Fighting for our Lives – Excerpted from Finding Deep and Wide

I hope you’ll enjoy this excerpt from my new release Finding Deep and Wide…

…When my grands spend the night, I tuck them into bed in a guest room down our back hall. They’ve learned that come the next morning, they’ll find me in the great room with my Bible and my coffee. As soon as their little eyes open, they are bent on one destination— Keggie and her chair. Down the hall they come.

Let me tell you what they don’t do when they reach the great room door. They don’t peek around the corner to try to gauge my mood. They don’t try to decide if they should close the distance quickly or if they should tiptoe toward me. They don’t stand there wondering if they should sing loud or low, fast or slow. They don’t wonder if Keggie is going to be happy to see them or if she is upset because they ate the candy she told them not to eat the day before, and they don’t worry about whether they broke something she told them not to touch.

Oh, no, ma’am! They round the corner without breaking stride! Hopefully, I’ve heard them coming and put my coffee down because once they get close to my chair, they launch themselves at me. I catch them, and we snuggle, giggle, and talk. And yes, I may have a talk with them about the hidden candy or the broken vase. Or I might tell them what we’re going to do that day and what I expect of them. Direction, correction, or affection—it all comes out of intimacy and fellowship.

This is the privilege of relationship granted us in Christ Jesus. Nothing in us can earn it, and nothing in us can keep it. But because this grace-soaked Gospel seems to us too good to be true in the face of what we know about ourselves, it behooves us to live reminding ourselves over and again that our access to God comes through Jesus, the Door. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said this is the fight of our spiritual lives. If we don’t fight to rest in what Jesus has done and is doing, we’ll fall back into our old efforts to sustain and obtain what we didn’t begin and can’t finish! Jesus gives us new life, and we must have Jesus to live it. Jesus, faith’s rest.

 

I’m not suggesting we change our speech patterns in prayer. I’m advocating the power of always positioning and repositioning our hearts with this one understanding, that I forever approach Father God through Christ Jesus. In this light, instead of closing my prayers in Jesus’s name, I’ve begun opening them in His name. Not to get my words right, but to make sure my heart is right.

But Shellie, are you saying I can’t ever come to God in prayer without verbally or mentally acknowledging that I’m coming through Jesus? Are you saying I can’t just start praising God and trusting that He will hear me? Oh, of course you can, and of course He does.

I’m saying every time we go to Him, we are heard because of Jesus, and we pay a tragic cost when we lose sight of this. There’s untold reward in reminding ourselves He is the Door, lest we find ourselves entangled in our own efforts and doing seventy-five spiritual pushups to be heard. Blessed are the try-harders who learn to guzzle grace in this dry and thirsty land.

This is what I’m telling you. My own heart that now lives hungry for Jesus can still go from cold to hot and hot to cold faster than you can say quick. Does this grieve me? Sure, it does! I don’t want to be lukewarm when my Jesus is on fire. My humanness gives my enemy countless opportunities to wedge between me and the One my soul loves unless I remind myself to wrench my eyes from my work-inprogress self and begin celebrating Christ Jesus. Again. This habit is opening the door of fellowship for me beyond my wildest imaginations.

These days, when I catch myself searching for the right spiritual formula because God feels distant or analyzing myself ad nauseum, I throw on the brakes and run for the Door that is Jesus my Lord. I ask His Spirit to stir my lukewarm heart into a flame. As a matter of fact, I’ve discovered my vital need of asking Him to help me pray every single time I reach for Him and not just when He feels distant.

I can no more pray without the help of the Holy Spirit than I can obey without His help, speak without His help, or serve without His help! Owning my perennial need has become my ongoing strength. I stand on naked faith in the Cross of Christ and remind myself that through Jesus, I’m in God’s favor forever.

But I said when I catch myself. You saw that? It’s present tense. As I’ve confessed, I’m not beyond getting stuck in the muck of me, but I’ve found that when I live asking the Holy Spirit to alert me to my wrong thinking, He is faithful to do precisely that, and those times are growing fewer and further apart. He’ll do this for you, too.

The Spirit of God is ever willing to blow on the fire He started in our hearts, but we must quit trying to stir our lagging passion by working up repentance or charting our obedience. One of the greatest discoveries of our believing lives is when we realize the hope for our passionless, disjointed, hit-and-miss faith is found in the same One Who gave us the first measure! Oh, glory.

Have you learned to cry out of your dry heart for more passion for His Word, His Presence, His will? Try it, and get back to me when you’re incredulous at what He is doing in you. We’ll celebrate together!

Teach me your way, Lord, that I may rely on your faithfulness; give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name. I will praise you, Lord my God, with all my heart; I will glorify your name forever (Psalm 86:11-12 NASB).

Hugs,
Shellie