"Not by might, not by power, but
by His Spirit"
by Jen Shroder April 2014
This is a rough draft but I feel
it needs to be posted now
Who am I to place my hand on the keyboard and dare to
convey in words what God has been showing me? I am weak, so weak. "The
spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." (Mt 26:41) That about
sums up my adult life. Of course I could lose weight, everybody can
lose weight, and most everybody gains it back and then some, feeling
worse than before. The few that are successful at weight loss seem to
obsessively stoke their fires of defense, ever watching to maintain,
skewing up their wills to conquer a thousand temptations a day. God
never intended for us to suffer so.
And so here I am. Forty years of weight-loss failure,
suddenly 70 lbs lighter. My life has become a string of days that fly
by and I feel a peace, protected, it’s like I’m in His sanctuary and I
feel like I can do this forever. But I have learned to be careful not
to fall into the trap of thinking I’M doing this, that *I* have found
the keys, and the attitude of "Thanks, God, I can take it from here"
creeps into my heart and mind. Oh such humbling days! God could easily
lift His hand of protection from me and I would fall flat on my face,
just like a dog returning to vomit. (2 Peter 2:21)
All I know is to grasp as much as I can of the intense
love that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has for us. Not some
vague creator, not some new age version of Jesus, but the unique and
absolutely Biblically defined Elohim, El Shaddai, Yeshua, Adonai….the
Great I AM. And once you have a taste of what God has for you, once
you taste the Living Water after years of being in this desert, once
you experience the reality of how He feels toward you, it changes you
at your very foundation if you will receive it, for one simple
reason…it’s the TRUTH. There is POWER in Truth and it really will set
you free.
"Therefore I will block her path with thornbushes;
I will wall her in so she cannot find her way.
She will chase after her lovers but not catch them;
she will look for them but not find them." (Hos 2:6-7)
Did I really think those verses were only for me? Am I
the only one that God would block from running to self-destruction?
"Therefore I am now going to allure her;
I will lead her into the desert
and speak tenderly to her." (Hos 2:14)
Just about every woman I know battles weight or learns
to live with more weight than they want. When I started this, the LAST
thing I would want to do would be to offer up God to be used as a tool
by people who care nothing for Him. God forbid! But I have felt His
correction yet again. The world is longing to find that source of joy
that can only be found in Him, that wells up from inside and breaks
forth like an everlasting fountain regardless of our circumstances. We
waste so much time and energy trying to find it in the most ridiculous
ways, and the whole time He is right here! He is personal, He is
intimate, He is intense, He can put passion in us that is so
misunderstood by those around us… it’s so hard to keep quiet about a
peace that is inexplicable with words.
When people are wounded, we shouldn’t just ignore them
and walk by and leave them there because we’re afraid they will laugh
or mock or criticize…or try to keep God under wraps as our own. So
I’ll try to be honest and transparent in personal ways because the God
of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob loves and longs for you just as much as He
loves me. If He would reach out to me, a woman who’s life looks more
like the woman at the well with a trainwreck of a past, He is surely
reaching out for you. Everything in the Bible, everything that Jesus
did, even all of creation all around us testifies to this fact. Just
know that His plans for you are for good and not for evil, that His
passion is all about you. We so often sing about Jesus, that it’s all
about Jesus, but from His point of view it is all about YOU, for He
came down in the flesh for YOU, a pearl of great price, the daughter
of a KING, all of history, all of the wars and the records and the
stories and the sufferings and the victories have been created and
fought for because of you, God had you in mind, God looked down the
tunnels of time and saw YOU, personally, and allowed so much to ebb
and flow because of you. He could have closed the books,
proclaimed ENOUGH of sin and murder and suffering on this planet,
gathered all of His saints and began the everlasting party in heaven,
but He looked through time and saw you. You and me and so many
around us, but each one of us breathing in life today is His child,
and He cares so much that He wrote about knowing even the number of
strands of hair on your head.
