Our spiritual ears are not connected to our brain as much as they are to our hearts. I know from experience how deaf we can get. No, deaf isn't the right word. It's worse. It's like reverse aphasia. We hear what is being said, but we don't hear it right. I say God loves you as you are, not as you should be, but He loves you enough not to leave you as you are, and instead of hearing that Daddy loves and cares about you, you hear God will love me if I change the way I am.
For those who don't know, I am a preacher's kid. Yes, one of those. I grew up in a home where the love of God was shown and preached from a father who believed in grace not works and lived what he preached. Yet somehow, I still don't understand why, I constantly heard I needed to do better, be better, that I was worthless and didn't measure up. This is not the message that was given. The truth that I believed this still breaks my parents' hearts. They didn't say what I heard. They didn't speak through actions what I heard. But that's what I heard, and before I could drive I had become thoroughly convinced that my father who would die for me hated me and that my Daddy who sent Jesus to die for me hated me as well.
Later in life, while living in the hell of addiction, committing slow motion suicide and dumping destruction on myself and all those I cared about, I had drug dealers try to cut me off and tell me I needed to "slow my roll." But I couldn't hear it. I didn't have a problem. I just needed things to start going my way and for people to leave me alone. I honestly believed that, even after intentionally overdosing a month before being arrested on a felony that would blow bridges in my life in front of me and behind me to hell. Yet, even then I denied being an addict. No matter how many people tried to show me I had a problem, I couldn't hear it.
Being told God loved me and that I needed to return to Jesus sounded in my ears like condemnation. Couldn't anybody understand? Jesus loved them, but He didn't love me. He couldn't. I was worthless. I was broken. I had done so many bad things and had so many bad things done to me. I was dirty and hurt everyone I got near, ruined everything I touched. God couldn't love me. And didn't they see that I had tried. I had tried so hard to be good, to do what was right, to walk with God. I couldn't do it. I started that walk and fell so many times, and it hurt so much. I couldn't do it anymore. I couldn't fix it. I just wanted to escape the misery until God finally finished making me live a life of hell and let me die.
Someone says this might have been a better way to do something, and all we hear is you're a moron and never do anything right. Someone says I'm worried about you, and all we hear is you're messing up instead of hearing loving concern. God says you can't be good enough to come to me, so I'll come to you and do everything needed so that you can enter into relationship with me, and we hear I'm not good enough, so I need to try harder, or I'm not good enough and there's no point in trying.
We can't hear, until we can. No amount of logic or reason will change that. Since our hearts are not healthy we hear wrong. Since we can't make our hearts better, we can't change that. Finally though we can reach a place of such brokenness and desperation that the walls crumble, and we can hear. Some call that place repentance. Some call it rock bottom. But it is a place where we can hear that there is an answer to the chaos, emptiness, fear and shame of life. Of course, we hear that there may be, just might perhaps be, a solution. But that's enough. That's a start. Because if we can hear enough to start hearing Daddy say, I care for you, and I want to help you, then we can finally turn.
That hearing, that ability to believe that God wants to make your life better, instead of wanting you to make your life better, that He wants to heal, restore and transform you, instead of wanting you to clean up, straighten up and do right, is a gift. It's a gift of faith. But we have to be broken enough to be willing to receive it. We have to understand our need and our inability to satisfy that need ourselves.
If you are in that place of desolation, drowning in fear, shame, condemnation, and hopelessness, I pray you can hear me when I say you don't have to fix it. You don't have to clean up or make it right. Jesus already made it right. You don't have to work off your debt. It's paid. You don't have to get cleaned up to take a bath, you can come as you are, relying fully on the work that was done on the cross to do everything you can't. If you can't hear that yet, I pray that this sits dormant in your soul until you are broken enough for the living water to seep in and start the seed growing.
And if you have a friend or loved one who is busy killing themselves, all the while seemingly unable to hear the solution, don't be hurt, don't be surprised, and don't give up. Keep loving them. Keep praying for them. You will be amazed at the difference in their lives when they are finally able to hear the Spirit say you are free to come to Me.
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