God heard my cry and saw the honesty of my desire. I found relief in the midst of the worst pressure I had experienced since my release, when nothing was going right and when I faced some old pain and memories for the first time without the aid of numbing agents, I stayed sober. For 15 months, longer than any stretch since turning 13, I did not drink or drug. I did go back out one more time, and that's why it was 15 months and not 8 years, but as I approach the seventh year mark coming in May I still remember that moment in 2009 as when I got it.
Maybe what I got will help you too. Some struggle with early sobriety. I knew a man who took 5 years of sober and not yo-yo action before he finally strung together a solid year, but once he got it...he never looked back. He didn't have the one more fall I did. He helped me a lot during my early days, and he died clean and sober. I have known others who relapsed repeatedly. One dear friend of mine called herself the Relapse Queen until she finally found what she needed to break the pattern of standing up only to fall back down. I also know people who called out to God, set down their chains and walked away from Egypt and have never gone back. Not one relapse or slip or..... But even those have mentioned to me times of struggle when defeat seemed close, when they had to remember it before they turned and headed back to bondage.
So what is it? First let me tell you what it is not. It is not more determination or somehow attaining more or greater will power. It is also not knowledge. What I mean by that is that it is not understanding your bondage better, understanding your addiction or understanding why you keep stumbling into sin. Knowledge of what your triggers are will not keep you safe nor set you free. It is not about hating the bondage, choosing life or hating evil or anything like that. There is nothing within you or your own power that can truly change yourself, overcome your nature or walk free from sin.
In fact everything about those ideas and more thoughts I didn't share are all tied to the first part of it. It is true that pride goes before a fall, and it is pride that makes us continue to fight when there is no way we can win. It's pride that makes us say things like if I could just avoid this or if I could just stay strong or continue to promise that this time will be different despite the consistency of failure. It is pride and foolishness to keep thinking that we are responsible for freeing ourselves from our bondage, addictions and sin. Jesus came to set the captives free. He didn't come to inspire the captives to set themselves free.
If you are struggling with repeated failure to avoid habitual sin, doing what you hate and not doing what you know is right, if you keep relapsing with addiction(s), if you walk away from your Egypt only to turn back, over and over, long before you get to the miracle of the Red Sea, then part of the problem may be pride. It is true that the truth will make you free, and the truth is the you do not have the power to overcome sin, but there is One who is greater than you. His name is Jesus, and He freely offers what you do not have and need so desperately. Give up already. Surrender. Stop fighting. Let go of your pride and the need to overcome and let Him do it.
But what if He doesn't? Oh maybe you are like me, or at least what I was like before I got it. I had a jacked up view of God, and in order to stop trying to set myself free I had to get it, a glimpse of the truth about God and His love, specifically His love for me. I believed in God. I believed there was a God who was Creator of all, powerful and mighty. I believed in Jesus as the Eternal Son, Perfect Sacrifice and Risen Savior. I believed in the power of the Holy Spirit. Create a checklist from the creeds of Christian faith, and I could probably check yes on them all. I believed God loved you. What I couldn't grasp was that He loved and cared for me. I believed He could set me free, He could do anything, but I didn't believe He really wanted to or would.
I prayed for God to save me from myself, and when He didn't seem to answer those prayers and I failed again to be faithful and walk with Him, I took that as proof that I was worthless even to God and that the God of daily new mercies had written me off. Shame, which says that you haven't made mistakes but that you are the mistake, causes this hesitancy with approaching God with any sort of understanding that He cares for us and will help us. Shame is a set up to prevent us from seeking the only source of a cure for the very things causing the shame. The it that we need is to hold onto the truth. This is truth. God loves you. This is not cliche. This is not trivial or glib. This is not to every other reader but you. God loves you. He loves you just as you are and not as you should be. And He loves you enough not to leave you as you are. He has promised that you can come to Him. He said all, all means all... all who are weary and heavy laden can come to Him and exchange their weight for His. It's the great exchange as Martin Luther called it. The unfair trade of all your crap for the treasures that come with His rightness, the treasures of joy, peace, love, purpose, life worth living, oh, and did I mention love? In my experience there is nothing heavier or more exhausting than carrying around and living with shame. It is the truth that you are not your shame and your shame is not greater than God's love for you.
I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it.
- Ender
Precious pain, our dear friend. That sounds stupid and crazy and seriously messed up right? Well, that's because it is. But still there is a part of us, especially those of us who have been in bondage to habitual sin and addictions, that believes that pain is a part of us. It is who we are.
The scars remind me that the past is real. I tear my heart open just to feel.
- Papa Roach
I hurt myself today to see if I still feel.
- Nine Inch Nails
Pain is what we feel we deserve because of the shame, the false pride that says I should be able to do the impossible, overcome sin and evil on my own, or God won't love me. Pain is the only thing that we trust, because feelings of hope dying and fleeting joy seem less real and more painful than pain. Our pain and misery has been with us like a shadow for so long we have lost sight of the truth that it is not who we are, it is not truly inseparable from us and we have become comfortable with it. We like our pain. We need our pain. It needs to get to the point where you can see all that for the lie that it is or where you hurt so badly that you have gone beyond what has become acceptable, where it hurts so much that the time has come to get better or die. That's the pain that will kill pride and cause us to admit defeat. It's that kind of pain that can make us crawl to God through the obstacle of shame and cry out for the mercy that we know we don't deserve.
It's never fun discovering it. It breaks us. Our pride is shattered and we have to look our shame in the eye and it hurts. It's like Pharaoh making the Hebrew slaves make the same number of bricks but without providing straw. What they had before was misery, but they had adjusted to it, gotten somewhat comfortable with it. And while they cried out to God for deliverance they weren't really ready. When deliverance came, they feared it, doubted it and hesitated. Then the load increased, their situation became even more impossible, and the pain nearly crushed them. Everything changed. Suddenly they became ready to face the desert and the wilderness and the journey to the land of promise.
So while it may sound like a curse, I assure you it's a blessing. I pray you find it. I pray that you come to that place where pride is crushed and all hope in yourself and your abilities is finally dashed. I pray that shame no longer hold you back and that when you look to the heavens you can see a God who sees your shame and the cause for it even better than you do and loves you totally and completely and desires your presence and relationship. And I pray it hurts. I pray it hurts so much that you no longer feel comfortable in your misery and that you can no longer find that place of being comfortably numb and where the only escape is God or death. I pray that because that's a wonderful place to look back on and realize that's when you got it, that's when you cried out for Jesus to have mercy and found His loving heart change your life and set you free.
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