The things that burdened me were more about praising him in spite of what I thought I needed, and asking that he transform me. I felt another message that he was trying to teach me. More important than giving me my desires was that my desires came in line with HIS desires. Yet, that realization convicted me of something else. I was asking the Lord to hear and bless my prayer when I had anger and bitterness and couldn’t forgive others. It was always a practice in the Bible that before you could present your sacrifice, you had to go find your neighbor and clear any grievances between both of you.
Yet, with this actualization I realized something else. In clarifying a grievance both sides have to examine their role in the situation. Sin is like AIDS everyone becomes infected expect those who choose to abstain…what do I mean.
I was in a bad relationship. Bad for several reasons…
I was angry with my ex, I wanted to hurt him so that he could feel the hurt I felt. I wanted to be vindicated, because the image I knew he portrayed of me and the image that my continuance in the relationship showed wasn’t comfortable. I wanted revenge, I wanted to be right. I had been manipulated, lied on, betrayed, and abandoned, long before I had a chance to do any of the same things. Yet, with clear conscious as I was praying I knew I could not ask God for what I wanted and feel like this towards one of his children.
Granted he was physically, emotionally, mentally and verbally abusive. He was a liar, a womanizer, professionally unstable, and didn’t behave in the confounds of our house as he professed to outside of it. YET, and this was the part that I was like wow, I had that aha moment… it was as if every time I got down on my knees to pray the Lord would ask, “But where were you wrong?”
See despite who and what he was and still is, I participated in this sin. Not just because I stayed in the situation. I was to blame because I was in the situation in the first place. No dating is not a sin, but living with someone you aren’t married to, and having a sexual relationship with them and being unmarried is. I could not ask God to bless that situation and he couldn’t bless it even on the good days, because it was not what he commanded of me.
Some of us know truth and we are held accountable for that truth. In reality I was and am more to blame than my ex, because I knew more and better than he did. He was not brought up in the church, he didn’t know the God I knew, he didn’t read the Bible and he hadn’t experienced God as I had. I was supposed to lead him to Christ, not to the Devil’s front door. My participation in the sin, allowed me to be a stumbling block and I was accountable to the Father for leading his child into sin, more so than the Gentile who knew nothing of him.
It’s funny, church girls are always the ones who get pregnant the first time they sleep with someone. When we drink we are always the ones who get into accidents, the first time we use drugs we get strung out. We look out on those in the “world” like, “well they get away with it.” They aren’t accountable for truth they don’t know. Fifth graders aren’t expected to perform trigonometric equations, however, 10th graders are.
He paid a debt he didn’t owe, and now we owe a debt we can’t repay.
Too many of us have taken Christ and his sacrifice for granted. We are very familiar with Jesus who came and died for us and paid the debt for our sin, however, we have no conception of God the Father who was just and carried out justice. Most of us don’t even have the sense enough to fear the consequences of our sin. We have apostatized. We have relationships that are adulterous, we commit fornication, we lie, we steal, we are drunks, abusers, drug addicts, homosexuals, etc. We go to church every week, and we usher, we sing on the praise team and in the choir, we pass around the offering plate, we read announcements and go about our day as if everything is fine. Just because God hasn’t struck us down in the midst of our sin like he did the children of Israel in the Old Testament, doesn’t mean he is pleased. We know better but do worse.
God can’t bless our mess! He will not bless our mess! We are pompous and arrogant to think and believe that he will---and more brazen still, that we believe that because he is this benevolent God that he is required to. He will forgive our sincere repentance, but cries when our house of cards come tumbling down don’t cut it.
I looked at my situation and had to ask myself, how did I expect the situation to play out. I had done my own thing, and expected God to perform these miraculous feats to fix it and continue to give me what I wanted. Obedience is better than sacrifice. Faith is noun that means nothing for our salvation until we change it into a verb called faithfulness. We must project a life---the adjective---faithful, and live our lives as an adverb, faithfully. God had been more than merciful towards me, he kept me from losing my life, contracting AIDS, and/or ending up in a hospital. HOWEVER, as much as he may have forgiven me, he was just enough to allow me my choices. God allows in his permissive will our ability to make choices.
Whether those choices are good or bad, we must live and die by them. Forgiveness doesn’t change the course of our actions, it cannot remove the consequences.
Meaning, God may have forgiven my sinfulness in my relationship and he may even have overlooked my not leading this man all the way to HIM and giving into temptations. However, I couldn’t be mad at him or HIM for the consequences of those choices. I sowed those seeds and I was going to have to reap them, one by one. He may allow me to get away from some, but I can’t escape them all. This is not to say that by works alone, I could fix the situation, but it is to say that as I proved myself faithful the more he could trust me. He who is faithful over a few things, can be made ruler over many.
Being vindictive wasn’t going to fix my situation any faster either. I need to pray for forgiveness from God, and from him. My sinfulness set up the chain events I was now experiencing and blaming others for my choices wasn’t helping either. Transference of blame or projecting my issues, only perpetuate the cycle.
Flowing from my heart…are the issues of my heart…
So this issue that had been on my heart brought me to a place of immense peace. I didn’t need to wallow in the blame and guilt. I needed to ask the Father for forgiveness like David did when he committed adultery with Bathsheba, and move on with God. David and all of his sinfulness was still described as a man after God’s own heart. Finally, I was feeling immense peace with myself and the situation after accepting this revelation.
When we wallow in revenge and mask it as getting what’s ours; when we swim in anger, and call it venting; when we remain transfixed in the sin; and rationalize it as needing time to fix it; when we live in denial of our actions and our sin; rather than accept our role and responsibility---we hinder God’s greatest blessing, his grace to save us, his mercy to forgive us, his love to enfold us, and his power to transform us.
I have decided as for me, I will choose God’s way rather than my own way. Mother has lived and it has been a hard life. I clearly can’t be trusted to direct my own affairs. I’ve made a horrible mess of myself. I can only allow God to direct my path, for he knows the purpose he designed for my life, the path he wants me to take, and the direction he wants me to go in.
My ex isn’t perfect, no one is, he may be worse than most, but the freedom I gained from letting go of the anger and hurt, has taken me to a greater place; a place of peace. I must humble myself to be forgiven for my role in our sin. The greater glory is that I can now pray that God transform his life and bring him closer to him and raise him up to be the man that HE wants him to be. To God be the glory, for GREAT THINGS HE HAS DONE!
Nothing can separate you from the love of God…
