Heart Soul Mind Strength

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” Psalms 23:4 NKJV

My family walked through this valley a year ago with the passing away of my Dad. We know the One who died and resurrected. We know that Jesus replaces that darkness of death with the Light of His presence for those who choose to be His. The God, who made us and gave us the choice to love and obey Him or not, is faithful to respond to our slightest yielding. As a foolish youth, I outwardly performed religious requirements, but inwardly wanted to get the “work” done to earn the reward of playing out my own imaginations.

Looking back, my regeneration began only after I had followed my own desires into a trap and felt the sting of sin separating me from God. For a few years, I mourned my cold, lonely existence blocking out the hope of God’s grace by allowing my mind to fill with my guilt and shame. The teachings of forgiveness, repentance, and overwhelming grace of God were drowned out by the reality of my guilt. I did not deserve better than darkness. In my shame, I hid and then ran away.

I had enjoyed a dreamy, tranquil childhood and a youth filled with self-righteous actions to support my feeling that my sin had been very little and that I was safe from its impact to my soul. Imagine my surprise when I woke up from the dream with festering wounds from the sinful nature that is born with each of the children of Adam and Eve.

How could I be so informed and equipped as a child and end up dying with sin? A Soldier can be trained for battle becoming proficient with the armor, tools, weapons, ammunition, tactics, and familiar with various environmental considerations. Training scenarios can be realistic, austere, and can evoke a level of true fear to best prepare the human for war; but the Soldier’s actual test comes when rockets are launched, when bullets tear flesh, when mines explode too close, when a brother needs help in the chaos of the battle. The test came for me after years of hard training, carrying a heavy load, trudging along in my own determination, and having no idea where the strength and courage for battle come from. Will the Soldier carry out the mission as trained? Will he remain vigilant during his watch? Will he make the courageous decisions? When I woke up to find my sin eating out my core, I could do nothing except to call upon Jesus to rescue me.

How did it get in?

How did sin get in to damage my soul, confuse my mind, and yield my body to enslavement? Did I take off the helmet of salvation that God gave me or had I never put it on? Had I made my own helmet of cardboard like immature children do? Did I set down my shield of faith in Christ or was my faith not real but child’s play, a figment of my imagination?

Faith in Jesus for salvation requires first recognizing the dire need for salvation from sin inside self. My experience proved it impossible to skip the part about deep Holy Spirit conviction of the sinfulness of my soul’s desires using the Word of God. The awesome thing about the Sword of the Spirit, the Word of God is that IT does the doing [Ephesians 6]. The Word was planted into me by the Lord through my parents’ faithfulness, and it ALWAYS accomplishes God’s mission [Isaiah 55]. Salvation is of the Lord.

My parents, in obedience to the Lord, had prepared the ground of my heart to be full of the Word of God. When did sin become sin in my life? I felt the sweetness of God blessing others around me through me as a young child as I accompanied my parent in ministry opportunities. Despite my parents’ diligent teaching godly principles illustrated over and over in the Bible, my heart began to exalt myself. I imagined myself as a renowned hero of faith, blessing and illuminating many peoples through my faithfulness to Jesus through it all.

I set out as a missionary to pursue my dream of being one of the faithful workers for God. I did the things I should do to live up to this image. When people wanted to know about my spiritual life or my faith, I felt like being a missionary was solid evidence in favor of my salvation. It was, in my mind, beyond merely Christian. Being a missionary entered into a category beyond average Christians who lived normal lives within acceptable minimums of Christian standards in comfort and safety. I was willing to step out to obey the Great Commission, and I wanted people to notice that I was doing so.

My sin of thinking too much of myself did not, at first, look like sin at all. It looked good and right. Temptation to sin is like focusing on my desire for cookies offered by the masked stranger next to a windowless van “but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed” [James 1:14 NIV.] Every time my FOCUS is MY desire, I’m already falling into the trap. The whole goodness of the Gospel is that we do not deserve it, yet the Lord chases us down to convince us to believe the good news that desiring Jesus saves us from sin and death.

God did not abandon me in my foolishness. He protected me, taught me, provided for me, and corrected me. You see, He had sown into my life, and He would reap a harvest. God initiated my salvation, so my life is on His list of projects to complete [Ephesians 2 and Philippians 1.]

