Insanity at its Finest
Periodically, there are days when everything frustrates, annoys, and stresses me out. During these times, I desperately want to find peace. In my heart, I don’t want to harbor evil things like anger, unforgiven, bitterness, self-pity, hatred, frustration, and various other lies and temptations, but I do. During these times, the frustration continually increases and I can rarely seem to shake it. I declare peace to storms, rebuke things, fight lies, and so on and so on…but no peace.
I’m having a strangely simplistic revelation. God is supernatural and deals with us, primarily, in supernatural ways. It makes sense then that I become more frustrated by being unable to get rid of frustration because I’m dealing with spiritual issues with natural stubbornness. As the phrase goes, “it sounded like a good idea at the time.” Jesus has been teaching me the supernatural power of rest and submission to him. I am a “fix it” type of person in regards to my own attitude adjustments, so I set out to trying to change my behavior. This is pretty dumb because the problem is not the action alone, but the root desire that will grow into the problem. If unchecked, all these weeds will grow up to choke the fruit of the Spirit.
This leads me to a similar revelation: I cannot go about attempting to change my desires and my heart. That burden is way to heavy and difficult for me to carry for the heart and mind are full of complexities. Through experience, I’ve learned that trying to fix my desires, thoughts, and heart result in greater problems such as more frustration, anger, guilt, condemnation, judgment, and futile work. Insanity at its finest. I must let God deal with me supernaturally.
Cerebral Civil Wars
It has been said that, “a house divided against itself will not stand.” Jesus says this about casting out demons by the power of Beelzebub, but Abraham Lincoln, also, says this about the United States in regard to the Civil War. There is plenty of wisdom in this statement, because sometimes my mind has civil wars raging in it. As you all know, these battles are never fun, always self-inflicting in one way or another, and almost never cease to ruin at least half of a perfectly good day. During these times, I either do one of two things. One, fight until I’m worn out physically and emotionally–inner battles are ridiculously exhausting. Or two, sulk until I feel like fighting–but fighting after depression and self-critical thoughts isn’t a winning battle either. As it seems, there seems to be an abundance of wisdom in Honest Abe’s statement. As a result of these civil wars, I no longer want to take a stand, but want to keel over and die or blame God for something or some other ridiculous response. Well done, Satan. You deceived me into blaming God, myself for being a terrible person, and/or someone else for not being the person that I want them to be. In these lies, I break the big two commandments of Jesus: love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. In reality, I break another commandment because I am not loving myself which is a sort of a prerequisite necessity to purely loving your neighbor.
In a way, it’s quite the blessing to learn this lesson through experience instead of some body simply speaking it to me. I’ve recently come to some conclusion on what to do with Cerebral Civil Wars. This is a bit silly to say, but we need to relax. Seriously, we need to rest. For me, I fought and fought to rid evil desires from my heart even though I knew had been made a new creation in Christ. Why was I still fighting for a freedom that already was bought? Yet, I was buffeted more and more the more I fought. I subconsciously thought that the act of dying to myself was about waging war against my “flesh”. Covertly, a false gospel slipped into my life. Welcome back to the gospel that is not even good news–the gospel of works. I was not trying to earn my salvation, but lived in the lie that I have to personally clean myself up before He will use me or encounter me. If you asked me about this, I would have acknowledged the lie in this mind trap, but my subconscious actions lived a religious gospel of works to obtain freedom in Christ. My actions pushed away His nail pierced hands and said, “your suffering and death weren’t enough to free me.” As time went on, I burned myself out trying to die to all the inner battles against false mindsets by the largely unknown method of spiritual shadowboxing. I define “spiritual shadowboxing” as this: using natural, physical means of resisting an invisible, supernatural enemy. This martial art will only drain the frivolous fighter and break their will to engage in warfare. I pray I have wised up since my last shadowboxing stint. We must fight the lies, the desires, the temptations, and the false gospels with truth. Lies enslaved me, but the truth set me free.
Lord, the feelings are not the same,
livingablaze 