Affections awaken in the strangest of places

You know when God hits you?  When He just penetrates your soul?  I haven't had that happen for quite some time until now.  I'm a victim of His grace in this way.  He has been working through my heart all weekend and into this week. Knocking at my soul.  Do certain words or lyrics from a song hit you like a two by four and make you break down and cry?  Words you heard or read before, now somehow echo in your mind and linger in your heart?  It's funny how something like picking up a book and deciding to read something I had underlined to come back to now effect me more than before. A song I have been listening to whenever I drive it finally sinks in and causes my heart to cry out to God.

Here's what has awoken affections for my Savior:

Self denial is never just a series of isolated acts of mortification or asceticism. It is not suicide, for there is an element of self will even in that. To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ & no more of self, to see only him who goes before & no more the road which is too hard for us

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Cost of Discipleship, page 88

So what if they think you the man
That don’t mean nothing in the kingdom
So what I want ya’ll to remember me for
 If you forget my name, please remember my Jesus
KB, Give My All, EP 100

You know what else has caused affections to be awaken? A sinful thought and desire moved through my heart today that I wanted no part of. I realized I don't want that sin anymore.  I just want Jesus. I don't want the things that hide in darkness, the dirt and depravity of my human heart. Something really powerful hit my heart this Sunday morning when songs were being sung. I had opened up to some women close to me last month about something I've struggled with, I struggle in controlling my thoughts.  It's like my thoughts want to enslave me into enjoying sin again as I use to.  Sometimes shameful thoughts just jump into my mind and my heart just sinks. My soul weeps and lives in guilt that I would even go where I have in my thoughts. Sometimes I feel I can't even control them and the more guilt I feel the more evil thoughts flood in. It spoils everything good that I want to enjoy and tries to convince me I can't have those good things, I have to be enslaved to the bad.  This past Sunday rolled around and while we were singing a shameful thought went through my mind, and the moment I began to feel shame I told myself, "You are clean. Jesus has made you clean. That sin has been washed away by His blood on the cross."  I know the words of that, I know what they mean, and I've always understood them, but this was the first time in a long time I've believed them.

When Bonhoeffer makes that statement in the Cost of Discipleship that I quoted above it is such a great comfort to me.  To know that the majority of discipleship is being captivated by the person of Jesus, the character of God. As John the Baptist puts it so my own heart proclaims it, "He must increase but I must decrease"  (John 3:30). Discipleship cannot be done without decreasing self so that Christ Himself is proclaimed.

With that I have been in tears all night pleading to God that if anyone remembers me, that the one thing they remember the most is Jesus. If I'm forgotten I beg God that He is remembered.  I'd rather be forgotten by everyone if it meant Jesus was found by souls through it.

These are my thoughts tonight. As much as I talk about how discipleship is about losing self, I have spoken mostly of myself.  I apologize for that.  This was therapeutic to write and I hope that as I look back on my blog Christ shines through.  I hope that these words will heal my future heart and awaken my soul to Christ again when it becomes dry through the cares of life. God is so great and loving!

Cheap Grace

My indwelling sin has flared up again. I'm not sure what triggered it exactly the last time I dealt with it was about 3 years ago when I was still in college. I think what caused it then was I prayed to God that he would show me my sin and that all I would want was Him. Unfortunately since I didn't learn from my past I'm doomed to repeat it and recalling last week on my way to work I prayed this same exact type of prayer to God. If you don't want to go spiritually insane don't pray that prayer. I have had shameful thoughts all weekend not allowing me a moment of spiritual joy to myself. My "inner goddess" has flared up again. You know, the desire to be admired and in control of people? Only that can happen in my mind though since I don't actively do it in real life. The problem is that I didn't practice beating my body and making it my slave early in my Christian walk so I'm going to have to work harder now than before.

I think what has led me slip into believing I'm okay and unaware of this indwelling sin is my false view of grace. I have cheapened it. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it:

That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. 

 

Cheap grace is the grace I have bestowed on myself.  This false grace, my inner goddess fooled me into believing that I could be made right with God without repentance or the realization of my actual need of God. That I could be made right with God because Jesus has covered me and therefore I can live and think in the ways I want. The refusal to believe that God hates my sin and if I love God I would hate it too.

My thoughts have brought me to Paul in Romans 6 where he states:

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

I want to walk into that newness of life again. Maybe I am and I can't see it but I really want it.  I don't want to be a slave to my sin but to Christ's righteousness.  The lyrics of an old hymn have been playing through my mind tonight:

My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought! My sin, not in part but the whole, is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more, Praise the Lord, praise the Lord O my soul!

If only I can recognize this sin has actually been nailed to the cross because it seems to be living and active right now within my spirit.

I think it's time for me to pick up the Mortification of Sin by John Owen again. This indwelling sin will be dead to me.