I’m starting with the man in the mirror, I’m asking him to change his ways, no message could have been any clearer, if you want to make the world a better place take a look at yourself and make the change.- Michael Jackson
Last night the other girls on my team and I were hysterically laughing about the World Race and how we thought it would be different. I say different with a lot of room, because all of us were expecting something different. Some people said they expected preaching every day, some said they were expecting different people to be on the race, and some said they were expecting everything to be different. I myself had all expectations of the race to be blown out of the water. I remember the first thing they told us at training camp, “get rid of all expectations of what you think the race will be like”. Ok so I may have put my finger print on the map giving my oath to leave my expectations behind, but I still held on to what I thought this year was going to look like, feel like, and definitely taste like. I thought “Yes God, I will leave all of my crap behind in America, travel around the world a little and save a few souls, eat some different foods, pretend I have my act together.” Ha. God laughs at our plans. Literally. This guy can move mountains and we think we can plan stuff better than Him. Really, all humanity has lost its mind.
God has blessed us with a very unique ministry this month. He has placed us in two different ministries were we are doing a lot of physical labor and not a lot of contact with people other than our team. So we have had a lot of time to get to know each other and share our testimonies, and I don’t mean the kind where we say when we got saved. I mean the nitty gritty secrets everyone hides from everyone else. We have also had a lot of time to think about our own nitty gritties. I myself have had a ton of time to think about all my stuff. I thought this year was about other people but I guess the World Race video of Michael Hindes saying that you can’t change the world until you yourself have been changed, is in fact, true. Which is definitely why God has put us to work digging fish ponds, holes, and pathways. When it’s just you and a shovel, there is a lot of time to think.
I have come to the fork in the road where I can either be a radical for Christ or not live for Christ at all. God says in Revelation 3:15-22 “Be either hot or cold, don’t be lukewarm, because if so He doesn’t want you” ok so I paraphrased a bit but you get the point. And when I say radical I don’t mean you have to live in a hut in Africa to be a radical, you can be a normal stay at home mom, a waitress in a small restaurant, or even a teacher at Auburn University J, but a radical in a sense that you live every moment for Christ. When you brush your teeth you do it for the glory of God, when you want to get road rage, you don’t, for the glory of God, or when you go grocery shopping you do it with the intent to worship God through how you act. Dude, I’m stuck. I am in a war between myself and the truth I know to be true and the lies I know are lies, but I so badly want them to be true. You know what? Sometimes I don’t want to do stuff for the Glory of God, sometimes I just want to be bad just because. My flesh desires something that my heart doesn’t, my heart truly wants to follow God but there are those lies that my flesh is drawn to. Paul says in Romans 7:15-20, “For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate. But if I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the Law, confessing that the Law is good. So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.” – I feel like this every day.
I’m not writing this to make an excuse for me to mess up and do the wrong things. I am writing this to call it out of me. I want to choose the right path and I am making a declaration in front of all ( or more like whoever reads my lame blog) that I am not going to be lukewarm. I will not be stagnant. I will be a radical. I will wake up every morning and die to the desires of my flesh.
It says in 2Corinthians 5:17 “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things have passed away; behold new things have come”, am I no longer the person I was. I am a new creature and I have a blank slate to start each day with.
In Colossians 1:21 “He has reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him; holy and blameless and beyond reproach.” He tells me I am holy and blameless because he has taken away my sin through His death on the cross.
But in 1Peter 1:13-16 it says, “Prepare your minds for action; be self controlled, set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. As obedient children, Do Not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as He who called you is holy, so be HOLY in all you Do; for it is written: “Be Holy, because I am Holy”.” God is calling me to be self controlled through all of this. He never gave me a free pass to do wrong things just because I claim I can’t control it. There is a part of me that has to work at it too. Which is why I have chosen to die to my sin every day. Some days they will be harder than others, but God has given me grace for when I do fall, it is ok. Paul says in Ephesians 2:8 “for by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God”. While every day I will try my best to do all of the “right things and have the right attitude”, I also have to remember, just like in this verse I can never do enough good to get into Heaven. It is all because of the Grace of God that I am going to heaven. That’s the beauty of grace, it makes life not fair J.
Ok so excuse the jumbled thoughts and strange arguments between myself. The blog is just an admittance of my struggles, my declaration to change my thought process, and accepting that I will fall some days and its ok, because God gives us grace to fall.
