“What do you want from me?”
I must have yelled that at Jesus hundreds of times. You see, I grew up a preacher’s kid, but I didn’t meet Jesus until I was a young teenager. I knew of Jesus. I had heard about Him my whole life, and I owned one of His Bibles from the day I was born, but I knew Jesus about as intimately as I did Tootie from the Facts of Life television show. I liked to watch the stories and I owned the magazine articles, but I never shook hands nor did we hang out together on weekends. As a matter of fact, until I needed something, I never even thought of Jesus.
This was the clincher though: I needed Jesus all along, but when I was standing in the middle of my own sin, I didn’t even realize my filth. 🤷🏼♀️ All I thought about was what I wanted and not about what I needed, but isn’t that how satan tends to lead? “What do you want? I’ll give it to you?”
But the truth is we don’t know what we want. We think we want a donut until it gives us obesity. We think we want a man until he turns out abusive. We think we want an expensive house until we can’t afford the payments. We think we want a better paying job until the hours take over our life. Interestingly enough, we don’t really know what we want. We think we do until the outcome turns out more like an episode of The Twilight Zone, and we find ourselves clutching our Bibles like a genie’s lamp, begging God to rescue us from our own requests.
Here’s what I’ve learned through my journey though, what I NEED is to step from darkness into the light, and once I’m in the light, my whole perspective changes. Not only can I see more clearly, but I think differently because I begin to think more like Jesus. I realize life is not about what I want, but more about what HE wants.
Because if Jesus IS light, then my whole mindset transforms when I transfer over. From there, I can look back and see where I stepped from satan’s prison cell into God’s freedom, but while I was in darkness, I never even realized the cell in which I was caged or the shackles that held me captive. My choices, which held me in bondage, continually kept me focused on “What do I want for ME?”
If Jesus had focused on His needs first, we would have had no salvation from our own sins and would be doomed for eternity–because we’ve all messed up and fallen short of perfection, and please allow me to insert here, no matter what the world tells you, God CANNOT be with you while you are imperfect; because imperfection cannot exist in the presence of a completely perfect and SINLESS God. (To get an idea of what I’m talking about, watch The Raiders of the Lost Ark, and view that scene where they pop open the Ark of the Covenant. 🤢)
Sin is destroyed, not because God is evil, but rather because He’s so good that everything that’s not good just disintegrates in His presence. so if that is dwelling inside of us when we come into His presence, guess what happens to our mortal bodies. 😬 🔥
So…because God loved us so much, and He wanted us to be able to not just come to Him when we need something, but He wanted to set us free from the power, addiction, and chains of sin, He sent His Son to pay our fine, so we could be freely transferred from darkness into His glorious light–from sinful to sinLESS. That is where we finally find what we truly wanted all along, but you’ll never find it, if you don’t FIRST step into the light. ☝️
HappygoMisty 