After I was done sharing a few simple words came from her mouth, "Surrender leads to so much healing." As my smiled stayed stuck on my face, my eyes welled up with tears I realized the surrender that had occurred in my life. For a quick moment I was proud of myself, so stoked that my brokenness led to another massive heart change. While reading Tozer the other day I came across this quote and I'm pretty sure I had to read it like 5 times, then write it down, then meditate on it, then be utterly broken by it.
“Self is the opaque veil that hides the face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction, as well try to instruct leprosy out of your system. There must be a work of God in destruction before we are free. We must invite the cross to do its deadly work within us. We must bring our self-sin (self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love) to the cross for judgement we must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some measure like that through which our Savior passed when he suffered under Pontius Pilate.
Let us remember when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking in a figure; and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us, and make us bleed, to say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and death no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free.”
A.W. Tozer
Great victory usually comes after a great battle. In one of my most favorite books, Hinds Feet on High Places...I know, I know I talk about it alot, but it's just that good! Much Afraid is going to altar to rid herself of her natural love and natural desires. She tries to pull them out herself but realizes that the roots are literally intertwined into every part of her being. She is absolutely unable to pull them all out herself. As she comes to an altar there is a figure there. She says to him,
"I am a very great coward. I am afraid that the pain may cause me to try to resist you. Will you bind me to the altar in some way so that I cannot move? I would not like to be found struggling while the will of my Lord is done."
He then binds her to the altar and pulls out her human love and human desire. In it's place is a gaping hole for the supernatural love and desires of the Lord to grow. It took her being bound, not all of our surrender will take that much surrender, but the big stuff will, we are human and it will hurt and our tendency is to fight or run.
Dear Lord as Ruth says to Naomi, so be my prayer to you, "Don't force me to leave you; don't make me go home. Where you go, I go; where you live, I'll live. your people are my people, your God is my god; where you die, I'll die, and that's where I'll be buried, so help me God-not even death itself is going to come between us." Ruth 1:17
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