The Embrace

 I love how Mark 11:23-24 reads in The Message translation of the Bible. Jesus was matter of fact: Embrace this God-life. Really embrace it, and nothing will be too much for you....That's why I urge you to pray about absolutely everything, ranging from small to large. Include everything as you embrace this God-life and you'll get God's everything.

We so often read about Jesus' words and life, but we miss what He's saying to us. We "see" what the words are saying, but we're missing His voice and heart in it. We're missing Him. We don't really know and believe what we say we know and believe. It's not our reality. We speak much of living His abundant life but seem to actually have very little of it. We get overwhelmed by the details of life because we resist embracing His life.

Fear of intimacy in our culture is real. We fear it with each other, and I believe that comes from our fearing it with Him. We seek to keep Him at a distance, and so end up keeping everyone else at a distance as well. He calls us to His heart and to His embrace, but we hold back. He offers us the fullness of His life, but to have it we have to let go of our fleshly fear and defense. To have His life we must trust His heart.....but we know so little of His heart and so have so little trust of Him. 

We can't experience His life from a distance, but so many of us try to. We have our daily devotions, our daily prayers, but we never really lay hold of HIm in them. We emerge from them unchanged, and too often, further from Him than before. We haven't brought all of ourselves to Him so it's no wonder as to why we have received so little of Him. So we're left with our nagging anxieties and fears. Our unhealed wounds and yes, our unconfessed and uncleansed sins. None of these can survive in the midst of His embrace. Fear, worry, guilt, bitterness, unforgiveness and every kind of bondage cannot exist in His loving embrace. The loving embrace of the Father through Jesus Christ.

We usually call our daily time with Him our devotion time, but what does the word devotion mean? To devote is to consecrate. It is giving everything to Him. It means what we've been holding onto is given over to Him...especially when what we hold most tightly is our right to ourselves. What's been held in our hand is now in His. Devotion is not a time of the day but a way of life. It's how we live...moment by moment. It's how we overcome the world and all the ways of the enemy.

Jesus continues to be matter of fact about all this with us. He invites us to embrace Him in full surrender. To enter into the intimacy of His embrace and know the life that makes us free. Bringing everything to Him and receiving everything of Him in return. He invites you to His embrace. WIll you come?

Blessings,
Pastor O