Breaking up is hard to do...
Some friends and I have just started going through a 13-week Bible study on personal revival together. The scripture to memorize for this first week is Hosea 10:12:
Break up your fallow ground, for now is the time to seek the Lord, till he comes and rains righteousness upon you.
That phrase, "Break up your fallow ground", has stuck with me for the last couple of days...
We have this romanticized notion of what the experience of sanctification is supposed to look and feel like. We pray---"God, make me more like you", "Change my wicked ways", "Deliver me from this temptation", "Take away these evil thoughts"---and then believe (or maybe it is a hope of self-preservation?) that an easy metamorphisis or a subtle shift will take place in our hearts and minds---overnight or over time---at the supernatural hand of the Holy Spirit and we will be changed.
The metaphors used in Scripture for the process of sanctification, however, are brutal: refinement by fire (like metal), pruning (like a tree), death to self (crucifixion), breaking up of fallow ground---all processes that involve intense heat or piercingly sharp objects---in short, pain.
But when pain comes, we are thrown into a tizzy, our trust takes a hard blow and/or, deep down, part of us wonders if somehow God has forgotten us, or worse, his responsibilities. Ironic, isn't it?
posted by Lorie @ 10:02 AM
7 Comments:
I am trying to learn, actually relearn and coem to a better understanding of pain. Especially in the means of it being a tool used for change and not suffering.
That, I think, is one of the hardest but most necessary lessons of our Christian journey...
"UGH"
That is the sound I made I read this because it is so true. The words "Change me Lord" are easy to vocalize but so much harder to ask with a willing spirit. Change in my life has never come without discomfort because I know what I'm changing from and to and that is a process that includes all that you listed above (refinement, prunign, death to self, breaking of the ground).
Sometimes it helps to focus on the results after the "changing pain." But, it's certainly hard to do when God is molding and forming us. I get a visual of the potter...and slapping that clay around on his wheel. It eventually becomes a beautiful piece of art, but during the process that clay is getting beat up!
Yeah, we talk and sing "he's the potter; I'm the clay," but do we really think about what that means, what it actually means to be molded, shaped, fired-up?
It's scary.
Good thoughts Lorie. I hadn't really thought that all through before.
Thanks for that post Lorie! I had never really solidified my thoughts on that. Isn't sanctification exciting?! I love it when God takes a passage of scripture like that and the Holy Spirit opens up our understanding!
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