The second part of the book focuses on what you can do in your own personal life to open up your relationship with the Lord. How you’ve hurt others because of your own pain needs to be dealt with. Just because you were hurting does not give you an excuse to hurt others. And in hurting others, most of the time, the conviction that you feel hurts you just as much as you hurt the other person.
Sometimes, in reaction to how others have inflicted pain, we ourselves delve into sin to escape the horrible guilt that we feel. But when we come back to the Lord, we know we are desperate, “that if the Lord was not as big as I was counting on him to be, I was most assuredly a dead woman.” Why not run to the Lord who’s arms are outstretched in love for you, his child?
There will be attacks from both the devil and from our own flesh. “The more powerful your story, the more captivating your love, he more fervent your passion – the more watchful the murderous eye of Satan will be on you.” And, in our desire to reconcile with the Lord, we will have to confess sin. But the author states that there are three reasons we bristle at the confession part of Christianity. The fear of the consequences, fear of what people might think or say, and fear that God will not be there to catch you.
“When God calls us to do something, he wants us to respond to his leading based on faith, not on what seems logical to other people or what we have seen him do in the past.” Your calling from God is not dependant on what other people think. Abram followed God’s leading without even knowing where he was going. But he obeyed because he trusted that if God was leading him, everything would be fine. God delights in guiding your life, because your life was worth dying for.
“If we can start believing what we do know of God’s plan for us, we will soon find that the parts we don’t know really don’t matter all that much anymore…. Spiritual growth is not so much a to-do list or an attempt to master the external mechanics of Christian living. It’s more about humbly placing ourselves before God in order to be changed.” Learning to trust is one of the harder parts about the Christian life.
God has so much in store for you right now! Your sin that you hold on to and blame on others will only hinder your walk with the Lord who desperately wants to have a relationship with you. God has a plan for your life; let him lead you now, which will later affect how he works in your future.
0 comments:
Post a Comment