Return to your First Love!

Unveiling the heart of a jealous God.

There are moments in life when you find yourself on the brink of despair. The things you’ve held on to for security and comfort are starting to crumble right beneath your feet. You look around in anguish and try to understand what’s happening but nothing makes sense. Everything seems lost. It is in those moments that we wonder why God allows us to go through despair and hopelessness. God is a jealous God and He knows that we are more likely to seek Him in times of trouble than in times of peace. When we feel afraid or anxious, we start to see the reality of who we are without God. Often times, we don’t even realize just how far away from God we really are until we start experiencing turmoil. God loves us too much to let us fall in love with anything other than Him. In the Old Testament, we find God passionately pursuing Israel again and again. So many times we, like Israel, forget that God is our source of life and peace and that everything good in our lives comes from Him. He is the One who rescued us and gave us freedom, yet we so often look to other things rather than looking to God. In His patience and mercy, God whispers to us to come back into His arms but we refuse to hear or simply ignore His soft voice. As time goes by, God starts to sing songs to us, hoping that we will return to Him. Sadly, our love for the idols of our lives is blinding us to how beautiful and breathtaking He truly is. Their song allures us and we become more and more entangled into sin. Yet God never gives up. His love is too strong, too deep. Our indifference and rejection brings tears to His eyes and fuels His jealousy for us. His voice is full of passion as he serenades us, hoping that we will at least listen to Him:

“Yet I am the Lord your God
Ever since the land of Egypt,
And you shall know no God but Me;
For there is no savior besides Me.
I knew you in the wilderness,
In the land of great drought.
When they had pasture, they were filled;
They were filled and their heart was exalted;
Therefore they forgot Me.”

(Hosea 13:4-6, NKJV)

The voice of our First Love no longer stirs us because of our adulterous heart. Despite the fact that our heart is no longer His, God still remembers us in our shame and nakedness. He remembers how lost, empty, and abandoned we were before He saved us. He remembers the pain and hopelessness. We don’t. Somewhere along the way, we accepted the lie that it was us who saved ourselves and not God. Pride has caused us to forget about His love for us and to live for ourselves instead of for Him. Mocked by our idolatry, He turns His face away from us, leaving us with nothing but our useless idols. Finally, the condition of our heart is truly exposed. Without Him, we are back to that place of hopelessness that He saved us from. As His jealousy mixes with anger, God screams to us through His pain and betrayal:

O Israel, return to the Lord your God,
For you have stumbled because of your iniquity;
Take words with you,
And return to the Lord.
Say to Him,
“Take away all iniquity;
Receive us graciously,
For we will offer the sacrifices of our lips.”

(Hosea 14:1-2)

It is our sin that has turned our lives into chaos. It is our arrogance that has broken the heart of our First Love. How do we get saved from our misery and grief? By confessing our sins and repenting of our sinfulness. True freedom is the result of true repentance. How do we truly repent? By asking forgiveness for our sins and turning away from them. As we take our eyes off of ourselves and our idols and fix them upon God, we will find life and freedom once more. God alone can change your wailing into dancing. Will you return to your First Love? He’s still in love with you.

“For your Maker is your husband,
The Lord of hosts is His name;
And your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel;
He is called the God of the whole earth.
For the Lord has called you
Like a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit,
Like a youthful wife when you were refused,”
Says your God.
“For a mere moment I have forsaken you,
But with great mercies I will gather you.
With a little wrath I hid My face from you for a moment;
But with everlasting kindness I will have mercy on you,”
Says the Lord, your Redeemer.

(Isaiah 54:5-8)

Have you ever tasted freedom?

The Gospel revealed.

