Transparency before God helps us understand that Christ came to bring us to a deep understanding of what it means to be created in God's image.
We will not always have it together and we will go astray in our journey and that looks different in all of our lives.
That is okay, because God will do things through you, through those mistakes, circumstances you've faced and will face; that will birth His purpose over your life.
In the past , as much as I had believed that I was loved by God, I trusted my own interpretation of what that means.
I've spent my entire life attempting to comprehend God as more than just a Creator, but as a loving Father.
With each failed attempt at perfection as I tried to become this concept of what holiness before God was, I began to understand what purification was and what truly dying to self meant.
Dying with Him is not a one-time event, but rather a daily act that we engage in every day.
It is written that we must carry our cross, but what does that really mean in everyday life?
It requires constant death, daily resurrection into who we are in Him, and revelation of the reflection we are of Him.
Simply put, we can't understand who we are in God if we're still focused on our failures and mistakes from the past. Thomas was hung on the practicality of death to understand the ressurection, so he couldn't find complete joy when he heard that Jesus had risen. We can get too focused on the death found in our sin to understand the grace and life found in the resurrection. That when we die with Him, that broken part of you that is consumed with shame dies, but we hold on to the memory of who we were so tightly that we cannot accept and live in the reality of who God shows us.
Gideon was being called a man of valour, but he failed to hear and comprehend this because he was holding on to who he had always believed himself to be and to notice that God was reintroducing himself to the Gideon God had preordained.
The death on the cross was not the final word on our lives, nor is failure found in our lives the final word on our lives.
Mistakes, brokenness, emptiness, and shame are the crosses we bear each day in order to live in the resurrection found in surrender.
As I came to terms with this and began to live in its reality, I realized that the strips we endure contain our healing.
As painful as it is to go through the torments of this life, we begin to understand that God has not abandoned us to die on our own crosses, but rather allows us to die so that we can become the resurrected versions of ourselves who can make a difference in the world.
We can never live in this while weeping over who we were, even if that person is not a past tense but a present moment and version of ourselves that we are struggling to let go of.
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