Month: March 2018

Soul Warning

Shaken Soul

I’m shaken after meditating on Psalm 78.  And it’s interesting that it came up in my reading this most holy of weeks, where our remembrance of the first holy week is full of defeat, blundering and failure.  It is a bit encouraging.  Not that we want to excuse our failures, but encouraging that there’s hope for us.  Sin will never satisfy like obedience does.  It only creates more ravishing pull.

 

Getting a glimpse of what our sin does to God:

God vulnerably shows His heart in Psalm 78

  • :40 His people grieved Him in the desert
  • :41 They limited God (i.e., in their arrogance “allowed” only so much, thinking they knew better) Of course, He can overpower but often waits for an invitation.
  • :41 They pained the Holy One!
  • :42 They didn’t remember His power (after all they’d seen!)
  • :52-55 He guided them, brought them out of slavery and gave them an inheritance yet they
  • :56-58 rebelled, turned back, provoked Him and aroused His jealousy.

 

Who puts up with this?!  Who is this God?

 

So He had to let them go…he had to give them up in order to get them to turn back. In an earlier cycle the same happened:

:34 then they sought Him, returned and searched diligently for God and remembered…

 

there is always redemption when we turn toward Him.

What our sin does to us:

  • :18 they focused on their desires rather than His promises. (Our desires can be good things, but not at the expense of remembering and asking God.)
  • :22 it fostered unbelief
  • :32 in spite of His answers they refused to respond either to miracles or to judgment.
  • :33 they missed what God had for them.
  • :36 they “flattered” him (praised Him with their tongue but their hearts were far from Him)
  • :37 their repentance was shallow, no heart change

 

How lurking sin (like an enemy) tricks us, pulls us, limits us, sets us back, saps us of strength and life.  We take it lightly, not realizing the depth of consequences. Yes, there is grace greater than all our sin!!

Amen! I’m so glad.

But there is also grace before we sin; so we don’t have to sin.  Grace that gives us strength and power to choose otherwise.

Hallelujah!

Grace to walk in newness of life, to “not let sin reign in our bodies to obey its lusts” Rom. 6:12

 

“Don’t receive the grace of God is vain.” 2 Cor. 6:1

As Beth Moore says:

I say this with tremendous empathy to those of you in my former estate. I earned the right to my defeat. If you knew the details of my past, few of you would wonder why I couldn’t escape the cycle of sin-cry-repent-repeat. But if Jesus had just left me there, I’d be dead by now.

 

Who puts up with this?!  Who is this God?

 

He is the One who let our sin put Him on the cruel cross to bring us hope.

 

Hallelujah!

What small choice will you make today applying His grace so you don’t give in to sin?

“Flee…and pursue…” 1 Tim. 6:11

OR

What drastic measure do you need to take to keep you from the pull of sin?

“…throw it away…” Matt. 18:9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Soul Growth

Soul Dispossession

Dispossess  –  dɪspəˈzɛs/   verb

deprive (someone) of land, property, or other possessions.  syn.- divest, strip, rob

 

 Feeling slighted by something taken from you?

 

Reading in Numbers 20-24, how the Israelites “camped… journeyed…set out…and dispossessed…” peoples of their lands by God’s hand, is disturbing and seemingly cruel.  There they were, the new kids on the block, barging in on someone else’s territory. What right did they have?

 

Well there’s a bigger story going on that stretches back centuries before, when God put His hand on Abraham, from a godless nation and called him out, dispossessed him so that he could eventually possess (centuries later through his descendants).

 

It is God who is doing the dispossessing.  His inalienable laws had been defiantly ignored and spurned.   Child sacrifices, unutterable abuses and atrocities reigned.  So He was on the move to reclaim His ways and show the right way to be human.  And He chose humans to represent Him.  That was a huge risk because it didn’t always go the way He desired. It put His name to shame, yet He patiently worked His plan.

 

Though the battle is the Lord’s, we still have to step into the land and use our swords with skill.  That’s what the wilderness training is all about.  Choosing the right battles; the battle to believe with courage and not shrink back because of difficulties. To dispossess the enemy of what is ours; rather than focusing only on trying circumstances like God’s people in the time of Hosea:

 

“Although I trained and strengthened their arms, yet they devise evil against Me.” Hosea 7:15

 

We’re ushered into this world that is ruled by forces that work at taking our identity, our hope, our freedom and our creativity.  So we are called on to go into the lands of our souls to dispossess and repossess God’s territory.  Just as the Israelites had to go into battle together with God, so we go in to take back what has been stolen, killed and destroyed (John 10:10).

 

God calls us out, to call us in.  He calls us to dispossession (taking what the enemy has stolen), to call us into possession of real life.

For me, self-doubt can get in the way of walking in courageous faith.  I am joining Him in dispossessing the enemy of his pull in this area. And finding this is a mercy to keep me depending on Him.

 

  • What area in your soul needs to be dispossessed (or taken back)? Dignity, value, belonging, joy, freedom from fear or bitterness, faith?
  • What are you demanding that God hasn’t given, keeping you from contentment?  Could that demand be taking the place of what He wants to give?
  • What might you need to repossess by the power and authority of your Creator and Redeemer?

 

“Abundant life in not abundance of blessing, it is abundance of power to live and love [in our messy world]; to put God on display in our difficulties.” Larry Crabb