The Struggle part 3
If I'm struggling to deny myself and be somebody else then I must believe that there is something inherently wrong with me. I'm not good enough, and I need to DO better in order to BE better. But here's where that idea falls apart: If I'm not good enough to begin with, how in the world can I do better? But that's the religious trap of "do in order to be." That's the lie that Eve swallowed way back in the garden of Eden that got everything so messed up. Because you can't do in order to be. You do BECAUSE you be. It's the same idea that says you can't give what you don't have. How could you? You can't love until you know and believe the love of Christ... until you know and believe that you ARE loved. Because only by knowing and believing that you are loved, do you then have any love to give. That's what John the Revelator is trying to help us understand with verses like, "We love him, because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). We don't (somehow) love Him in order to be loved. We love Him because we ARE loved. We simply receive it and release it. And when we start to do that, when we start to rest, then we stop struggling. We stop seeing ourselves as unworthy of love--as someone bad who needs to change into someone good--and we start seeing ourselves the way God sees us; as His beloved Son in whom He is well pleased. And here's what I really want us to understand today: That thing about you that you're trying to deny... God put that thing within you when He created you! He made you specifically you. He doesn't want you to be somebody else. He wants you to be... you. Let me give you an example--and I always use myself for this example so nobody can get mad at me. I'm a writer. That's a big part of who I am. And all my life I struggled with this gift. I would try to write "my" kind of stuff (which my grandma loving referred to as trash) but I would never be able to finish anything, or produce anything, that was worth anything. So instead of denying myself guess what I did: I presented my body as a living sacrifice to the Lord. I said, "I'm a writer. Let me write for God." And then I wrote Identity Crisis in two weeks. Got it self-published. Wrote half a dozen more books. Am still writing books to this day. Why? Because instead of struggling to deny myself, I embraced myself. We all have that thing that we feel driven to do. The problem is that until we invite God into the situation (if I can say it that way), that thing that's inside of us usually gets twisted on the way out. It doesn't manifest right. And then we feel like failures. I certainly did when I would start to write something and it would fizzle out. I felt hopeless. Because I KNEW I was a writer, but it wasn't working right. And I think that's how we all feel when we're struggling to deny ourselves. Or struggling to be who we are without fully KNOWING who we are. Because while I AM a writer, who I REALLY am is a JESUS WRITER. It lines up when you stop trying to do it yourself. When you stop struggling. When you stop trying to be Jesus and just let Jesus be Himself in you and through you and as you. When you let what's inside overflow out of you naturally. Not trying to force it. Not trying to do it yourself. But letting the One who put that desire in there in the first place manifest it! That's rest. That's abundance. That's what it's all about!