Mikki's Blog - Living in the Grace and Love of God » Christian Living

Giving Up and Giving In; The Pathway to Receiving His Grace

Mikki — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 16:16:48 +0000

My journey is a journey to know God, others, and myself.

I’ve been quite committed to the upward journey of knowing God for most of the past 30 years, and yet in the last two years, I have found that He is not only committed to me in my journey to know Him, but He is committed to my journey to know others and myself.

The more I have learned about myself, the more I have found my commitment to being in control of my life, which may sound like all that and a bag of chips for after all, shouldn’t we be in control of our own stuff, but the truth I have found in my journey is that I am not really in control at all.

I am, in fact, powerless.

Yes, I can do all things through Christ but somehow the last part of that verse often eludes me…Who gives me strength…

And this is where I get screwed up. The tension is between my being able to do all things and my total dependence on Christ to give me the strength.

How do we live in this place? I believe it is the place of true discipleship. True dependence upon Him.

Somewhere along the way, we often either become prideful and dependent upon our own selves or we come to believe we are complete failures, which is yet another way of being too self-important, another way of saying, “It is all about me.”

The treadmill of self-sufficiency is so subtle, so insidious, so deceptive, and goes all the way back to the beginning of time and the initial deception of mankind.

God has been showing me a path which leads to life and the path is one of utter dependence upon Him. It’s not an easy path to stay on. I so easily revert back to my faulty patterns of living. We all are, umm, well, should I say, hell-bent, on finding our own ways? Surely God would not require us to be utterly dependent upon Him? It is so, well, offensive, to suggest I am nothing without Him. My flesh resists such an idea!

Jesus said, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it.” Luke 9:23-24

And yet, our modus operandi is to lean wholly on our own wisdom to live.

Surely I can figure things out!

Surely I can make things work!

Surely I just need another opportunity to get it right!

I just need to reorganize, revamp, reroute, rework…

Self-sufficiency doesn’t die easily. Faced with one failure, we often just take our same ways of thinking, our same patterns of relating, and repackage them, while all the while God waits for us to deny our own abilities and lean fully on Him.

The challenge, no, the opportunity, is to give up. Give up our self-strength. Give up our self-wisdom. Give up our self-sufficiency. Give up our control, and give in to God’s control.

Admitting our powerlessness gives us hope for we all know, somewhere down deep within ourselves, that our attempts to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s in our lives, falls short of perfection. We may get one thing right, but another one falls between the cracks. When we can admit that, in and of ourselves, we will never be able to control this life, then we are in a position to receive hope and power for it is at that very place, with our self-sufficiency lying broken at the feet of Jesus, that we can receive His all-sufficiency.

The divine exchange. His strength for my weakness. His wholeness for my brokenness. His victory for my failure. His power for my powerlessness.

Life is about the journey to see our need for the exchange. As we surrender, bit by bit, day by day, to His power and His plan, we become whole. We become vessels of His glory instead of our own.

We’d be a fool to be unwilling to take His offer for this exchange, and so often we are just that – stubborn, prideful, foolish, resisting His help, like a two-year old who screams, “No, I do it myself!”

Would you offer this prayer to God today along with me?

Lord, I acknowledge that, in and of myself, I am nothing. I know that You want to do Your works through me. Help me to surrender, to cooperate, to join You in Your plans. I give. Myself. My plans. Lord, I chose to exchange my strength for Yours. Come and empower me with Your Spirit to see life through Your eyes. May Your heart beat within mine. May my hands be Yours today to touch the hurting world. May my ears hear Your voice as You quietly guide me in the paths of life. Rescue me from my own self. I confess that I have no control, no sufficiency, and I ask for Your Spirit to come control me; be my sufficiency. Be my power.

May you find, as I am finding, that giving up and giving in is the way we grow up in Him. It is the pathway to living dependent upon His grace and receiving the victory that He gives.

Beyond Blame

Mikki — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 15:59:51 +0000

(This is part two of a series on forgiveness. I’m not sure how many parts there will be! Pt. 1 is The Hardest Thing You’ll Ever Do).

