Tag: Lies

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Nothing but Willingness

Today I have no prepared insights to write about, no theme on my mind, no Scripture to anchor my anecdotes. As usual, my demons haunt me with thoughts about not being worthy to write at all, not being a voice worth sharing, and all the other such lies I used as excuses to stop trying. But today I’m choosing to write anyway, stare my demons in the face and defy them. Resist!

So, how are we doing? I like to take a look back at the end of summer as the new year is soon to come; I’ve begun to measure years starting with the beginning of autumn, in keeping with the Jewish calendar. What I see now is that I took some steps forward at the start of the summer, and have since taken a step back. Thankfully, Jesus is still King.

Today, in light of feeling set back, I feel like all I have to offer to God is willingness. I’m willing to obey Him and willing to do what He asks, but as Scripture says, the flesh is weak (Matthew 26:41). I don’t feel the same confidence I had at the start of this summer to take action, to enact change, or to get things done. But I can look back now and see that God has been and still is using it all. He uses our ups and downs, the days when we fall apart and the days when we are steady, the emotions we feel and the people around us, all to draw us closer to Himself. Today the Holy Spirit encourages us to turn to Him and to teach us to follow Him, just like Jesus, when He walked the earth, taught His disciples to follow Him.

For me, this year has been another season of learning more deeply that emotions don’t equal Truth, and that how I feel isn’t often aligned with Truth. This is one of the things that made me decide to start this blog in the first place, to better discern what is actually True versus what felt True at the time. As a person who is naturally wired to use emotions as intel, this is a hard lesson I’ve been tempted to forget over and over. But God has been mercifully patient with me and simply has taught it to me again this year.

These lessons we keep learning, these are clues for us. We can recognize them and bring them to God in earnest. All I can bring today to the foot of God is willingness to walk in the lesson learned; but walking in the completed transformation is something different. Some days, like today, all I can do is to be willing. God can always do something with our willingness, when we give Him room in our hearts to work. There are things I cannot overcome without God’s help–everything, in fact! That is something I’ve learned the hard way.

As this year winds down, may we all be willing to bring our shortcomings before God and earnestly ask Him to overcome where we cannot. Amen.

“Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41).

“So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed: shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsion, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:1-3).

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Seeking Life’s Deeper Truth

Today I invite you to celebrate with me because six years ago today, I started Life with the King. My first post was called What To Do When You Struggle with Faith. The timestamp is a day late, July 25th, for some computer-y reason I couldn’t fix at the time. I remember having a blog launch party at my house with a few friends and games and food and I was so excited, but nervous. I’ve been journaling since I was seven years old, happy to have a private place to put my thoughts. The decision to be vulnerable enough to share thoughts with other people wasn’t easy, but at the time I just knew it was something I simply had to do. And I’m so glad I did. Six years later, and I still know it’s what I’m supposed to be doing.

The idea behind my website’s tagline, “Seeking Life’s Deeper Truth,” is something that I don’t know that I ever explained, or intended to explain. Those who get it will get it, I told myself. But perhaps now it’s time to go back six years and tell the story behind that tagline.

When I decided on the tagline “Seeking Life’s Deeper Truth,” I had just come from the previous six-year stretch from 2013-2019 of seeking Truth after finding myself caught in a lot of confusion and outright lies that I had sincerely thought were truths up until that point. I never believed in Santa Claus, but just imagine what it is like to find out the truth about him, only you’re an adult, then multiply it by about ten because it impacted every single area of life, and that’s roughly how it felt.

To believe that being a Christian means you’ll be happy every day, to believe that you’re doing everything you can to live well when your gods are television and weekends and looking successful in your career, to believe people need to earn their worth and find their identities in the world…the list could go on and on. I believed these and so many other outright lies and was angry that I had fallen for them. Truth became sacred to me in that period of time. That’s why I now capitalize the word Truth. And I also now believe that Truth has a name. Truth means everything to me in my life and faith journey. The interesting thing about Truth is that this world encourages us to give up on it, have a strange avoidant relationship with it, or lose sensitivity to it just to cope in the moment, while compromising long-term peace.

