For me this week I can with all my heart and in all honesty say it was life changing for me. This week my life has been changed because of Jesus. Simply because Jesus is mine, and I am His, He knows me, He loves me, He understands me, He knows exactly what dreams I have in my heart and He knows them in more detail than my mind can even comprehend. My whole entire life I have had this deep longing in my heart to have Jesus. I’ve just always wanted Him, weather I knew that’s what I wanted, weather I was pursuing Him or not, my soul has always wanted Jesus. But it has never been enough to know about Him, all my life I’ve known about Him I’ve known who He is supposed to be, but I never figured out that He Himself is mine. Jesus in all his perfection, in all his Glory, in all his righteousness, is mine forever and ever and ever.
This week in class I heard God speak to me something so simple but it was so profound to me and in my walk with him. He simply said, “Emily, I understand.” In my relationship with God I would go to him with my prayers, questions, concerns, and feelings but I would always have this sense that I had to convince God that I was worth listening to, and that my problems were legitimate enough for him to listen.
While praying in class on Monday as we were asking God to identify certain things that were getting in the way of us hearing him and having direct access to him (such as fear of man, doubt, unbelief, comparison, etc.) He showed me that I was condemning myself. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, yet when I would be talking to Him, I was doing it in a self-condemning way. But God said No! stop doing that and let me be the one that consumes you. In that moment when I let all these things go that’s when I heard God say, “Emily, I understand”. Now I know that I don’t have to go to him trying to make my problems seem difficult enough to pay attention to, he wants to listen, he wants to take my burdens purely because I am his prize possession.
This was only one moment out of this whole week that has impacted my relationship with God. God truly used our speaker this week to transform our relationship together, it is taking us into deeper intimacy and bringing me to a place of greater dependence on God rather than on myself. Our speaker has challenged me to actually die to myself every morning and truly realize that my flesh is pretty much the only thing that is getting in the way of me having the relationship with God that I want to have. That is why daily I’ve been making the choice to die to myself and pick up my cross, and usually its more than once in day that I have to remind myself that I am not in control because I died to myself today. It’s in this daily surrender that I am realizing what it is like to have intimacy with God and it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced!
This week in class I heard God speak to me something so simple but it was so profound to me and in my walk with him. He simply said, “Emily, I understand.” In my relationship with God I would go to him with my prayers, questions, concerns, and feelings but I would always have this sense that I had to convince God that I was worth listening to, and that my problems were legitimate enough for him to listen.
While praying in class on Monday as we were asking God to identify certain things that were getting in the way of us hearing him and having direct access to him (such as fear of man, doubt, unbelief, comparison, etc.) He showed me that I was condemning myself. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, yet when I would be talking to Him, I was doing it in a self-condemning way. But God said No! stop doing that and let me be the one that consumes you. In that moment when I let all these things go that’s when I heard God say, “Emily, I understand”. Now I know that I don’t have to go to him trying to make my problems seem difficult enough to pay attention to, he wants to listen, he wants to take my burdens purely because I am his prize possession.
This was only one moment out of this whole week that has impacted my relationship with God. God truly used our speaker this week to transform our relationship together, it is taking us into deeper intimacy and bringing me to a place of greater dependence on God rather than on myself. Our speaker has challenged me to actually die to myself every morning and truly realize that my flesh is pretty much the only thing that is getting in the way of me having the relationship with God that I want to have. That is why daily I’ve been making the choice to die to myself and pick up my cross, and usually its more than once in day that I have to remind myself that I am not in control because I died to myself today. It’s in this daily surrender that I am realizing what it is like to have intimacy with God and it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced!