Testimony - Look Up and Rejoice

            I don’t think I have yet to write about an actual personal testimony on my blog. I am going to remedy that right now; something happened to me recently that I’m going to share. Most things I write about on my blog are my thoughts, opinions, etc. but not my personal real-life experiences so... I’m not quite sure how this’ll go, but hopefully it’ll go well enough that you can get something good out of it for yourself.

            During the past few weeks, since thanksgiving, I have been resisting the temptation to go back to one of my old bad habits. I won’t tell you what it is because it’s very personal, but I will tell you that it’s something I have been doing quite habitually for a very long time. On thanksgiving (or maybe the day before) I simply decided to stop doing it. For a day or two it was easy of course, but old habits die hard (Die Hard and Christmas time... interesting... but never mind); after a little while I was tempted quite strongly to go back to it, but day after day I would just say “no” to those old thoughts and feelings and cravings, because I really do have my reasons (good reasons; I’m not just doing this because I think it will make me thinner or give me more time to play computer games).

            On Tuesday, a couple of weeks ago, late at night after my dad had gone to bed, I was tempted again, but this time so insidiously I actually thought that I might go back to that old habit that I really wished I could be rid of for good. My carnal mind was trying to convince and persuade me that it would be alright, that there would be no harm and no foul, and it was doing a really good job of it. But remembering the reasons why I had wanted to let this thing go in the first place (Let It Go... with the arrival of winter, that’s funny... but anyway) I reached out to God for assistance and boy did He deliver (Deliver Us... Prince of Egypt, great movie but... never mind! What is it with my brain and movies right now?). At first, I was just feeling desperate and in great need, begging God to free me from this evil spirit of temptation, though after a moment or two I realized that that is exactly what I should be doing anyway; silly as it might sound (I also know no one can argue against it) it is entirely too easy to fixate on the wrong things in your life that you can forget the good things you have and that can give you strength when you just let them. In that moment I realized God had shown me my way of escape; when the enemy thinks it has you surrounded, just look up. That song (Look Up and Rejoice) actually came to me in that instant and I started singing it quietly to myself, and I didn’t even get through half the lines in the chorus before I realized that the rather heavy spirit of temptation which, just a moment ago, I had thought would claim the victory over me was banished! I had not even noticed its departure; I could only view the temptation-shaped hole in the metaphorical door of my mind (it must have left in a hurry). And just in case you don’t know the song (it’s a good one) this is how it goes:

(the words in parentheses are my thoughts, not actually part of the song)

Look up and rejoice, a new day has begun

(fairly self explanatory)

Look all around you; see what the Lord has done

(He delivered me from an enemy I thought had me surrounded)

He has turned your darkness into his marvelous light

(again, self explanatory)

With the dawning of a new day and a future so bright

(I find that new day part very amusing because it happened at night right before I went to bed)

            Since then, every time my old carnal self tries to rear its ugly head, I just use that as a reminder to pray and rejoice and just make sure my faith is secure in the Lord. It’s remarkably simple but very powerful; just last night, I had a dream conjured up by that old mind, but the new man in me, the one who seeks after the things of God, hated it while it lasted but used it for motivation in the morning to devote this day to God, and so far today has been a very good one. To sum up, I have seen how easy it is to draw upon the Lord’s strength in my moments of weakness, and even turn that dastardly devil’s own devious devices against him.

             That’s my testimony. Well... for the past few weeks, but the grace God gave me at the start is still good today and it is my hope that now you’ve got a hold of some of it as well. Until next time, God bless y’all! And Merry Christmas!

Forgiveness and Resetting the Board

       Last week, Thursday, God opened my eyes to something I had never seen before. It's about the fact that the Earth's magnetism periodically switches polarity; the magnetic north pole becomes the magnetic south pole and vise versa, so north becomes south and east becomes west as the magnetic field goes through this strange flip or reversal. Stranger still, God showed me how this relates to forgiveness.

       You can read for yourself in the Bible in Psalm 103:12, "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us." I don't know what David was specifically thinking when he wrote this; most people would interpret it as God forgiving and cleansing our sin so completely that we'll never see it again, just as you can head east for as far as you want and you'll never be headed west, which doesn't work for north and south directions of course. The phrase forgive and forget is also used a lot by people who would like others to not use people's past (forgiven) mistakes against them so they never have to even hear or think about them again. But such thoughts are false and shallow interpretations of the power God has shown us in His forgiveness. For one thing, there's no way anyone is forgetting king David's greatest sin, his adultery with Bathsheba; that story has in fact become an integral part of any Christian's heritage. as for the "east and west" thing, science itself can show you that east becomes west and west becomes east because God periodically flips the compass, just on a physical level.

       Spiritually you can see God do this with David. Just in case you aren't familiar with the story of king David's greatest sin, it's very simple: one night, king David sees Bathsheba bathing on her home rooftop, seduces and sleeps with her, gets her pregnant, and then has her husband Uriah (yes, she was married already) killed so he can marry her and make the pregnancy look legitimate. Basically, the only reasons Bathsheba is in the picture to begin with is because of lust, lying, adultery, and murder. However, God forgives David (very generous) and Bathsheba in fact becomes the mother of the next (God-ordained) king of Israel, Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived and who led Israel into its golden age. Bathsheba also becomes the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother (that's 25 greats) of Jesus Christ, although if you look in the first chapter of Matthew, it does not name her in the lineage but rather it refers to her as the wife of Uriah (apparently it was difficult even for the writers of the Bible to understand why God let this happen). Lust, lying, adultery, and murder were the only reasons Bathsheba was in the picture to begin with, but she becomes such an important part of history; you could in fact make the argument that were it not for lust, lying, adultery, and murder, the king Solomon would never have been born, and (by long extension) you could make the argument that were it not for lust, lying, adultery, and murder, the Lord Jesus would not have been born. Of course I am not advocating these horrible sins; please don't do these things ever, they've always been awful and always will be. But that right there demonstrates how profound the power of God and His forgiveness really is. For king David, a man after God's own heart, God changed the game, reset the board, and flipped the compass; what was totally unacceptable, God accepted, and what was so horrendous and wicked and awful, God made it into one of the greatest, most uplifting stories history can tell.

       Now think about how this might apply to yourself and to the people in your life. God can transform your deepest sin into highest praise. He can turn your weakness into strength. He can take your longest, hardest, darkest personal struggle and turn it into your favorite testimony which you won't let anyone forget. God can take that moment in which you fell short of the grace and the glory of God and use it to show everyone just how glorious He is. It of course makes no sense to the natural mind, but such is the power of God and the power of forgiveness. So the next time you see someone (this includes yourself) struggling with the darkness or making some sort of horrific mistake, forgive them as soon as you can, and you can access the transforming power of God to completely turn things around. Perhaps a good way to look at this is that God, as moral as He is, does not see things in terms of right and wrong; He looks at it in terms of life and death, and then He does the thing that promotes life. Really that's what forgiveness is all about: conquering death and giving life.

       I hope you found this helpful. I just love when I can spend an afternoon meditating on something given to me directly from God. And I'm not kidding about that by the way; I didn't even try to put all this together, God gave it to me. But anyway, that's all I have for now. Until next time, God bless!