The last couple of weeks I have just been really angry with the Lord. I don’t know why, but I have had little desire to really fellowship with Him or spend any time with Him at all. Obviously when a person goes through a wandering period their actions are going to reflect that in every way. The things I have said to God and the attitude and way I have acted towards Him have just been awful. No, I am not living a life of the “original sins” like sex, drugs, etc. But my heart is in rebellion. And that is equally full of sin.
So naturally every sermon or spiritual conversation is leaning towards this type of heart or situation. No one really knows what I have been going through. So that leaves me with knowing that of course God is trying to get through to me. If I won’t listen to Him, he will make sure that I hear Him from every avenue. All the while I just sit there and think, “Yep, that was for me”... “Yep, I’m there”.
So in the middle of last week after one of my infamous, “Oh God why?!” speeches, out loud to an empty room I said, “This must be some sort of heart issue”. Thankfully, the Lord heard it even though I had no desire of changing it. So over the next couple of days, the Lord has showed me some things that I did not necessarily want to see, but feel a freedom of them being exposed and starting the long process of refinement that the Lord is going to take me through.
It all started last Saturday at church. The pastor was speaking and the message was called, “Tough love”. While we were in Isaiah, he stated a point: “The danger of idolatry is that you can’t hear the voice of God”. What has been my year long struggle? I can’t seem to hear the voice of the Lord about a lot of things…. Another powerful point was: “God most often doesn’t spare us from the trial but allows us to meet Him in the trial”… One thing that I have always known myself to do would be to ask the Lord to save me from the trial as soon as I entered it. Then I progressed to asking Him to teach me what He wanted me to learn and to deliver me from it. I truly prayed these things with a genuine heart, but I still missed the buck.
Like an Israelite, I will cry out to God when I go through a struggle, He saves me, I am follow Him for awhile, and then end up in a desert or valley. Each time I go through these seasons, it is deeper than before. So when I realized that this might be a heart issue, I really pondered that. I felt like in the past I have asked the Lord to fix the symptoms, but have never asked Him to search my heart and heal the heart issue. It is overwhelming about how fast all of the next few things came. It was really great to have a good conversation with two dear friends about it.
The first thing God really showed me is that I am prideful. For twenty years I have been prideful. I am just now realizing this of course, but subconsciously I have thought I am good at everything I do, and that I am fine spiritually. Yes, there have been times when the Lord has laid on my heart areas to confess and change, but I never saw the weight of my sin. There have been times of conviction, but I have never really felt in my heart the weight of sin. How it separates you from God as a covenant partner should kill you for breaking it.
Another thing the Lord has been revealing to me is my attitude of self-entitlement. For some reason I don’t think that I should have to suffer through trials or get less than an A in a class or be treated differently than from how I treat others. Well, here is the reality: The only thing I am entitled to is a long spiritual death. There is nothing good that I am deserving of. This was something I always knew. I could give you the church answer and say, “Everyone deserves death”. But it wasn’t until now that I am actually realizing and feeling and understanding of it.
The Lord has shown me that a lot of my thinking patterns are of a humanistic nature, and not from a solid, God ordained thought pattern. My dear friend’s pastor said, “If satan can change the way you think, he can get you to act any way he wants”. Oh boy is this true. For the first time in my life am I truly realizing how evil and wicked and sinful I am. There is nothing for me to give to make this right. Over the past couple of weeks there have been times where I have said something to God, and then thought “He is going to smite me”. And He really should have. But He didn’t. It is only because of His grace and glory. My sweet friend said, “He takes you through this to make you more like Him. To make you refined so that you are more and more in His image”. I am a long way from being the person that Christ wants me to be, but I am glad that His grace and love are not from a human’s perspective. I’m also glad that He is just, that there will be consequences for my rebellious heart, and He “Chastises those whom He loves”.
