “fireball,” in the sky. An emergency rescue operation is underway to recover any survivors, but early reports presume that all sixty seven people are dead.

All of them had plans for today. All of them had agendas, meetings, schedules. I would wager that they all had plans for tomorrow, this weekend, next week. Personally, my family has plans as far out as July. I know the crater that would devastate our home if my husband didn’t come home from work today. I feel the dread in my bones. For sixty seven people, they received a phone call informing them that there has been a terrible accident and they need to prepare themselves, their children, their parents, for the worst.

The illusion that we have a say in the events of our lives is simply a coping mechanism. We live under the idea that our meticulously organized, color coded schedule blocks are somehow the fibers that hold together the circumstances of our moments, but this just isn’t the case. The aviation world, experts, pilots are shocked by the “swiss holes” in flight technology that aligned perfectly and allowed this sort of tragedy to occur, but God wasn’t surprised.

I don’t believe in coincidences, whether good or bad. This was a tragic occurrence that was completely within God’s control and timing. The wives who are now widows, the children who will grow up without their mom or dad, the parents who lost children in this horrific accident are not unseen by God who is sovereign over all. His power and presence doesn’t stop tragedy from occurring. It is within the scope of His knowledge that tragedy occurs, and He does have the power to stop these terrible things from happening before they occur. However, the moments of despair and despondency, when we are faced with a trial that we don’t have the strength to endure on our own, are exactly the circumstances that drive us to the foot of the cross.

It is grace when we face suffering beyond our comprehension and mercy that is extended in the form of comfort and peace by the hand of His sustaining power because it is one means by which God will draw us to Him. The problem is that we view these circumstances through the lens of our temporal perspective and not through the lens of his eternal one. This doesn’t mean that grieving, devastation, anger or shock are inappropriate. At the tomb of his friend Lazarus, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35) and in the Hebrew the connotation for this use of the Hebrew word, “wept,” was a guttural cry of anguish and dismay at the suffering of God’s people at the hands of the consequence of sin, which is death.

God’s plan of redemption for the world began before the foundations of the earth were laid. He knew the serpent would deceive Eve, and Adam who was with her, in the garden and therefore introduce sin into the world. He knew that the law He gave to Moses for the Israelites would be impossible for them to keep, and that they would continually fall short of the holiness required of them to be reunited with Him. He knew that only by a savior could those who trust in Him be redeemed. Jesus came to earth to redeem His own and by His word we are provided all the information we need to understand why tragedies like this occur: because satan introduced sin into the world which separated creation from a holy God and allowed for pain, despair, destruction, division, and death. But Jesus came to overcome these things.

Jesus states in John 16:33, “these things {His instruction and teaching} I have spoken to you so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.”

When Jesus came, died on the cross, and was resurrected three days later it was to secure, for those who would believe, a future that does not include happenstance tragedy. It will not include sickness, pain, or death. He died so that the payment for the sin of man, which made man irreconcilable to God through any other means than by grace through faith, was made.

Today is the day of salvation. Confess the sin that separates you from God and trust in the payment made by Christ on your behalf.

Pray for the families of this most recent tragedy. Unfortunately, there will be another one somewhere today, tomorrow, soon. The facade of control is that we have any but Jesus provides a solution. The tragedy and brokenness have already been overcome and can be accessed in a future day because of the blood of Christ.

Come soon, Lord Jesus.

God bless.