This past month has been a really rough month. It’s been really good but very rough.
Ministry has been great. We were able to go into many people’s homes, hearing their stories, sharing our testimonies, and praying for people. We got to see some people come to Christ, give them their first Bible, and do some Bible study and discipleship with them, teaching them even some very basic things about Jesus. That was so exciting to be a part of! For others we got to pray for healing for them, and even see some be healed and restored. Ministry in Honduras has been wonderful.
But personally, it has been a very rough month for me. Starting back in Nicaragua, before we even talked about it as a squad all together, God was speaking into my life, saying how two major things He will be doing in me this year is UPROOTING INSECURITIES and SPEAKING INTO MY IDENTITY as a Man and as a Son of God. So it was really cool the next week after God spoke that to me to have squad meeting that were specifically about those things, mainly about identity.
But this month God has really been working on uprooting those insecurities. The month started out by my recognizing that there was definitely some spiritual warfare going on in the area I was in. Then, slowly, I started to forget about that spiritual warfare, and I would start to get distracted a little bit at a time.
At first, it was a temptation here or there. Then, it was a lie from the Enemy. And then I would dwell on that lie. Then more temptation. Then a lie, and then another lie. Pretty soon, I was not only hearing these lies, I was starting to believe them. I was starting to want to believe them, to just sit in the lie. To just have a little personal pity party for myself.
You see, I’ve heard the Voice of God. I know what He sounds like. I know how He speaks. And I knew those lies weren’t coming from Him. But the voice of the Enemy… he is much more sneaky. I still knew it was him, but he can say stuff so trickily that you think it is actually your own thoughts, and so it makes it easier to want to believe it. And I knew that I was supposed to “take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ,” but honestly, I didn’t want to. I wanted to sit in those lies. I didn’t want to hear what God had to say to me.
Yet, He still persisted. Through sermons my team were listening to as a group from Graham Cooke, to little conversations I would have here or there, with every lie that I was believing, God was still there waiting for me to allow Him to press deeper into those areas with Him to allow Him to heal me.
Lie after lie would lead to insecurity after insecurity, until I felt so insecure about myself in almost every area of my life that I just literally felt so beat up and so full of wholes from the devil. I started to be consumed in my thoughts by these insecurities, that at times I didn’t even want to go to ministry or I’d start to withdraw from my teammates.
Yet God was still there, digging deeper. I was challenged to press into those insecurities and identify the roots of them. So sure enough, through prayer and journaling, God would start to reveal one underlining issue for a lot of those insecurities, and then a little while later another issue underneath that issue. Until at last here at debrief, He’s started to show me events or situations in my life—my childhood—that a lot of these things stem from.
These insecurities have been there all my life, and now that I see them, now that I know them, I see how they have affected me all throughout my life at different times and in different ways.
The first night here at debrief, Thursday night, our whole squad got to be together again, and we got to take Communion together. I had forgotten until someone had said that this is Holy Week, and it was on that very night, a Thursday night, two thousand years ago that Jesus had broken the bread with His disciples. Within 24 hours from that moment, Jesus was hanging on a tree, crucified for me.
He died to take away my sins. But He did so much more than that. He died so that my sinful nature might be crucified on that cross with him. He died so that I might has worth in His eyes, that I might have a new nature in Christ, and that I could be in relationship with Him.
Before I took the elements of that Communion, I had to repent. I had to confess that I had scorned the cross. All throughout the month, I didn’t want to hear, I didn’t want to listen to what God had to say to me and for me and about me. I wanted to seek more of man’s opinions about me. I didn’t think what God said was valuable, because after all, He has love and good things to speak to everyone. I wanted an imperfect person to give me my value.
But the reality is, God has given me so much more infinite value than anyone else ever could. A completely holy, perfect, beautiful, sinless God who has created all things good, even after I completely rejected Him in my sinful state, still saw it good and fit to send His Son in a humble state—from being the King of the Universe to the limitations of the flesh of a man—and then to be humbled to death, even death on a cross, all to take upon Himself my sin, my insecurities, my shame. To crucify that to the cross, and to raise me up to have new identity in Christ so that I might have eternal relationship with my God forever! How incredible is that!
How could I ever question my worth. God has given my so much and has loved me so much.
May He be forever praised!