“But whoever has been forgiven little loves little [Luke 7:47 NIV.]” The Lord initiated my salvation when I was a young child with a simple confession of faith in Jesus, based on my Momma’s testimony. Although I knew academically that I was a sinner (Romans 3), the “saved” box next to my name was checked “yes” before I had reached an age of soul understanding. Could I be transformed without feeling first the weight of the ledger accounting of all my sin?

He Keeps Working

My self-exaltation sin gave rise to greater arrogance and pride. Along with youthful inexperience, these sins resulted in God sending me back from the mission field. He set me up with a teacher called experience that would eventually grow actual faith in Him. He wove in many instances of HIS faithfulness to me. The first lesson was the humbling of being sent home. I did not know how to survive in the world of my own nation. I had set all my ambitions in one direction for which my homeschool education, study of missions, and the way my family culture was had prepared me. I had never developed a plan B. My parents had wisely encouraged me to do a year of junior college (in the year that would have been my senior year of high school) before I left for the mission field to make it easier to transition back if necessary.

Another lesson, God used my unpreparedness to force me to actually rely on His provision for a journey to an unknown destination. During my fundraising before the mission field, I sincerely pledged my whole commitment for life at age nineteen. Initially, I held on to the idea of returning to the mission field after acquiring a useful skill. Eventually, I realized that God had shut that door, and I updated all those who had supported me to go. I had no idea what I was to do. I had to work to live, so I did that. I thought I should learn useful skills for the land of wherever God was going to take me.

During these years, God continued to build my experience of His faithfulness. He opened up a place to live that I could afford over and over again. He granted me favor for a job that began to build some skills as I lived in the world Jesus died to save. He walked me through a complex process of registering for community college as in-state despite having lived outside of any state in the U.S. for several years as an overseas missionary. The only connection the dedicated registrar could find to link me to Texas was the visa in my passport processed through Houston. God made His real-ness known to me as I began my secular education. God filled me with joy and excitement in learning at this school.

School was fun. I started with a thought of being a math teacher like Mom had been. I gained employment as a math tutor each semester, which built my confidence and experience. Although I finished that degree in Mathematics education, observing in public schools raised doubts about that path. I discovered a love for working out, for human anatomy and physiology, and for maximizing physical health and fitness. I ended up with a degree in Kinesiology also by adding just a few specific classes to fulfill the credit requirements. I gained two associates of arts degrees over a few years.

Even as school went well and I developed a basic level of maturity as a human, going to church triggered a deep mourning in me. I went through a reverse culture shock experience as I re-entered my culture. I had developed a sensitivity to spiritual darkness and to the enemy’s attack strategy on the mission field; but, the Christians of the church I attended seemed oblivious to these things. I still felt deep down like I was supposed to be a super-Christian. Whatever the reason, when I attended that church I could do nothing but find an empty room and weep the whole time. I sought and found Christian fellowship at school, and the family that had allowed me to live in their home took me to their church. I found a mature, experienced fellowship of believers that knew about spiritual warfare, the Holy Spirit, and kept the Great Commission central to their hearts, minds, and actions.

I believe in the power of God to heal instantaneously when appropriate, but the wisdom of God allowed my healing to be slow and painful. I did not understand how to live yielded to Him in faith. He used my circumstances to kill the self-aggrandizing dreams of my sinful soul. For me, it took a very long time and much painful flogging [Hebrews 12:6] to teach me the ugliness of my sin, a prerequisite for repentance (changing focus from MY desires to God’s desires) and rebirth into a new life.

Outwardly, I continued to work on being as spiritually heroic as I could make myself to be in my activities, but I began to divide my life into compartments. Subconsciously, I built a partition allowing school and work success to make me feel good while; on the other side of the wall, I muscled through the good works that I expected of myself as a saved person. It was hard work. I helped with the Awana program, for example.