If you’ve never come across one of my blog posts before, I hope that the Spirit of God will cause you to stumble upon this one. My prayer is that God will move you to read it because I am certain that He wants to fill your heart with truth and hope. We so need His truth and hope! I feel so compelled to write what I’m about to share with you and I’m so excited as I’m typing this! My heart is ready to burst with joy but I need to take a deep breath and allow God to write through me. This is so good! Are you ready? The Gospel is such a much needed treasure for every living soul. No wonder the enemy is doing everything he can to keep us from seeing it for what it TRULY is! That’s what he did to me for 19 years and it was only by the grace of God that I finally saw the truth! I touched it and tasted it and it was better than anything I’ve ever known before! God stepped in at a point in my life when I was at my lowest. Lower than I’ve ever been. I had no hope. Everything was going so wrong, nothing fulfilled me anymore- there was no more joy for me. I felt dead, terrified, and so desperate for help. It was then that God started speaking to me clearer than ever. My heart was SO disconnected from life and it took a very desperate situation for me to stop and realize how much I needed God. I didn’t just need Him then but I’ve needed Him all along. Before, I was too caught up in living for my own glory and serving myself- too blinded to see reality. Even as I write this, I remember the fear and disappointment that weighed down my heart like heavy, rusted anchors that kept dragging me lower and lower until I reached the bottom of the deepest and darkest of oceans. Have you ever sunk to the very bottom? I have. It’s such a lonely place! I was so unhappy! I don’t even want to be reminded of what my life was like then but I decided to travel back to that period of my life for your sake. Your soul is too precious! The price paid for your freedom was too costly! And you CAN be free! What I found is so good that I can’t help but share it. You really need to read this! I hope you’re paying attention. In my misery, when I was the most alone and hopeless I’ve ever been in my life- I found Christ! Like never before! I always knew God existed, but I had no interest in finding out more. I didn’t think I needed to be forgiven. I considered myself too good to even care about what the Bible had to say. I thought I was much better than that. I COULDN’T HAVE BEEN MORE WRONG! My first memory of Him is tragic, yet so beautiful. I saw Him bruised and beaten. I saw Him crucified. Crucified! It hurt me so much to see Him that way but at the same time it made me feel so enraged for not accepting what He did for me earlier! I found Him bleeding but there was so much beauty in His eyes. When I opened my heart I realized that I did that to Him. I made Him suffer, I made Him die! Yet I was so thankful for His death! I cherished His wounds. I treasured every whip mark. I found myself at His feet, kissing them and holding them close to my heart- until His blood ran over my whole body and washed me clean. He made me whiter than snow (Psalm 51:7)! Every stain was gone, every wound was healed, every tear was wiped away from my eyes; only tears of happiness remained. I FOUND SO MUCH FREEDOM AND PURPOSE AT HIS FEET! It’s where I belonged. All I could do was cry and I wanted to keep on crying forever because it felt so good. I was free! Words fail me in expressing what it felt like…it was the most amazing experience I’ve ever lived in my entire life! I found so much love and hope and joy! HIS LOVE IS BETTER THAN LIFE. Better, stronger, and more powerful than any love I’ve ever experienced before. I wish I could explain the life I’ve found…the beauty…the happiness! Words are too limited for me to express the intensity and beauty of what it felt like to be forgiven. To know Him who loved me before I even knew Him and who gave Himself for me (Romans 5:8). IT CHANGED EVERYTHING. No one could ever do for me what Christ did! This world has nothing for me anymore. I found what I was looking for and it made me so satisfied! Oh, the joy I found!!! If you’re reading this and you don’t know Jesus Christ, please don’t miss out anymore on the life that He offers! It’s too good to pass up! SO GOOD. But don’t take my word for it, open your heart to His love and watch it change you from the inside out! You’ll NEVER be the same again! Satan will try to do anything to keep you from finding the truth, but NOTHING can separate you from the love of God (Romans 8:38-39)!!! NOT EVEN SATAN. If you’re reading this and you know Jesus Christ, please don’t allow satan to rob you of the happiness, vitality, and life that are found in Christ alone! Too many of us get so caught up in the traps of the enemy that we end up forgetting what He did for us! That’s precisely satan’s strategy. Having a relationship with God and walking with Him is NOT boring or tiresome, it’s exciting and refreshing! Don’t allow satan to take your eyes off of Jesus and direct them towards yourself! You didn’t do anything to get to where you are today! CHRIST DID. Don’t let pride take control of your heart! God gives grace to the humble, but He opposes the proud (James 4:6). So be humble that you may walk in the power of His grace! We were saved by grace through faith to a life that’s vibrant and real (Ephesians 2:8). Not a life that’s dull and without desire. It’s so easy to lose focus and look inside yourself for strength and peace. Look to God! You were saved by His grace, walk in this grace! Live in it, breathe in it, sleep in it, wake up in it, be always abiding in His grace and He will empower you to walk in the Spirit rather than your own flesh. If our mind is focused on our own flesh- we will find nothing but death, but if we focus our mind on the things of the Spirit, we can be sure of finding life and peace (Romans 8:6). Only Christ can empower you to live a life filled with strength and hope. A life of happiness and rest. Be still and remember what He’s done for you! You did nothing to deserve it so stop striving, you’re hindering the Spirit of God from doing His work in you and missing the whole point of grace- something you didn’t deserve but received anyways! Grace is God’s undeserved gift. It changes the way you relate to God. And He is the very same God today- the God that forgave you and restored you, the same God that gave you a new heart. He is EVERYTHING and all that we are is a fruit of His real and passionate love. GOD DID IT! Don’t ever forget that! This is what God spoke through the prophet Isaiah about Christ. This prophecy was fulfilled in us and we are sons and daughters of this beautiful and life-changing promise. I simply love these verses because they’re so true! I’ve come to live them out and the truth they reveal brought me such true happiness!

