AUTHOR’S NOTE: I just made the shocking discovery that I can’t include a link in the title of this post, so click here and pretend you’re clicking on “Burnin’ Up.”
In my last post, I talked about the pain of spiritual discipline and refinement vs. the pain of sin’s consequences. Discipline and refinement have been major themes for me this summer, and it hasn’t always been a ton of fun.
You know what has been a ton of fun, though? Getting to see God’s healing, redemption, and freedom made manifest in my life, especially over the past few weeks.
Hebrews 12 tells us that discipline isn’t a scary and terrible thing:
For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons…he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
So, I’ve had a summer full of discipline and refinement, but that was brought about by a winter and spring of painful consequences. This past winter, I fell into a rut of relational idolatry. Making my relationships with people more important than my relationship with God is not a new thing for me. However, despite having seen the pattern before, I still took too long to recognize it. It wasn’t until other relationships started disintegrating that I realized I was in a bad place.
Side note: when you persist in sin, you’re never the only person who gets hurt.
Breaking your idols is always a painful process. After all, you wouldn’t have idolized those things in the first place if they weren’t important to you.
I kept thinking of how God is a consuming fire (Deuteronomy 4:24). I remember talking to one of my friends about how he would burn away all the impurities, anything that would hinder me from him. I remember saying that I didn’t want to keep clinging to those things and get my hands burned along with them.
So, I did my best to let go of the things and people that were so precious to me, and to believe God for who he says he is. I reminded myself constantly that he really IS all-sufficient, completely enough, and that he can fulfill me like nothing else ever could.
The craziest thing happened as I willingly submitted to God’s refining fire: he went from burning through issues I knew about and had struggled with for some time, to dredging up stuff I didn’t even know existed in me! I thought God was going to just fix up a few things and then we’d move on, but no, the fire kept getting hotter. It was like he could finally get down to business for real since I was finally willing to let him.
This reminds me of one of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes:
“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
To add yet another metaphor to this post, God didn’t just cut off the issues that I could see sprouting; he dug down and got to their roots. If you’ve ever weeded a garden, you know how pointless it is to just pull up the tops of the weeds. Unless you yank them up by the roots, they’ll be back before you know it.
Letting God dig deep and expose the roots of things has brought me to a new place of healing and freedom from things I’ve struggled with for years. I can’t wait to tell you a little about how awesome that’s been!
