Thursday Musings August 29, 2013

The following quotation was on my Facebook this morning  and it stirred up something that I have been  seeing in many of God's precious people.

And Moses said unto Jehovah, Oh, Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant; for I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue. Exodus 4.10.

Knowing one's own uselessness alone is still useless. The important thing is to know the power of God. And this is true resurrection. God had wanted Moses to know that it was He who had made man's mouth. God tried to encourage Moses. "Oh, Lord, send, I pray thee, by the hand of him whom thou wilt send" (Ex. 4.13). Moses again excused himself. When God heard this, He was angry with Moses. And why? Because even though it is of great importance and highly acceptable to God that we are brought to the place of no self-confidence and no self-reliance, nevertheless, if we stay there and refuse to go forward by trusting in God, we will greatly displease Him.

How we need to be careful lest we swing from one extreme to the other. God takes us through death in order to raise us up. Death is not the end, resurrection is the goal. We will be of no use if we remain in death and not come into resurrection.~Watchman Nee

Recently I heard someone say, I am nothing. Then they went on to say it was all God.  This is not what the scriptures say. Yes, it says we are clay/earthen vessels that the EXCELLENCY might be of God and not of ourselves.   Apart from Him, I have no purpose except destruction, to be used for purposes that do not bring glory to God.  BUT WE ARE NOT NOTHING!  

Another way we use words to express this error of our thinking is to say, " That wasn't me, that was God."   It was your mouth, your hands, your vocal chords, it was your body it came out of.   There are things I do not do. I don't heal people. God does and sometimes He choses to use that precious combination of Him and me which is unlike any other combination of human being and Him in the universe. That is our uniqueness and it is to be valued not diminished.

We are precious in the sight of the Lord. We have been bought and paid for by the blood of God's own beloved Son, Jesus Christ that we might be restored to fellowship/relationship with our Father and with the rest of His precious children.  Not only am I precious in the sight of the Lord but so are the rest of his human creations. So precious He has invited us to allow Him to share our lives with us by joining our spirits with His Spirit that we might...notice that word...we...might be filled up with His very nature, character, the very essence of Himself.

Fear of screwing up.....oh my friends, in Christ there is no condemnation. Guilt and shame have been eliminated by the fulfilling of the law. What you do and who you are no longer are defined by how well you performed, how you act, how you feel, how you think.  Instead, your identity and worth and value are not defined by the Body and Blood of Jesus shed for you and the Resurrection Life of God Himself available for you to live in and out of. That is our worth and value.  The only "fear" is the awesome reverence and awareness of the Life that is in Him and the awareness that apart from Him there is no life.

When I was preparing to go to Montana I had an increased awareness of the "fear of the Lord."  Two people ( including a prayer group)  prayed warrior angels over me as I travelled and a covering of protection also.  My awareness that how essential it was for me to have that protection of the Lord reminded me how awesome is that love for me least outside of it, apart from His total provision there is death and destruction.  I didn't "fear" death and destruction. I had the "holy reverence" for Himself and the hiding place that is in Him knowing it is Life and that that is what my heart desires not death and destruction.  That holy reverence, as some call fear, is a respect and awe for the preciousness of Life that is only in Him......knowing apart from him, is only death and destruction.

I am just learning these things afresh in this hour and seeing as never before how many of us have been stuck in our lack of worth and value, our "nothingness", our uselessness.   Years ago I was in a meeting and a guy kept preaching on "sin consciousness."  I may have mentioned this before. I didn't get it.  I am gaining insight into what it means today and the total uselessness of focusing on what I can't do, what I have done and failed at, how I haven't kept the law, the consequences of my failures, etc. My hopelessness and helplessness profit me nothing to focus on. They all come out of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The awareness of my limitation as a human being, my failures only press me down, UNLESS I see who He is, the Light of the World, the one who paid the price for all my shortcomings so that I might have HIS LIFE in me and His life becomes my life and restores my identity which was lost in Adam.  We are children of the Father, sons of the Kingdom, joint heirs with Christ.  We have a new identity in Christ Jesus.

I was blessed to share with sisters this past weekend, many of whom have a history of marriage not so different from my own, though most have a few less divorces. Even those who have remained married in very difficult situations are struggling with "WHO THEY ARE."  The truth of what has been spoken here in the paragraphs above has begun to penetrate the darkness of the life of those women that they might be raised up to know who they are in Christ in their marriages.  Like me,  though I loved the Lord, I didn't know who I was. I didn't lose my identity, I never had one and sought my identity through "service" to man, to congregations, to pastors, to my children.  Today's society uses that word which has been so misused rather dislike it, that word  "co-dependency."   I was fused to those I served, my identity being drawn from them, from my parents, from my children and today He is filling me up with my identity in Him and who He is in me. I am learning to live in that identity and relate to those precious ones in my life out of that identity.   Funny thing, when I begin to walk out who Christ is in me and who I am in Christ, I see those people in my life that I related to so very differently.   I learn new words, am still learning how to fill my mouth with words of graciousness towards people who may not be so gracious towards me and those whose behaviors in the past facilitated my lack of worth and value out of their own empty hearts.

Time to go to the laundromat....just another place in my circumstances to live out my life as a precious called and chosen daughter of the King among others who may or may not know how valued they are or know what their worth is to the King of Kings unless I live it before them!

Meri