Risk - Step outside of your usual craziness

Most of my life I have felt like I am always having to "work" on or change something in my life....always striving to grow to be a better woman. This way of life is exhausting, filled with lists and plans and crazy efforts to be good. Until finally I came to a tipping point....enough is enough. I was tired of letting go and then picking it right back up again feeling defeated.

 

I love how The Message brings familiar verses into a new light and opens up my eyes to a fresh way of experiencing Christ.

 

Galatians 3:2-6 - Let me put this question to you: How did your new life begin? Was it by working your heads off to please God? Or was it by responding to God’s Message to you? Are you going to continue this craziness? For only crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was begun by God. If you weren’t smart enough or strong enough to begin it, how do you suppose you could perfect it? Did you go through this whole painful learning process for nothing? It is not yet a total loss, but it certainly will be if you keep this up! Answer this question: Does the God who lavishly provides you with his own presence, his Holy Spirit, working things in your lives you could never do for yourselves, does he do these things because of your strenuous moral striving or because you trust him to do them in you? Don’t these things happen among you just as they happened with Abraham? He believed God, and that act of belief was turned into a life that was right with God. ~ The Message

 

Does God richly bless me, and change me because I try so hard to be good? or because I trust Him to do it?

 

What crazy efforts am I making for transformation to happen in me?

 

Try stepping outside your usual craziness. Experience what it could be like to see growth as a process of letting God "complete" what was begun by Him. Rest in the presence of His Holy Spirit, "lavishly provided to you". Don't worry about how you will grow spiritually; don't try to make a plan for how you'll change yourself --practice simply being, finding out what it is to be yourself  in the presence of LOVE. Love that is unconditional, everlasting with no strings attached.

when we value who we are in Christ we can risk being who He created us to be