Confusion is a specialty of the enemy of our souls. The strange thing about Truth is that Satan, as the father of lies (John 8:44), confuses Truth and lies even though they couldn’t be more opposite. And he does this really, really well. Scripture promises that this will get progressively more intense, “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths” (2 Timothy 4:3-4). Can you think of any teachers or myths with influence being spread today?

The stakes are high, so high that I started a website six years ago to remind others (and continue to myself), that Truth is the most important thing, and it must be sought out. If we are passive and not intentional to seek Truth, we will be swept into the current of lies, so subtly we’ll never even realize it’s happened. I know because that happened to me. I don’t want that even for enemies, but especially not for you, friends.

So I fight against the father of lies by sharing about the Truth when I am given the words. Particularly for me, I fight against the lie of the ego that we are immune to lies. My old post called The Truth about Philosophy and Mental Health is an example of working this out in my own life. I’ve learned the hard way that we must keep our eyes on the Truth, or we may be subject to the wrong king. What would happen if instead of shying away from Truth out of fear of the unknown, we chose to embrace it? For me, it changed everything and it was more than worth the risk.

If we don’t take the risk, we may get to a point where we are told the Truth, and even though we hear it, we don’t recognize it to be True. This happened not only to me but to king Ahab in Scripture. He fell for the trap of his own preference, and believed the lies of the false god prophets, who he chose to follow over Micaiah, who was a prophet of the Lord (2 Chronicles 18). When Truth is clearly presented to us, how do we recognize it when we see it? We must recognize the importance of Truth, seek it, and keep ourselves sensitive to it, no matter the cost. Truth is always worth it.

Seek Truth with all your heart! There is nothing more important. That’s why Life with the King exists. It’s all about Truth, and seeking it for yourselves in the deepest way possible. May you find what you are seeking. Amen.

“They bend their tongue like a bow; falsehood and not truth has grown strong in the land; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they do not know me, declares the Lord. Let everyone beware of his neighbor, and put no trust in any brother, for every brother is a deceiver, and every neighbor goes about as a slanderer. Everyone deceives his neighbor, and no one speaks the truth; they have taught their tongue to speak lies; they weary themselves committing iniquity.  Heaping oppression upon oppression, and deceit upon deceit, they refuse to know me, declares the Lord” (Jeremiah 9:3-6).

“And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray” (Matthew 24:11).

“...they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen” (Romans 1:25).

Thank you for spending some of your time journeying with me. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to Life with the King, and like & follow the Facebook page; it truly helps me continue writing this blog. Grace and peace.

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Repentance

Turning back to God didn’t happen just once for the Israelites, and it certainly didn’t happen just once for me. In my own life, I’ve turned back to Him more times than I can count, sometimes multiple times in a day. However, one time in particular was the start of a big change in my life. Admitting we are wrong isn’t easy. Yet in a sense, it is exactly what repentance, and in fact Christianity, calls for.  

When I discovered this, I didn’t like it at all. It made so much more sense to me that I was fine just the way I was. That sin wasn’t a big deal to be ashamed of but something we learn to cope with. That I wouldn’t really be held responsible for sin, especially the inherited kind that I had no control over. Following this logic, it was easy to lose ground with faith, and I slipped further and further away from the truth of what God’s Word actually says about sin. After losing my faith entirely, living my own way, and believing these “comfortable” things for several years, repentance from sin as the Bible describes it finally became real to me.  

One of my favorite verses in Scripture now is Romans 2:4, “...God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance.” While I was fully convinced of the merits of not believing in sin or God, He reached into my life and showed kindness so undeniable that I couldn’t ignore it or explain it away. When I realized that it really was God’s kindness, not some happy accident or coincidence, it changed something in my heart.

On the path of losing my faith, my heart had gone through a number of phases toward God; I became skeptical, then callous, then arrogant, cold, and unloving. I had been awful to God if He truly was real. I had denied Him. Yet, even still, God showed me kindness. Despite how awful I was to Him, His kindness was the only thing that finally warmed my cold heart. Only a few months later I truly wanted to repent, to turn everything in my life around and trust God instead. It all started with His kindness. His kindness led me off the path of faithlessness and onto a new path of true repentance.

