God is Not Subtle…

…and there are no coincidences in the Christian life. When God wants to communicate something to me, I will encounter it in my personal study time, we will talk about it in Sunday school, my pastor will preach on it, and I’ll hear Charles Stanley talk about it on the radio. To top it all off, I’ll encounter it again in My Utmost for His Highest (MUFHH). All of this will transpire over the course of a few days.

Do you read MUFHH? If not, you need to. I never cease to be amazed by Oswald Chambers’s wisdom and spiritual insight. He has a way of saying things you have heard countless times before in a whole new way. I don’t read it every day, but it is uncanny how when I do read it, it speaks directly to something I am dealing with. Here is an excerpt from today’s (June 13) reading:

There is actually only one thing you can dedicate to God, and that is your right to yourself (see Romans 12:1). If you will give God your right to yourself, He will make a holy experiment out of you—and His experiments always succeed. The one true mark of a saint of God is the inner creativity that flows from being totally surrendered to Jesus Christ. … A saint realizes that it is God who engineers his circumstances; consequently there are no complaints, only unrestrained surrender to Jesus. Never try to make your experience a principle for others, but allow God to be as creative and original with others as He is with you.

I know that an aspect of my struggles is an unrealistic expectation that my FEELINGS will go away, but surrender is doing what you do and thinking what you think regardless of your feelings. I want to be in the place where my will is always conformed to that of Christ’s and my feelings are always in subordination to my will.

Here’s something I wrote on November 19, 2004 that articulates how I feel about this process:

Last night,
As I lay in bed
Contemplating my life,
I concluded
That my SELF
Is dying a
Long,
Slow,
Painful
Death.

I realize that I’m doing this to myself because He says, My yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Matthew 11:30). Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief (Mark 9:24 KJV).