As a youth, I had taught Bible clubs and fully participated in the Awana program under my parents’ authority. Any ability or talent I may have had to be successful in this was gone. I was frustrated by trying to get a huge group three- and four-year-olds to pay attention at all. Eventually I took a different position and didn’t feel particularly successful at it; although, I was determined to keep trying. I felt like my service in the church was mandatory and there was no way to be a Christian without having some kind of successful ministry somewhere. Bearing fruit in the kingdom of God, I understood to be required. My understanding of what John chapter 15 meant by “abiding” as “stick to it.” I was to continue to stubbornly hang on and eventually I would produce fruit.

Needless to say, my enjoyment of school success began to draw me more than the drudgery of working so hard to meet the high standards of minimal Christianity. One day a student on campus from the country I had gone to as a missionary said something like that he had become a Christian because the standards for holy living were lower than the religion he came from. He had switched to get permission to do whatever he wanted and then get forgiven. A teacher at the school who daily scoffed at any hint of righteous living articulated a similar message by identifying himself as a “carnal Christian.” Both of these regarded themselves as recipients of the grace of God through faith in Jesus Christ, but not living with any resemblance to the righteousness of Christ. I did not accept their ideas, but I felt something in those declarations pierced through whatever armor I was then wearing. When Soldiers are lazy or weak, they sometimes cheat by taking the heavy plates out of their body armor because they are too tired to carry around all that protective weight. At some point in my full efforts to do Christian work in my flesh without receiving true grace through faith in Jesus (not in myself), I must have downgraded my armor.

Sin works hard in our hearts to prepare a place for demonic forces to move in and gain influence over our mind, will, and actions. The voice of that college teacher wreaked with deception, and I heard it regularly for two semesters. He aimed charming, fork-tongued monologues at the female population of the largely female class. Looking back on this many years later, I see him as a classic example of grooming for sexual exploitation. The process begins in the mind and inches into the emotions. Like the parasitic Ceti eel, the mind control creature planted in the brain to control the mind and actions of the host, this clever predator worked in concert with the enemy of my soul to destroy me. I was as one drugged during that season. God delivered me from that monster in the moment of desperation by causing me to be frozen. I felt like one who wakes up in a coffin or in the body drawer freezer of a morgue. Alive, but horrified beyond comprehension.

Although I was delivered physically and soon extricated me from that monster’s poisons, I entered a guilty plea under the sin column with no belief in the possibility of redemption. Because I had been saved before I knew I was lost, I applied to myself the condemnation of the one who put his hand to the plow and then looked back [Luke 9]. Even the New Testament had no recourse for this. It was over. I was unfit for the kingdom of God. I had not yet begun to live or see salvation come to anyone from anything, and I was as good as dead by applying the law of Righteousness without the wisdom of the Holy Spirit or the understanding of God’s heart for me. God’s heart was for others, the nations, the lost. I had not included myself in any of those categories.

Dead Me

Surprisingly day by day, I was still physically and mentally alive. I completed a bachelor of science degree, Reserve Officer Training Corps, stayed as busy as humanly possible doing as much good as I could. Although this sentence of unfit for God’s kingdom hung over me, I did not dare pause to ponder this. I remember praying that God would end my life if it would be a detriment to anyone or do harm to His Kingdom. If I was not welcome to participate in the fellowship of those who Believe and follow Jesus, I figured I would also have to work and provide for myself and figure out how to live without that hope I had always expected to find in my “hanging in there.”

I worked and lived as an outcast with very little sense of purpose. Eventually, in isolation and despair, I spent many months contemplating my worthlessness, loneliness, and deadness. I began to ponder ways to die. My career did not resemble anything I had planned or hoped. In the darkness of that dungeon, I met another human who seemed to be similarly afflicted with guilt and quiet resignation. God, still the author of my Salvation, did not allow me to carry out any of my ideas for ending my life. In blocking my path from the culminating act of sin, death, I came to the end of myself and cried out to Jesus. This was my encounter with the grace of God, salvation, and the seed of faith in Christ alone.

Jesus came and picked me up and began to walk with me (and us) in His arms. He had so much healing to do in me and restoration to do in my life along the way. I began to pray like a daughter to her Father. I asked Jesus to restore what the enemy had taken.

The Lord pursued me as the Good Shepherd, not resting until this lost sheep is found. He carried me into His fold. Praise be to the Lord, the Author and Finisher of my faith!

This IS Life. This Life is available to all who will receive it.