God’s kindness can reach beyond all intellectual and emotional barriers. 

The call to repent really intensified shortly before Jesus’ three years of ministry when John the Baptist began preaching, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matthew 3:2). After John was put into prison, Jesus moved to Capernaum and “From that time on Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near’” (Matthew 4:17). These two major figures of the Bible both had the same core message! So, what is so important about repentance?  

Repentance comes up quite a bit in Scripture. It is associated with baptism and life. In trying to Biblically define repentance, I found that it is to allow oneself to be corrected (Jeremiah 5:3, Revelation 2:21), to realize and turn from wickedness (Jeremiah 8:6), to turn from idols and renounce all detestable practices (Ezekiel 14:6), to turn away from all our offenses (Ezekiel 18:30), to (re)turn to God (1 Samuel 7:2b-3, Hosea 14:1, Acts 3:19, Acts 26:20), and to produce [spiritual] fruit (Matthew 3:8, Luke 3:8); it involves faith in God (Matthew 21:32, Mark 1:15, Acts 20:21), it is a command to all people everywhere (Acts 17:30), it involves Godly sorrow (2 Corinthians 7:9-10), it involves and is done in relation to sin (John 1:28, 2 Corinthians 12:21), it involves recognition of the truth (2 Timothy 2:25), it is something God wants for everyone (2 Peter 3:9), it is a sort of waking up (Revelation 3:3), and it can result from God’s love, discipline, rebuke (Revelation 3:19), and kindness (Romans 2:4). 

God wants nothing more than for us all to repent. When we do, it unlocks our hearts to be open to receive His promises, His gifts of the Spirit, and His presence. He longs to be close to us. When I chose to keep Him away in my own life, I fell into the sin of idolatry, among others. God’s very first commandment to the Isrealites is to have no other gods before [Him] (Exodus 20:3). While I don’t recall having any golden statues in my house to worship, for me, idolatry came in the form of putting other things before God. The prophet Samuel spoke to the Isrealites about this;

“Then all the people of Israel turned back to the Lord. So Samuel said to all the Israelites, ‘If you are returning to the Lord with all your hearts, then rid yourselves of the foreign gods and the Ashtoreths and commit yourselves to the Lord and serve him only, and he will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines’” (1 Samuel 7:2b-3).

This Old Testament passage speaks not only of repentance but idolatry, of putting other gods in place of the one true living God. He wants nothing to come between Him and any one of us. He wants our hearts to be committed to Him. 

I had gotten lost in the prevalent explanations that society offers: we all make our own truth, there is no one absolute truth, all you need to do is be a good person, you don’t need to feel ashamed of anything about yourself, there are no eternal consequences for anything, and there is nothing after we die. 

These lies became idols in my life. 

I had adopted them and they became louder in my mind than God’s still, small voice. I was trying to live out this new philosophy of life where I had landed, but I was still miserable. I was even more miserable than I had been when I wasn’t sure of whether or not God was real. It was all too much and I just became numb. It was a dark, confusing, and exhausting time. If you know someone going through a time like this, please check out my post, “10 Ways to Help Someone Struggling with Faith.” Friends, it is so easy to latch onto lies the world tells us; they usually sound good and fair on the surface. However, we must test everything against the truth in the Word of God. It points us back to the truth about ourselves, and to Jesus, who is our hope. 

God keeps His promises. He promised salvation, and He keeps that promise through Jesus and the baptism of the Holy Spirit. 

Repentance leads to receiving God’s promise of deliverance from sin through Jesus Christ.  

God reached out to me even when my mind and heart were closed to Him, when the misery became too much to bear. It was wonderful, amazing grace. This miracle still astounds me. I finally knew without a doubt that God is real, but I couldn’t go back to all the same beliefs I had about God before. Some of those beliefs still needed to be changed, because they weren’t all true. Even though I had repented, I still had to rethink everything all over again. All I knew was that He is real; I had to just start there. I had lied to myself for so long it was hard to know the truth, but I craved it. The fact that I knew He was real meant I couldn’t trust atheist or agnostic sources anymore. He led me right back to the Bible for answers, a Book that I hadn’t trusted in a long time. But I trusted that God was real, so I gave it another chance.