We don’t even begin to realize how incredibly
important each one of us are to Him. Think about it, if just one of us
lives on with Him into eternity, you could take every human life that
ever lived, stack it’s time end to end and eventually time would run
out. ONE person eternally with Him outlasts every other being ever
created…His eyes are on us, His goal, His longing is for as many of us
to spend eternity with Him as will come, that we would have an eternal
destiny knowing Him more intimately than we ever thought possible.
There was a time in my life when I struggled with
forgiving someone in my past and I couldn’t. I prayed every morning on
my way to work about it because I knew it was a shadow in my life.
After a year, God granted me just a glimpse of a vision, I saw the
difference between spiritual death and life…I saw at my feet the woman
broken and spilled out into the mud and grime as if one, and for just
a second I saw myself spiritually in Christ. The contrast was so huge
and shocking that it caused me such a need to find people and tell
them about our Savior, the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ…I
write about this to tell you what I saw that surprised me. Of course
there was love in that vision, like a Father holding you tight in His
arms, but what completely surprised me was what it felt like to be
free of all insecurities. You feel centered in His will, I can’t
describe it with words but it’s huge. The human words of "God loves
you" completely fails at describing the sense of what God has in store
for us when we are no longer separated from Him in these finite
bodies. His Holy Spirit indwells us, comforts us, surrounds us, but
that peace is just a taste of what is yet to come when you are His.
And THAT is why we are here.
People shake their fist at God and shout WHY? WHY does
He allow all this suffering and trauma, why doesn’t He just wipe out
everything evil in the world? But if He did, none of us would be left.
For we all fall short of perfection, because of the fall we are all
born into the sin nature, we chose it, and if you think we didn’t then
look at what Eve did. She ate the forbidden fruit. How successful are
we at resisting the forbidden fruit in our lives? For me, as I reached
for fattening self-destruction time after time, it’s as if I was
replaying what Eve did, I’m a walking testimony of the bad choices of
grandma. I’m sure not going to stand up and claim I could do any
better. Can you?
But that’s why Christ came! To wipe out ALL of that,
to pick us up out of the mud that I found myself in, cleanse us, give
us robes of righteousness and a ring of authority and invite us to
walk with Him in HIS ways, ever growing, ever learning, as He
patiently leads us even when we fail and fall, He lovingly picks us up
to keep going. He doesn’t beat us up, He just longs to walk with us
like He did with Adam and Eve in the garden before the fall. He sees
YOU, He sees eternity with YOU, and if He allows trials and
tribulations in our lives that He knows will cause us to eventually
look up and cry out to Him, then praise God!
God is in pursuit of you. And not just you but all of
you. He knew you before you were born, He decided the color of your
hair, the tilt of your nose, the curve of your cheek and the exact
placement of every freckle. He knows every wrong you have ever
suffered, He knows every obstacle you have ever faced. He remembers
your childhood better than you do, and He understands what tangles you
up even when you don’t understand yourself. You are His MASTERPIECE,
there is no one that can replace you, no one else was designed to live
in this time or in your place. You and you alone are meant to be you
and when you run away from Him, He grieves and waits for your return.
"Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
Will bring her into the wilderness,
And speak comfort to her.
I will give her her vineyards from there,
And the Valley of Achor as a door of hope;
She shall sing there,
As in the days of her youth,
As in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt. (Hosea 2:14
NKJV)
And YOU were created to be in a relationship with Him.
That’s why we long to be cherished, to be pursued, to be valued so
much that someone would fight for us. It’s keyed into us. It’s why
soap operas and cheap romantic novels are a billion dollar industry as
we hunt for imitations. We want to feel cherished in a confused world
that seems to think a woman’s value is all about superficial beauty as
most of us desperately try to reach for impossible standards. The
tragedy is no one has EVER arrived, no one has ever reached perfection
by the world’s standards and if she comes close, the clock of age and
wrinkles is ticking and she knows it.