When there is sin, there will always be the need for forgiveness. Sin doesn’t exist in a bubble, and often causes collateral damage.

Adam and Eve sinned and mankind has been dealing with the effects of their sin (and our own personal sin) ever since.

Blaming is easy and can be an attempt to deal with our shame. Adam, who should have stepped in and covered his wife, blamed Eve instead of facing his shame. Eve blamed the serpent. And we still naturally default to using blame as a tactic to defer our personal guilt. We are not personally responsible in every situation, of course, but there is often a domino effect after sin occurs. You hurt me; I hurt my kid; my kid hurts the dog, etc.

Blame distracts us from the real issues and hinders our healing. When we default to blaming others, we can’t really know the truth about ourselves. When Adam and Eve sinned, they hid from God, but God responded to their sin by calling them out of hiding and confronting them with the truth. He declared that sin has a penalty, an intrinsic curse, and then He spoke of how He would trump the entire situation with a plan of redemption. God offered hope. Even Adam who had been caught up blaming his wife, offered hope when he called his wife “Eve”, the mother of all living. Yes, there would be life after terrible sin, failure, pain, and separation. God knew his children needed hope for without it, they would despair of their very life.

Even when we are completely innocent in a situation, we have a propensity in our sin nature to react wrongly. We can become bitter, angry, resentful, and unforgiving, and then we are no longer innocent. We all stand before God, responsible for our own words, actions, and attitudes, even when the original sin was not our fault in any way.

Blame separates us from feeling our loss. It hinders us from appropriate mourning over sin, whether ours or another’s. When we choose blame, we get “caught in the swirl”, which causes us to lose our objectivity.

I suppose we all could name at least one person whom we identify as someone who never takes responsibility for anything. It is always someone else’s fault (and conversely, some people take the blame for things that are not their fault in any way – that is wrong, too, because it attempts to defer the blame and can, at times, hinder the person who is at blame from “stepping up to the plate”). This kind of blaming hinders personal growth.

So if blaming is not the answer, what is?

1. Take responsibility for your part. Ask others to forgive you if that is appropriate. Ask God for forgiveness for any sin on your part. (If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1:9) (If it is possible, as much as depends on you, live peaceably with all man. Romans 12:18)

2. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. (Ephesians 4:32)

3. Depend upon the grace of God to bring healing and restoration, when possible and remember that it can be a process (Where sin abounded, grace abounded much more. Romans 5:20).

4. Resist the urge to demonize your enemies. (read The Hardest Thing You’ll Ever Have to Do)

5. Accept God’s hope and offer it to others.

6. When appropriate, cover the sins of others. (again, this is not always appropriate but most of us tend to uncover people by gossiping and blaming instead of erring on the side of covering too much. Love covers a multitude of sin. 1 Peter 4:8)

7. Understand that there is a real need to grieve your losses. Sometimes you need to do that with a friend or pastor. That is different than trying to prove that someone else was wrong.

We who are Christians begin our relationship with God through receiving His forgiveness, and we continue our relationship with Him through receiving His forgiveness and offering forgiveness to others. It’s not easy, but it is God’s pattern. Move beyond blame and seek to understand the deep, inner work God wants to do in your own heart.

Forgiveness – The Hardest Thing You’ll Ever Do

Mikki — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:07:27 +0000

Forgiveness is hard. Forgiving an offender is hard. Let’s just cut through the religiousness we hide behind and tell the truth. It is hard. Oh, not so much when someone cuts us off in traffic or steals that parking place we had our eye on. We can move on pretty quickly when the offense is not relational. But it is in relationships that we have the potential to be hurt, offended, betrayed, and find ourselves with a heart struggling to forgive (and it is in relationships that we also have the potential to hurt others, offend others, betray others. As a matter of fact, all, and I do mean all, relationships must deal with this issue.)Whether it is words spoken or the lack or words spoken when we needed them, actions taken or the lack of actions taken, or the million other ways we can be hurt, at times we all find ourselves at times in the position of having a major offense in our hearts that needs to be dealt with.

