Freedom from Independence

I'm in a real 'learning lab' in my Christian experience right now. I am learning to let go of independent thinking. I’m being delivered from independent thinking through a world lens and learning to rest in my dependence on Christ.

I recently have experienced an onslaught of worldly cultural pressure that is pressing against my identity with Christ in His Kingdom. Attempting to shift my thinking off what is real and drift me toward trying to conform to what isn't. It has tried to get me to question what is eternal and what is temporary. There have been voices that persecute day and night, pressing in tighter and tighter until I have found myself entertaining questions like, "Have I been wrong to go this path all along? Have we been way off course?" I may not have entertained those voices long, but just a moment of lingering unbelief can spiral my life into anxiety and disorder.

I recently found myself back at the Cross again, asking how this all 'works'--this dependent life. I am asking questions like, "How do I DO this God? How do I do this Gospel life? It goes against everything the world is doing around me? How do I identify fully with the Godhead in a world in which I feel like an alien?"

But, If I take a really long, hard, look at my question, I see that what I am really asking God is, "How do I DO this apart from you, because I feel alone in it. I would really feel better if I just looked a little more appealing to the world, because I am feeling like I look like a failure. I am feeling a bit outside your reach of grace, so I am going to go out there independently and give it my best shot. I just need your advice to get me started."
---uh oh, Melissa, let's go back to the Cross and see the Truth again.

Last week, I grabbed my Bible, sat down in the back yard, opened the pages of Romans, and read through chapter six again. The words resonated off the page into my body. I began spontaneously shouting out praise in the tongues of angels in my backyard-- even though my neighbors were 5 feet from me. Three men, working construction all day, came home to unload their truck and hear some alien creature just over the fence losing her mind over the pages of her Bible.

"How strange they must think I am," I thought to myself, "I'm shouting in tongues and manifesting Glory in my backyard, just from reading the pages of a book! Ah! But I can't help myself, I just need to keep reading the Truth! It's setting me free!" Thus, the praises and manifestations of an alien Kingdom woman continued.

I found myself feasting again on this amazing power that is so much bigger than the world. So complete, so finalizing-- as far as this world is concerned-- that my heart began to beat faster and my blood began pulsing through my body. The Gospel was shifting the lens through which I look at myself and quickening my mortal body to the Truth-- again.

Was I just reading words on a page and feeling inspired? No way! I was seeing my identity through the lens of the Cross as I read about my death with Jesus! As I am reading the Truth, I am actually experiencing the power of this powerful Gospel Message. This Gospel says that I am dead as far as the world is concerned. This Gospel says that I became One with Him in death and so now am One with Him in His resurrected life.

“Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.” Romans 6:8-10 NIV

This Gospel is so far from thinking independently. It is Jesus wrapping my life in His, and folding His Life up in me, when I should have been cast out as a leper. It is Jesus entering into my sin and curse-filled life, filling Himself with my shame, and pulling me into an eternal irreversible existence together. This is His permanent act of destroying my sinful/independent nature once and for all. Here, He ripped the power of sin and death and worldly points of view away from me forever--and all through an embrace of all of me in Himself. He identified with my sin on the Cross, so I could identify myself in Him in His resurrection life.

We were forged in the fire of His identification with us.

I have a friend that struggles sometimes with abandonment and rejection issues. In essence, he is slipping into independent thinking. He loves Jesus, but when he is feeling unworthy again, he immediately feels rejected by and separated from God.

I always say the same thing to this friend, "At what point did Jesus leave you? If He made Himself one with you on the Cross when you were still a God-hating sinner, when did He decide he had enough of you as His son and walk out of your permanently joined resurrection DNA?"

As I am learning to look at my life through the lens of Jesus' Death for me, I let go of independent thinking, and I see that I am no longer living my life through the lens of being independent from God. I am finding myself looking at Christ's Death again and finding that I can rest there. As I learn this Way-- the only real way to DO anything--rest, I find myself only doing what I see and hear the Father doing as well. I stay within His grace. He does the work, and I become a public display of God's love too. I look like a partnership with the living God. I don't look like an independent, hard working, world-saving super woman! I look like the God that loves me enough to finish the work ahead of time and then walk me through the stage of my life in Grace.

The world will know will know us by our love. How do we learn love? We learn it from the One who gave His life up for us all. He didn't shrink back from death, but embraced it--all of it and all of us in all our hopeless conditions-- so that we could have His life. I love this Grace!!!

Being dependent on this union with Christ and His death produces within me a mindset that He is actually real and involved my life. He is involved intimately with our reputation. Our acceptance. Our belief in an unseen God. Our jobs. Our relationships. Our crisis. Our living out life here on planet Earth.

There is an unseen God that wants to be seen through us, to give the world a glimpse of the love of the Father of eternity. Our union with Him, is constantly tested by the world around us. God's point of view vs. a clouded, distorted, worldly point of view. I am thankful, that even through the testing, I can lean into my union for strength to sustain me. This oneness has more power than I have in my own human ability. It is supernaturally reminding me that Jesus has overcome the world, and I get His new life to enjoy.