And all the while, the LORD is standing at our side,
whispering "choose Me," "seek Me," "I am RIGHT HERE" but so often we
miss Him. So we battle the day, doing our best to look right, act
right, eat right, occasionally berating ourselves for saying or doing
the wrong thing. Some of us pick at our own flaws and if we don’t,
wondering if our husbands or boyfriends are noticing whatever
imperfection we see in ourselves. And if there is no husband or
boyfriend, why isn’t there? So we go to the latest movie and wonder
why Mel Gibson or whatever heartthrob hasn’t shown up in our lives
yet. If only I looked like whatever-leading-lady looks like, and we
drown in negative toxic thoughts that seem to have only one remedy…
whatever we choose because at least we can control that, and it’s
probably self-destructive and fattening. And I couldn’t even taste it
because I was too distracted with what I would reach for after that
was gone.
Does any of this sound familiar? "If only I was
thinner, if only I was thinner…" The truth is, it’s not about weight
loss, it’s about God. He is what we are missing and He is what fills
and satisfies us. Weight loss has actually been a distraction from the
most important choice a woman can make…choose God. We were born with
this desire to feel validated, appreciated, loved, cherished and
fought for. Hollywood provides an endless parade of cheap substitutes
on the silver screen of fictional noble men with pure intentions who
love us so completely after one glance that they would die for us. Men
DO like to have someone to fight for but somehow I never fit the mold
of who they had in mind…whoops. Oh well, I’m only one of the 99.9%
that don’t measure up to the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue.
(rolling eyes)
So here we are, some married, some not, all of us
walking around wounded in some form or another, looking for something
that’s missing and finding ourselves in situations we’re unhappy with,
unhappy with ourselves, and reaching for comfort in all the wrong
places. But women have a long history of this exact same wrong choice.
Yep, we’re still following the pattern of Great Grandma Eve. The enemy
hasn’t had to change his tactics much over the centuries…
Eve wanted to be “like
God” but through disobedience. Scripture shows us that she knew what
God said but esteemed her own judgment over God’s and followed the
serpent. It probably seemed harmless to her just as it seems harmless
to us when we choose to eat what we have forbidden ourselves. Instead
of looking up and seeking God, we have gotten into bad habits that
never really satisfy, and we limp along suffering the consequences of
listening to the darkness or our own rebelliousness…”Take a bite, it
won’t hurt you, it’s just a little more, what will it matter, you’ve
had a tough day, it will comfort you, eat.”
How many times have I fallen for that
line of thinking? Isn’t it interesting how the first couple of bites
are so full of flavor but I barely register the taste of something
after that. It’s just how I coped. It’s our generation’s answer to
almost everything. It destroys us and the enemy is delighted. When we
overeat, we believe it’s what we want but then we have to pay the
consequences. What an internal battle we wage! It’s just as Paul
describes, “that which I will to do, I do not do; that which I try not
to do, I do! Oh wretched man am I, who will save me?” Thanks be to God
through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7)
Jesus. The answer is Jesus. He
understands our mental conditions better than we do. He can just look
at us and know all the internal struggles, prisons and traps that we
are tangled up in. He loves us so much even while we were yet sinners
that He died for us to set us free. That kind of love ought not be
ignored, or casually accepted, or acknowledged with a passing thought.
That kind of love, God’s love, is what we need to meditate on. It
frees us. The enemy will bind us with malicious destructive thoughts
that he helps supply and we are all so willing to take the reins and
continue to lash ourselves. Or we have parents or spouses who are
emotionally abusive. The sources of problems go on and on, but the
answer is always the same. “Jesus.”
We can stay in that spiritual battle,
living day by day feeling empty but striving to stay alive. Or we can
become God’s own, receive Jesus Christ, be born again and choose His
side and enter into His Light. We are cleansed internally and we start
gaining small victories. But think about it, what happens on a
battlefield when one warrior starts cleaning up and gaining ground?
The opposing general will send in more troops to that hotspot. So it
is with us. We start to gain a few victories and suddenly a host of
temptations and self-condemnations begin to flood us, or external
crisis start to mount up. If we don’t recognize what’s happening, if
we don’t pray and learn how to use the gifts God has given us, we will
be like little children easily disarmed.