We Christians build our faith on Christ forgiving us for our sins. Most of us know what the Word says about forgiveness. It’s not for babies. You won’t be forgiven if you don’t forgive. Your lack of forgiveness allows “the tormentors” to access your life. On and on we could go. God doesn’t give us any wiggle room on the issue, but yet we all find ourselves struggling. How do we overcome?

I used to have a nice, neat package answer on this then entered OFFENSE 601, the graduate course. I didn’t even sign-up for it and yet I found myself enrolled, as if it were some sort of required class. More tests than I could even begin to count. I passed some, failed many, and gradually got a grade of Incomplete in the course. But then God reactivated my class status. He has a way of doing that, you know! When we tuck things down inside, allowing them to lie dormant, or so we think, God has a way of bringing them back to the surface. Something happens to remind us of the offense. The emotions spring back up. Alas, back to the old adage, “Things buried alive never die.”

But God, who is committed to our wholeness, has great dredging equipment. He dredges up the “stuff”. And we can’t escape. We come face to face with our pain again. What is a believer to do? What are the truths we need to know about forgiveness? I will offer a few today, and I plan to write more on this in the next few days because I can’t possibly cover it all today so know that this is a part one of a series. I offer them as suggestions from a heart that acknowledges my own weakness, my humanness, my Incomplete grade on the course, but I offer them in my own pursuit of wholeness and in the hope and belief that they might help others.

1. Forgiveness is a process. It is complicated. If we are real about the hard stuff, we must all admit that we are unable in our humanness to deal the death blow to offense in one broad stroke. I have said before that we choose to forgive, and yes, that is true. We choose, but truthfully that choice is the beginning step. It is a necessary step, but it is only a beginning step that places us on the track of healing. Great offense requires that we choose again and again and again and again. When our buried alive emotions fly out of their grave, we must choose again to access God’s grace and forgive.

2. When we think of forgiveness, we tend to view it as one person or group or family that has been wronged by another. However, relationships are much more complicated than that. More often than not, both sides carry a measure of the “blame”.

3. There is a difference in a heart that vows never to forgive an offense and a heart that acknowledges its struggle to forgive but desires to. The process of forgiveness can be a real process that is happening in our hearts and coexists with our struggling emotions. God works with us in our weaknesses. Each step towards healing, however incomplete, is important.

4. The process of forgiveness requires us to feel – our losses, our grief, our hatreds – whether they be toward ourselves or others. The process of forgiveness confronts our hearts with our emotions, and this is very important. We are less than truthful when we deny the authenticity of our feelings. Acknowledging those emotions does open the door on the path of allowing healing to come into those places. I was recently troubled by a statement someone made to me about their recent hurt. “It’s really okay,” they said and then they offered their reasons on why it was no big deal. And it was a lie. It was a big deal, but they “needed” emotionally to just push it away, deny its pain. That is inauthentic and distances us from the grace of God which comes to heal us when we are able to admit our pain.

5. Perhaps the greatest temptation is to begin to see the offender(s) as all evil. We humans love black and white thinking. All evil or all good. If we can view a person as completely evil, it is easier to deny the need to deal with our pain. If they are all evil, then it doesn’t matter that they hurt me. As we process through our forgiveness issues, we learn to accept our own humanity and the humanity of others. When we view others as all good or all bad, we are, in reality, refusing to acknowledge anything bad about ourselves (for surely we are all good and our offender is all bad). The more mature view, which I do not altogether possess, is that there is a person or a group of people who has hurt us, but yet that person or that group has good qualities as well as the bad ones which are highlighted in our feelings. It is the higher road to be able to say, “They really hurt me and wronged me, but there was a time when we had a good relationship. I still can remember the good about that person in the midst of this very hurtful situation.”

That’s enough to chew on today. I’ll post more thoughts in the next couple of days, but for now let me say, stay in the process. It will be the hardest thing you’ll ever do, but in doing so, you will gain more of God’s heart as you humbly acknowledge your own. Forgiveness is a great key to freedom, use it!