Yes. I am stubborn and stupid. That's what I'm discovering as I am going through some spiritual discovery. I am an absolute mess. I know more and more the anguish Paul was expressing in Romans 7:15-24. It's a constant battle between spirit and flesh. I am also realizing I have trust issues. I don't want to be fickle in my affections for the Lord. I want my heart to be stirred for Him. I don't understand my own ways. I trust God for eternity, but not for the "right now." WHY?? I have no reason to distrust Him.
I am tired of pretending and performing. God doesn't care about that. I can try and perform all I want, that is not going to change my heart and transform me spiritually. I have used and abused the lover of my soul. I live as an orphan rather than a daughter of the King. I have been invited into the palace and am standing outside the door (as Andrew Murray puts it).
It is absolutely piercing my heart that I am nowhere near where I thought I was with God. My weaknesses and idols are being revealed and it is painful! Where is all this coming from? Well, two places. I have been reading John Owen's "Mortification of Sin" and my small group is going through a curriculum from church called "Gospel Centered Life." Funny, though, how they are complementing each other and really driving home to me a lot of the same points.
And then, Andrew Murray, in Absolute Surrender, nails the reason, I think, behind my issues. He wrote:
No doubt you have never regretted responding to His call and coming to Him. You experienced that His Word was truth; all His promises He fulfilled; He made you a partaker of the blessings and the joy of His love. His welcome was heartfelt, His pardon full and free, His love most sweet and precious, was it not? You more than once, at your first coming to Him, had reason to say, "The half was not told me."
And yet you have had some disappointment. As time went on, your expectations were not always realized The blessings you once enjoyed were lost; the love and joy of your first meeting with your Savior, instead of deepening, have become faint and weak. And you have often wondered why, with a such a mighty and loving Savior, your experience of salvation was not a fuller one.
The answer is very simple. You wandered from Him. The blessings He bestows are all connected with His "Come to me," and are only to be enjoyed in close fellowship with Him. You either did not fully understand, or did not rightly remember, that the call meant "Come to me and remain with me." This was His object and purpose when He first called you to Himself. It was not to refresh you for a few short hours after your conversion with the joy of His love and deliverance, and then to send you forth to wander in sadness and sin.
No, indeed, He has prepared for you an abiding dwelling with Himself, where your whole life and every moment of it might by spent and where the work of your daily life might be done as you enjoy unbroken communion with Him. Who would be content, after seeking the King's palace, to stand in the door, when he is invited in to dwell in the King's presence and share with Him in all the glory of His royal life? Let us enter in and abide and enjoy fully all the rich supply His wondrous love has prepared for us!
This just floors me! It reveals my propensity to wander and pursue my own ways instead of God's. It also lets me know what is needed more: and that is an abiding fellowship with God. I want that. I often lack the discipline to make that a priority - which is something else I don't understand, but want to alter.
I don't want to be an ass.
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