Stand therefore, having
girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of
righteousness, and having shod your feet with the preparation of the
gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith with which you
will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. And take
the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the
word of God; praying always with all prayer and supplication in the
Spirit (Eph 6)
We
must realize and admit we are in a huge spiritual battle and our best
defense is PRAYER. Jesus even told us when He taught us how to pray,
“and deliver us from temptation…” And when we pray with other women
for each other in that endeavor…it is POWERFUL. But we resist, we want
to fight our own battles, win or lose. And so we fall, whatever we are
tempted with, it’s the same old story…it’s just a little bit, that
small amount won’t matter. We trivialize it over and over and over
again, and then we feel lost in failure and worthlessness.
This IS a spiritual battle, and that
little temptation has been your Achilles heel. The enemy plays it so
well, but we already have everything that we need, we just need to
learn to walk in it, to put it into practice in these times. To find
reminders in this world of what God already told us in His word. The
enemy has already lost but like a brainwashed troll we are convinced
we are defeated, put on our own shackles and are led back into the
pit. It doesn’t have to be! Recognize this is the biggest battle of
your life and remember to meditate on the love of God. You are the
daughter of the King! Even when you stumble, the Light of God
surrounds you in grace and mercy because you are HIS. God doesn’t
condemn you when you fail, He just holds on to you and whispers,
“Follow Me.” So empty your head and heart of negative thoughts about
others, situations and yourself and focus on God’s love and what HE
says about you! And the reason that it works is because it’s the
TRUTH.
Finally,
brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble,
whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things
are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue
and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things. (Phil
4:8)
I slowly
realized (and am still) how detrimental so many Hollywood movies and
television shows have been in my life. So I started to watch the news
but began to realize how it drained me. That was a place where I
needed to find balance. For you, it could be something else draining
you. Analyze how your favorite activities affect you and if it’s
negative or doesn’t edify, start starving that beast.
God really does restore
beauty for ashes when we seek Him. You might know Him better than I
do, you might not know Him at all, but He created you to know Him, to
have a deep and meaningful relationship with Him, one that lasts into
eternity.
And yet we always want
the glory, don’t we? Some of us would rather fail than give God the
wheel. Some of us want to walk with Him just long enough to get what
we want. Therefore this walk will not work for everyone, because if we
don’t have pure motives, if we don’t realize and seek the primary goal
of closeness with the Master, then we’ve already lost. We’ll get back
on that hamster wheel of running in circles trying to get somewhere,
succeeding for a while but eventually falling back. We need God. We
need to know Him through the Bible. And even when we’re reading long
genealogies of names that seem so foreign, or measurements of the
temple that are important somewhere but don’t seem to matter that much
in the “now” of our lives…yet even as we read things that don’t seem
relevant, they are, because God knows you are spending your time
seeking to know Him and He strengthens us through it. Something
spiritual happens as you read. It waters our souls. And like a young
plant, we need watering daily…not a flood once a month, but that quiet
little stream that soothes our souls.
When you pick up your
Bible, do you sense the Spiritual battle? Part of you longs for it but
part of you fights against it. It IS a spiritual battle, the enemy
doesn’t want you anywhere near God because if you get to know Him, the
light destroys the darkness. Christians that have developed a deep
relationship with God cherish their Bible. The enemy has stopped
trying to wage that war. But when you first pick up a Bible, the war
is on. “It’s dry, it contradicts, I don’t understand it…” It doesn’t
matter. The washing of the Word, even if at first you don’t understand
it, it plants seeds in your heart, it changes you for the good, there
is something spiritual that happens as you read and you need a little
of it daily. To think you read it once for the week is like saying you
ate once for the week. It’s a need that we have, it rinses us, He
works in us through it. There are some truths in it that are hard to
understand at first glance, but keep reading, the Holy Spirit is with
you as you do, you are touching God as you do and all of the enemy’s
realm knows it and fights it, whispers discouragement, tries to plant
doubt. But keep reading. Seek Christians that really love the Lord and
make Him first in their lives. Ask the Holy Spirit to lead you in
finding them because we are all around you, though many claim to be
Christians and are not so watch. None of us are perfect but the true
ones are always seeking and will be growing. They will be different
than they were a couple of years ago because God changes us. And they
will love you, truly love you, because He first loved us.
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