At my 16th birthday party one of my very good friends and mentors blessed me with a devotional book entitled “My Utmost for His Highest,” written by Oswald Chambers (The Updated Edition). Now I have not exactly been faithful to reading this devotional, but every now and again I feel the need to reconnect with God so I pick it back up and turn to the current date.
My mother and I were reading, “My Utmost for His Highest,” devotion at the beginning of our “Porch Time.” On July 22 we read a devotional on Sanctification. Chambers asked “Am I willing and determined to hand over my simple naked self to God?”
That question suddenly became pertinent to me today as I sat on my porch alone and picked up a book, “Freedom from Fear, Overcoming Worry and Anxiety,” by Neil T. Anderson and Rich Miller. I turned the book open to the Foreword (Just started the book today J) and was struck immediately by the magnitude of how it began.
“But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’ He answered, ‘I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.’” (Genesis 3:9-10 NIV)
Since the beginning of human sin we have been ashamed of our nakedness. We’ve been afraid that God would see us and our sin and hate us. We are scared of what it means to be naked in front of God. He’ll see it all, the burns and scars, wrinkles and age spots, and we’re afraid that He won’t see any good in us because when we are naked we can’t see the good. We so easily forget that God made us naked, already seeing everything we have to offer.
So we clothe ourselves, we hide from God (which is impossible to say the least). When we’re finally ready to let God into our lives, when the good news finally clicks and the enormity of being saved hits us, when it should be so easy to say “God, Here I Am! I’m a sinner, fix me!” the enormity of our sin also hits us, and it hurts, and we know that for God to “fix me,” it will hurt even more. So we let God come in and fix us a little, we give up some, but we are still scared for Him to venture further into our hearts and see what we know is there.
My mother explained it two ways to me.
Our hearts are like houses, and we allow God to fix up the front room so that He can come in and visit in the pretty, so that we can invite others into the clean, but we stop Him, as well as others from coming in farther than that, because we don’t want the worst seen. So when someone needs something to drink we run back to the kitchen and clean up a glass real quick to bring it back without anyone seeing the mess we’ve made. We’re so afraid of letting God open doors in our hearts and cleaning it all out. But my mother also said this, “When God’s reaching under a bed and pulling stuff out, it’ll hurt and you’ll be scared but He might just pull out a teddy bear, and you will have been afraid for nothing. But maybe He does pull out something bad, like that moldy, rotten, stinky, 3 month old pizza that you forgot about. It’s still going to hurt and you’ll still be scared, but if you don’t let Him pull it from under the bed and throw its nastiness away, it’ll just get moldier and more rotten; it’ll just smell worse with all the time you invest in hiding it. Think of how much better you’ll feel, how much prettier the room will be with it gone.”
Analogy numero dos; we are flowering plants. “How do think plants feel when we prune them Amanda? It can’t feel good. But look at how much prettier the plant is, a new bud grows in after the dead one is gone.” It’s the same way with us, God prunes us, He cuts away the dead parts, the ugly parts, the parts we don’t want to show people anyway, and then something prettier grows back.”
It’s humbling to see all of the dead, the moldy and rotten on yourself; it’s humbling to go to God with nothing but our nakedness, just ourselves.
“Am I willing to reduce myself down to simply “me”? Am I determined enough to strip myself of all that my friends think of me, and all that I think of myself? Am I willing and determined to hand over my simple naked self to God?” That is what Oswald Chambers says we must ask ourselves. He goes on to say that “Once I am, He (God) will immediately sanctify me completely.”
When Adam and Eve came to God in their nakedness, do you remember what He did? “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” (Genesis 3:21 NIV)
~Amanda~
