Freedom in the Light

The dark is a frightful place. There we are either hiding from God or pretending primarily to ourselves and ultimately to God. Worse our vision of God becomes clouded by shame and we mistake the voice of l o v e with the life-sucking, self-condemning, self-loathing, dark forces of shame.

There was a time when I mistook the enemy as my friend. That somehow there was importance to shame and accusation because it was correcting me and giving me something to work on.  When in actuality it only dug me deeper in the hole of darkness. Shame is the horrible cloud that twists thoughts and dismisses dignity.

L o v e, however, calls us forth, meets us in the dark, and surprises us with His light. Love, when we are in the darkness of the self--self-loathing, self-contempt, self-pity, self-deprication--startles us with it's generosity! Love feels too good to be true. G r a c e dumfounds and bewilders in the sweetest ways and shocks me by it's generosity, patience, kindness, and favor.

It dissipates the darkness and "Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee......" suddenly and quite mysterious the heavy laden fog in my mind dissipates and life looks different. Way different! I have what it takes, held by this grace, to embrace my imperfect, confess my sin, and rejoice in my acceptance.

Jesus does that! Jesus lived for that! Jesus continues to live on in us to be ambassadors of that! And you can only represent it, that kind of gospel-life goodness, if you've held his hand and transversed the inner darkness and been carried into the glorious light!

Freedom folks, beautiful, undeserved, shockingly good and gracious--freedom!

He lived for it and died for it that we might have true life and be light bearers to it's gloriousness! His gloriousness!

^17-19 And so I insist—and God backs me up on this—that there be no going along with the crowd, the empty-headed, mindless crowd. They’ve refused for so long to deal with God that they’ve lost touch not only with God but with reality itself. They can’t think straight anymore. Feeling no pain, they let themselves go in sexual obsession, addicted to every sort of perversion.

^20-24 But that’s no life for you. You learned Christ! My assumption is that you have paid careful attention to him, been well instructed in the truth precisely as we have it in Jesus. Since, then, we do not have the excuse of ignorance, everything—and I do mean everything—connected with that old way of life has to go. It’s rotten through and through. Get rid of it! And then take on an entirely new way of life—a God-fashioned life, a life renewed from the inside and working itself into your conduct as God accurately reproduces his character in you. (Ephesians 4:17-20, The Message)