Freedom, exuberance and joy

My interior life – my personality – can be a desert wasteland, a place of mountains of dread and fear and depressions of anxieties. It can be a place of tortuous curves of self-justification and valleys of low self-esteem. 

I don’t think I’m alone in this. Isaiah 40:3-5 speaks personally to me about this. ‘In the desert prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God. Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low, the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all mankind together will see it.’ 

I can deliberately work on rectifying these situations in my mind and personality but that can quickly slide the way of most New Year’s resolutions if I try to do it by myself. It’s only as I ask prayerfully for help in identifying the mountains and valleys and boulders, and then continue asking for help in removing them, that success will come, and it is as I work with God on this interior landscape that the glory of the Lord is revealed and others see it. We’re meant to be a partnership: each one of us + God.

What does his glory look like? Freedom. Exuberance and joy, light and laughter and love, togetherness in relationship.

All mankind together will see it. 

Division in the church is opportunity to prepare the way of the Lord. To prayerfully, humbly seek to remove boulders of division. It can only be done with God’s help because we don’t want the church to end up watering down the message of grace nor conforming to the spirit of the age. 

When God’s glory is revealed in the church, the whole world will see and rejoice.  May his kingdom come and his will be done in me and through me, in the church and through the church, today as it is in heaven. Amen.