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me, for the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to comfort the brokenhearted and to proclaim that captives will be released and prisoners will be freed. He has sent me to tell those who mourn that the time of the Lord’s favor has come, and with it, the day of God’s anger against their enemies. To all who mourn in Israel, he will give a crown of beauty for ashes, a joyous blessing instead of mourning, festive praise instead of despair. In their righteousness, they will be like great oaks that the Lord has planted for his own glory.

Isaiah 61:1-3 (NLT)

He is the God of comfort and freedom! He is our defender and our justice! He is our joy and our hope! And we are His workmanship, especially designed for His glory (Ephesians 2:10)! We need to look to Him because those who look to Him are radiant and their faces are never covered with shame (Psalm 34:5). Ever. They radiate His brilliant light! God is not a distant being, too proud to make Himself known to us. Rather, He is a Person to be known and loved in the most intimate way possible! It’s hard not to fall in love with Him when you finally get to know Him for who He really is. He took my breath away and that’s why I love Him so much! This is what the Gospel is all about. It’s TOO good to pass up…WHY WOULD YOU?

Are you unhappy?

Complete surrender is the key to finding the life you’ve been looking for.

I can vividly remember the day when I experienced salvation. The day when I died to myself and was resurrected to life in Christ Jesus. The day when I lost my life in order to find it. It was the day when the old was made new, completely new! On that day, I realized how filthy I was and how much I needed His salvation. I needed to be forgiven, to feel the freedom that comes from it surging through my veins! Oh, how beautiful that day was! To have the weight of the sin I was carrying taken off my shoulders!!! To surrender all that I was to the One who carried the cross in my place and who was made sin so that I might become His righteousness! I could have never done on my own what Christ did for me on that cross! I will never be able to fully understand the beauty and mystery of it and I want to keep the memory close to my heart forever! This life is like an ocean, with waves hitting against the shore of our heart in magnificent force. Sometimes it’s really easy to get caught up in the midst of it all; to overlook what Christ has done on our behalf and the life that we found in Him. It was through complete surrender that we found life in the first place, yet we don’t live lives completely surrendered to Christ anymore. The world around us has a way of making us “numb” to the effect of the cross. It’s not that the cross is of no effect anymore, because the power of it is stronger than anything else in this world! It’s just that we often become part of the world instead of letting God change the world through us. I’ve noticed that we can become a little too “comfortable” in our salvation and instead of living in it every day of our lives, we can so easily let sin creep in. This can take the form of a worldly mindset that shouts to us and begs us to focus all our attention and time on us instead of on Christ and what He wants to do in our lives. Instead of conforming ourselves to the image of Christ, we tend to conform ourselves to the image of this world. I’ve seen this happen in my own life and it happens in a very subtle way. If we don’t immerse ourselves in the Word of God and spend time in His presence through prayer, how can we constantly renew our hearts and minds in order to allow the Spirit of God to lead us on the path that we should follow? We wonder why we don’t feel as close to God as we used to feel in the beginning. Our focus has shifted. It used to be God, but now it’s become so many other things. We try to fit God in our lives, instead of giving Him full control and building our lives around Him. He is not our first love anymore. He just isn’t! Look at the way we spend our time and what consumes us. Are we devoted to God or ourselves? Are we starving our flesh or are we feeding it? If we feed our sinful nature, we starve the spirit; it’s just the way it works. When we sin, do we confess our sins and repent of them while turning away or do we let sin over sin accumulate in our lives until our sensitivity to the truth fades more and more? Do we allow Christ to be Lord over our hearts or are we serving our own desires and ambitions? We need to let Him renew our hearts and minds. Like a book that’s been long-forgotten on an old library shelf, so have we forgotten about our hearts and what the finger of God wrote on the pages of our life. We have forgotten that the hands of the One who wrote the story of the universe picked up the old and dusty book of our lives and with a gentle blow He dusted us off of our sinfulness and filled us with life. He erased everything and rewrote the story of our life. The pages of our heart became white and new. God wants to keep it that way. Let’s allow God to make our hearts new and pure again! There is nothing in this life that is as strong and powerful as the power of Christ to forgive sin and make everything new! God longs to be close to you and He’s been waiting for you to surrender your heart completely to Him in the same way that you surrendered when you first accepted Christ as Lord over your life. You found your life by losing it and the true Christian life is lived in a constant and complete abandon to God. We are focused on so many different things, when our sole focus should be our God! We try to make life work on our own and become so frustrated when we find out that we can’t make it work, yet we still don’t realize that everything we need will be given to us if we seek Him FIRST- with our whole heart. Give God everything! Your time, energy, dreams, all that you are! Life, freedom, fullness, blessing, joy, peace, stability, balance, wholeness, and true fulfillment will be yours.

Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.

Matthew 6:33 (NLT)