It was a process to understand sin, and how it had cut me off from relationship with God, and that I had gone my own way because of it. I had repented, but then later after seeking truth I finally understood. “‘After I strayed, I repented; after I came to understand, I beat my breast. I was ashamed and humiliated because I bore the disgrace of my youth’” (Jeremiah 31:19). We need both repentance and understanding to sustain us in our faith. I had to come to face the worst of it which was finally clear to me; I’d KNOWN God and STILL walked away from Him! Maybe some of you can relate to this story. Even still, all God asks is for us to trust Him enough to repent. Through repentance–turning from sin and relying on the salvation Jesus offers each one of us–He promises us restoration back to Himself.   

I pray that you can learn from my mistake: you don’t have to walk away from God like I did for your faith to be renewed and strengthened! By seeking Him and the truth about Him, you can know He is real now, you can know He loves you now, you can know His intentions for you were always good. “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). Yes, sin crept into humanity at the start and bad things happen. Being a good person isn’t enough to conquer sin and death; only Jesus can do that for us. With repentance comes restoration. “Therefore this is what the Lord says: ‘If you repent, I will restore you that you may serve me; if you utter worthy, not worthless, words, you will be my spokesman. Let this people turn to you, but you must not turn to them’” (Jeremiah 15:19). There is always hope.

God longs to restore us to walk with Him as He originally intended in the Garden.

Yes, true repentance will cost everything in your life. To fully trust God and walk in repentance, we must let our own logic about what is right for us die and surrender our lives to His way, “Then [Jesus] said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). The cost is great, but it’s well worth it. God’s way is better than anything we could dream up for ourselves. I’ve never met a single Christian who was sorry they made the choice to follow Jesus.

When repentance and understanding came, the nagging sense of meaninglessness and numbness in my life disappeared. I accepted the truth the Word offers about my own sin, that it is in fact a barrier to relationship with God. Jesus brought justice where I didn’t deserve justice. He loved me when I didn’t love Him. He made a way for me even after I closed the door of my heart to Him. 

No one is too far from His love to be found by Him. 

After I repented and accepted Jesus’ gift of life for me, I couldn’t just go on as I had been going. My life dramatically changed. I started attending church again. I made Christian friends and sought their counsel. I prayed as much as I could because prayer had been restored to me, right along with my life. I had a reason to live again, and to glorify Him in everything. I’m sure my family would tell you I cried less tears.

Change is evidence of true repentance. 

I am still learning and definitely still do things that are wrong. I still need to repent of those things. However, everything changed when I repented of the way I was living and believing. At that moment, change really began. My faith in God is now growing all the time where before it was dead. God restored my ruined life and handed it back to me miraculously whole again. 

Eternal life begins now when we repent, we don’t have to wait until after we die to begin living it! Jesus has truly restored all things, including a life where I can find joy despite the pain this life can bring. It all starts with repentance. May we all be quick to repent and turn to the Lord.

“‘This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says: ‘In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength…” (Isaiah 30:15a)

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Confidence in The Promises of God

I go through these times when my inner space is filled with noise to the point where being calm isn’t even an option. I’m still very much in the process of learning to actually use the anxiety-reducing “tools” that help–breathing, for instance. I’m not very good at that. Or staying still. Not so good at that either. Or limiting the amount of content I watch in a day or a week. That’s definitely a work in progress. I’m writing to myself today, as much as to you, my fantastic readers, because this week, I’m in one of those states where I just feel scattered. Maybe you’ve experienced this too. It might last a few hours or a few weeks, but these are the times when I need to remember the Truth of God’s promises the most. 

When I’m feeling this way, it’s easy to forget God entirely and focus on myself. This is what’s so dangerous about it. It’s easy to only hear the noise and feel that God isn’t there after all, and pretty soon my mind starts telling me that He’s not speaking to me, that He’s disappointed in me, or that He’s punishing me. My mind goes there, 0 to 60, despite all I’ve learned and all I’ve experienced and all the ways I’ve grown spiritually. I still need to pick up my cross daily, just as we all do. I’ve been reminded a lot of this lately, that it’s not a one-and-done deal to follow Jesus. I have to work at it every single day. On days like today, it’s especially difficult because the less my mind can focus, the more prone I can be to self-deprecating lies.  

