For those who really know me you know that I am a person who is always inside my head. Often times this comes across as aloofness or me spacing out completely as my mind takes me into an abyss of my own thoughts, and it sometimes quite literally takes someone to snap me back into reality. I'm a deep thinker. I love reminiscing on the past. I'm very sentimental. I can be sensitive. I love thinking about the future and the places I want to go. I have a creative mind with a big dose of ADD and that combination can drive me crazy.
I hate this about myself sometimes. I overthink everything. I'm so observant and intuitive that I pick up on everything and end up hurting my own feelings. I jump to conclusions so fast people think I'm crazy, but then they watch the situation unfold exactly as I predicted. My brain is smart- it figures things out quickly- but it often leaves me stuck in discontentment and anxiety.
This is one of the biggest road blocks in my walk with the Lord. I like to try to figure out things on my own, put all the pieces together until I crack the code (the next step I want to take in life or when something seems off with someone I want to figure out why.)
I like my peace of mind. But it is ironic how the part of my brain that wants everything figured out to give me peace of mind is the same thing that destroys my peace of mind.
All throughout my childhood, my mom would frequently remind me that we have power over our thoughts. Freedom in Christ means sin has no control over us anymore. Something I beat myself up about is my sin. I am very aware of my own sin and sometimes fall into the belief that God is mad at me or withholding good things in my life because I don’t deserve them due to my mistakes and sin. I really wrestled with this over the past summer until I listened to the song “Whole Heart" by Hillsong. I knew God was speaking to me through the lyrics. The song says “once I was broken, but you loved my whole heart through, sin has no hold on me, cause your grace holds me now.” God's grace holds me like a child who disobeyed. He just wants me to run back into His arms and hold me, remind me He isn't mad and His grace covers all my sins. I get kinda emotional thinking about that picture.
This morning as I am writing this post, I started to read through Jeremiah. The chapter opens with the word of the Lord speaking to Jeremiah about the call on his life. He says, “before I formed you in the womb I knew you and before you were born I consecrated you: I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Okay I have definitely read this verse before, but as I was reading it again I was like what the heck does consecrate mean. So I researched it and listened to a podcast on it (typical me haha). Consecrate means to call up to a higher purpose. Woah- God is telling Jeremiah that he knew the purpose of his life before we was born and called him up to a high purpose. Jeremiah questions the Lord because he is so young and he has a hard time believing he is capable of a huge calling. As a response, the Lord so kindly and gently stretches his hand over Jeremiah's mouth and says “Behold I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down to destroy and overthrow, to build up and to plant." Honestly, if God told me I would pluck up and break down kingdoms, I would be so freaked out too.
The physical act of the Lord touching Jeremiah’s mouth is a picture of a spiritual truth. God is the one who places the call on our lives. He is the one who reaches out and equips us with all we need to fulfill our purpose. When God gives us a call on our lives it might seem too big or too uncomfortable at first. This is because God “consecrates us” and calls us up into a higher purpose- He has bigger plans for us than we can create in our own minds. To ease more of Jeremiah's doubts, He paints pictures and visions in his mind for his future. The end of their interaction ends with God saying people “will fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you declares the Lord, to deliver you.”
This ties in to what I opened the post with. You can replace people in verse 19 with any other word; "_____will fight against me, but they will not win because my God is always with me and He promises to deliver me. My thoughts, my fear of the future and my self doubt will not win. God has consecrated me to a high purpose before I took my first breath. Before I took my first step, God knew all of my steps and walked them before me. He defeated all of my giants so I do not have to.
Okay here is even better news. Everything God has for you in your life has already been done. If God wants you to get married- it's already done. If God wants you to have your dream job- it is already done. Anything in God's will for your life is already done. This is truth that can give me peace of mind- walking hand in hand with the Lord knowing He guides my steps.
However, this doesn't mean we can just sit back and not do anything and expect God to do all the work. This is the where the word consecrate comes back into the picture.
When we consecrate ourselves to the Lord, we become a living sacrifice. We choose to give up our own claims on ourselves and put ourselves completely in His hands. Previously, our life was for our use and our satisfaction; now it is for His. When we present ourselves to the Lord as a living sacrifice, we’re simply saying, "Jesus, I am for You. I’m no longer for myself, the world, or anything else. I am for Your use and Your satisfaction.” We WANT to work hard and do big things, because we want to serve the Lord.
However, it can be easy to slip into the idea that we can experience the fullness of Christ as it talks about in the BIble, but still align ourselves with ideas and the direction the world is pulling us. This is often done subconsciously. We cannot continue to grow spiritually without consecrating ourselves to God. The moment we fail to recognize everything in our life is spiritual, we miss key opportunites to allow the supernatural to intercede the natural (heaven on earth). Now this is probably fancy talk, but basically I'm trying to say God should not be boxed in to just our prayer time, quiet time, worship and church attendance. God is in everything- the mundance and the big eventful moments. We just have to choose to look for Him.
For 2020, I have decided consecrate is the word I want to live out. Just like Jeremiah, I and whoever is reading this have been called to a higher purpose by God. I just need to decide daily to put my life in His hands and hold onto nothing. The more I do this, the more I let go. I let go of the spiraling thoughts when I try to figure everything out. I let go of the timeline I want my life to fall in. At the end of the day, I don't need to know everything. God doesn't want me to. He wants me to trust Him and believe He has unlimited resources and power. When I do this, I allow him to enter in, to fill me up with JOY and allow space for Him to grow in me- such a beautiful thing :)
“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb 12:1-2)
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