Get ready for a loooooooong post!!!!!! I hope this will make sense because I’m just going to put all my thoughts out there and they may not be organized.
I’ve had so many revelations today I’m not quite sure where I should even begin. First off, outreach locations were announced today: Columbia, South Africa, Cambodia, Rwanda, India, and Mozambique. They didn’t give out much info on what we would be doing at each location. We had only 15 minutes to go out to pray and ask God for our top two choices. Well, I ended up putting Cambodia as my first, and India as my second. We find out teams and locations on Tuesday night! The leaders will be praying over our choices and sort us into teams. I’m ok with going to any one of the locations – I would want to go to all of them if I could! Pray for my leaders to have wisdom as they place us into teams.
A lot of the stuff in lecture today I have known about, but today it become alive and real and I had many revelations. The gospel life came alive to me. It has before too, but I feel like I had always gained sight of it for just a fleeting minute and tried to grasp it but I couldn’t wrap my fingers around it or hold to it with a firm grip. Today it was like I saw it clearly; I chased after it, ran with it, and through the grace of God I tasted it and know that it is good. In other words, it just clicked. When I think about true Christianity and all the radical Jesus lovers I admire, there is one thing they all have in common: the exchanged life, absolute surrender. God’s body and blood for me, my body and blood for Him. This whole thing is either real, or it isn’t. I’m either in, or I’m not. There is no in-between. And I better make the right choice because eternity is the most important choice I can ever make in my life. To be a disciple, I have to be all in. Surrender means I give up, and I don’t take back. I’m a bond slave to the Almighty. My whole Christian life I have been going back and forth. Having spiritual highs and then lows, giving up my life, testing it out to see if I like it, then taking my life back, messing up again, giving my life back, then returning again to selfishness, back and forth, again and again. That is not true Christianity. True Christianity is giving up your whole self to Jesus, to the King of the universe, and never taking your life back. If you happen to look back, you repent and move on, and keep pressing with fierce tenacity. I have been striving for so long, striving to be a better Christian, doing stuff out of a sense of duty, and taking steps to get to the next level of intimacy. When I failed, I felt guilt and felt like I moved down a scale on the spiritual level. It doesn’t work that way; it’s not through striving, but through love. Liberty is found in slavery to God, because God is good. Everything I’ve every learned is absolutely empty if it doesn’t capture my soul and change my life. I’ve been grappling with the difference between hearing truth and having it and living it out. I’m going to chase after it until I know without a doubt that I have it. There is a solution to the whole life of Christianity, one primary command, which I’ve heard over and over but never seemed to get. It is love God, and everything else follows. Today my job is to love God. Tomorrow my job is to love God. In 50 years my job will be to love God. The more I love God, the more I will desire revolution, the more I will do acts of love and desire justice. Absolute surrender comes from loving God, reformation of lifestyle comes from loving God. It doesn’t have to come with a deep, emotional feeling either. Immerse yourself in His presence, in prayer, in the Word; after time you will be consumed with Him. Intimacy with surrender is protected. Intimacy is hard to catch, but when you do it completely consumes you. Once surrender comes, God gives grace and power for you to live differently. He showers down riches from His Kingdom. There is so much more access to the Kingdom if you get a hold of this. He gives the supernatural, enabling strength to live the gospel life, I just have to live in surrender, loving Him and saying yes to Him in everything. It’s like I have a handful of worthless pebbles and God is wanting me to exchange them for His truckload of precious jewels. I’m giving up my little ridiculous life in exchange for God’s life. I’m getting the better deal! All that God is, all of God’s wealth, all of God’s strength, power, might, at the disposal of my life! Why wouldn’t I want this? I actually weigh my options? Why do I do this!? Why hesitate! Because for so long I have not been willing to give up my life and die to self. It has been selfishness. I’ve wanted to be in control, to have things my way. It’s my sinful nature. I’ve still been clinging to the throne of my life. I have lived with self-focus for so long. The greatest enemy of the true gospel is self-focus. Self-focus keeps worship from being all it should be. It is the greatest impediment to revival. I have a vision of what I want my life to look like in 50 years from now and I’m going to chase after it. I still have a deep ache within. I want the joy that the New Testament talks about. I want joy like a cheerio in milk. You push it down and it comes right back up to the surface. So no matter what I do I can’t keep in down. I want peace that surpasses all understanding, that no matter what is happening around me, the mountains could be crumbling to the sea, the world could literally be shaken to its core, and I am unmoved. I want that. Do I have the type of love that the world could spit in my face, slap me, and I would turn the other cheek? That I would consider their needs and good above my own even if they’re my archenemy? Do I have victory over all that would disable my soul? Have I been able to stick it under the thumb of Jesus and say no more will it hold me down? Is that the testimony of my life? Because that’s what normal Christianity should look like. I fall short, so very short. I don’t have to be perfect, but I need to stop living in mediocrity and lukewarmness because Jesus suffered and died to claim me and give me victory. He has made the provision for me to be free. The gospel is after my life. The gospel life is an endless frontier. There is no end, I can go deeper and deeper and the more I do the more I’ll want more and there is so much to discover that I will be chasing after it for literally all of eternity. There is such victory in knowing truth. In knowing that I can go to the darkest place on earth and fear absolutely nothing, not even death, because I have already died. No one can touch a surrendered life. I get to remain in Christ forever and ever. My vision of a fully surrendered life will be a process that can’t happen overnight. The formula is: die gladly. Surrender daily. Stop focusing on self. Love God. It’s not easy. The road is narrow and few are those who find it. But Jesus says follow me, I love you, love me back. The only thing He doesn’t have is our voluntary love. He says come, pick up your cross and follow me. It’s not a forced demand, He knocks gently. I have to want to, it’s my choice to follow. I can’t follow unless I’m prepared to forsake all but Him. To lose my life is to find it. I want to lose myself in the glory of God. It’s there that I will find myself, and come alive. I’m sick of taking my life back into my own hands. I keep messing up. I don’t know what’s best for me. God does and I want to give Him the pen of my life and not take it back no matter what.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, no fear, no insecurity, no doubt, no hesitation that will ever, ever stop us. Because we are the sons of the living God, because we are the children of the Almighty, because we are the residents of the kingdom of heaven, and we are soldiers in an army of the immortal. And when we speak life, life happens, and when we speak healing, healing happens, and when we speak truth, truth happens. And when we go take what we found to a dead world, we'll see it come to life again, and when we take what we found to a hopeless world, we'll see hope come back. We'll see the heart of our world start beating again, and we'll see the color come back into people's faces. Absolutely nothing will ever stop that. Mountains will move before us, and oceans will part before us, and the dead will raise before us. And the world will know that our God is the God that heals, and our God is a god that lives, and our God is a god that loves unlike anything that anyone has ever felt before, because we are fearless, and because we are His hands, and because we are His feet. Forever, and ever.
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