One particular lie I’ve been wrestling with lately is, the more you do, the better you are. Thinking this is a guarantee of getting into a swirl like the one I’m in. When I’m busy doing things, I hurry. I hurry to try to make a deadline for work or hurry to make an appointment on time or (cringe) hurry through my devotion time. In the book by Alan Fadling, An Unhurried Life, he writes that when we hurry, we’re actually committing violence to ourselves. I think this is at least part of where my sense of being scattered comes from; that violence splinters something in me. It reduces me to being what I can do or produce in a day, instead of being myself. When I commit violence to myself, I’m doing exactly what my sinful nature wants: weakening not only my spirit but also my resolve to treat myself as a child of God, with respect. I start putting myself down, pushing myself to do even more, and losing myself in the process. Needless to say, this is an unhealthy cycle but getting out of it is easier said than done. 

Sure, breathing helps my body to calm down and deal with the adrenaline overload a bit better, it gets a little more oxygen into my overactive brain. Staying still, or stopping activity, can help to diffuse the stress of and in the moment. Limiting content can help keep my brain from being overstimulated. But, none of these tools actually address the real issue, only the symptoms. So, what REALLY helps? What is the real weapon against the lies that can splinter our souls? Along with prayer, the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God (Ephesians 6:17), is a powerful weapon. In the Word, God provides His promises. I take great comfort in them and the fact that they are True despite every swirl and every situation I may find myself in. Stopping to speak them aloud or meditate on them in my heart brings God into clearer focus. We must never forget to resist the devil, and he will flee… (James 4:7). Here I’d like to share three of my most treasured promises of God (there are hundreds!):

1. God promises to never leave you nor forsake you (Deuteronomy 31:6, Joshua 1:5, Hebrews 13:5). 

When I started believing the Bible is True, I discovered something amazing–there are SO many promises to hope and have confidence in! To discover them while also believing they were True without a doubt was, and is, an unexplainably great gift. When I’m flooded with negative thoughts, remembering His promise never to leave us nor forsake us is a huge comfort. When I feel full of negativity and doubt, it’s easy to feel lost and that God isn’t there. But, the Truth is that He has already promised otherwise. He is there, even when we can’t see it or feel it or experience it, He is with us! We don’t have to do anything to earn it. As my wise sister Abby once told me, it’s not about what you can do; it’s about what He did for us.  

2. God promises that He has plans to prosper you and not to harm you, and to give you hope and a future (Jeremiah 29:11).

When I was experiencing violence to my soul, reading this promise and finally believing it was True was perhaps the most life-giving thing I’d ever heard. It was as if I’d never heard it before; I read it with a new heart, finally ready to receive what God had offered me long before I was even born. I had been at a point where I believed I had no future, that the odds were stacked against me, and that God, if He was there at all, didn’t care. How beautiful this promise was to see with fresh eyes! I had basically given up planning for a future, but took new hope in the promise that God really did have one in mind for me, for, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31). 

3. God promises to restore all things (Acts 3:21).

The awareness I’ve gained of the world’s brokenness and my own brokenness can be difficult to bear at times. But thanks to God’s promise, I can rejoice that He will restore it all and that at His appointed time, [t]here will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain (Revelation 21:4). My hope is in Him, who is bigger than any problem you or I may face, and who has promised to restore what has been broken in and around us. What incredible hope we can find in His promises to us! What reason to live and endure and bring His hope to this world! Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything (James 1:2-4). 

It takes faith to believe in the promises of God, it’s certainly not a popular thing. But I’ve tried it the other way and there was nothing for me there. No hope, no meaning, no future in sight. Stepping confidently forward in faith, everything changes and suddenly, all things are possible. Thanks be to God.  

Though an army besiege me, my heart will not fear; though war break out against me, even then I will be confident. -Psalm 27:3

Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her! -Luke 1:45

Further suggested reading:  An Unhurried Life by Alan Fadling

The Grace Upon Grace blog (www.graceupongrace.space) by Abby King

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