But I reread it yesterday morning and was about to post it… and as brilliant as I thought it was (it was about loving and supporting "failures")… I just couldn't post it. Like… I literally could NOT post it. Kind of weird.
Or, kind of… God.
(Oooo, I coulda used that one in high school: "God told me not to turn in my homework." I'm sure that would have worked! Haha!)
Anyway, sorry for the rambles. But, I figured out why I "couldn't" post… cause God was gonna speak to me later that day... and then again today.
Cause this morning, I had reworked another post... a post about how Satan is waiting for us to be successful so that he can nuzzle his way in and create a gap between us and God. Was almost finished with the post... and then, an almost audible voice told me not to publish that one either. Ugh. Now, I was realllllly late.
And then came my afternoon prayer time, and it started out like a lot of my prayers "Uhhhhhhh... hey God. Uhhhhhhh... what's up? Uhhhhhh... not sure what to pray about..." and then my prayer dramatically (and randomly) shifted to talking about making covenants with Him.
As you may, or may not, know... in January, I made a covenant with God to eat vegetarian for a year, cutting out all sugar (cause I was pretty hard core addicted to the stuff), and seriously limiting my bread intake. And I decided to write my own devotionals every day during that year in an effort to gain my strength and motivation from Christ, within whom I can do all things. And, so far, it has been an amazing, life-changing, mind-altering, soul-reviving year for me.
Yes, my body looks drastically different from the way it looked before, but more importantly, my soul looks drastically different than it did before. Losing a bunch of weight has been nice, don't get me wrong, but finding the freedom from being addicted to food... that has been the most amazing part! And today I was praying to God thanking Him for the self-control that He has given me (cause I naturally have pretty much zero self-control), and I was thinking about all the different parts of my life that seem so out of control... my eating was the first one, my time-management, my approach to mothering, my spending, etc. and I was starting to get excited thinking about covenanting with Him to rid the sin out of each of these areas as I have seen Him purge (and continue to purge) the sin of gluttony from my life. And well... I just wanted to share a portion of my prayer-journal with you:
More and more I want to covenant everything. Maybe that's a lifestyle in and of itself... to covenant everything in my life. To give everything to You, God. What... what a life I would have... simply put: a life like Christ.
And wow... He truly, truly gave it all, didn't He? He completely gave over everything to You and your power. He truly covenanted His LIFE. He covenanted His death...for me.It was such an awesome moment... for now that I have covenanted with Him, I understand a bit more that pull that Jesus must have felt... standing there in the Garden, struggling between his human self wanting to keep His life and his God-self knowing that He had a covenant with God to sacrifice it all in order to give us the gift of righteousness. For the first time in my life, I understood this verse a little: "I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I want to suffer with him, sharing in his death, so that one way or another I will experience the resurrection from the dead!" (Philippians 3:10-11).
So, all of this rambling to say... look at your life. I think we all have areas of our life that need to be completely taken over by Christ. Well, I would just encourage you to seriously think about letting Him completely take over that area. Make a covenant with Him. Like, I recently realized that my "prayer life" pretty much consisted only of praying continually (also known as sporadically) throughout the day. I never sat down to really meditate or talk to God, so I covenanted with Him to sit down for the fifteen minutes after I get both of my sons down to nap... to pray. Just fifteen minutes. But it's not a deal with myself. or with my pastor. or with my husband. or with anyone. It's a deal with God. And I'll stick by a deal with God... because, well... because He. is. God. And already, just ten days in, my relationship with God has exploded to a whole new level. Who knew? (Well, He did... of course).
I just know that a covenant with Him this past year has changed my life... for.ev.er. And I want to make sure that you guys know that a covenant with Him could change your life... for.ev.er.
I pray that you consider it... I pray, sisters, that you might "want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead."
As always, so timely. Struggling this week with my own covenant. Thank you for listening to the Spirit's prompting.
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