Romans 8:31-39

These last few weeks, I've been thinking about my mistakes and my past.  I've done and said things that I'm not proud of.  I've been feeling a lot of shame and guilt over that. I think somehow I thought that coming back from Africa, I would be perfect. I would have everything figured out and be good to go. However…thats not the case. I came home from Africa completely transformed and a new person but that doesn't make me perfect. I still make mistakes and I still have to kneel before the Father and ask for His forgiveness and thats a hard thing to admit. God never said that He would make me perfect coming back from Africa..what He said is that I was transformed and love by Him Throughout this whole transition, the main thing that God has been revealing to me more and more is that I am His. I am adopted into the family of God and nothing can separate me from the love of God. How amazing and freeing that is? Romans 8:31-39 says, 
31 What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 33 Who will bring any chargeagainst those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. 34 Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36 As it is written:
“For your sake we face death all day long;
    we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”[a]
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,[b] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I feel like this section of verses is the theme of my entire life. I've struggled all my life with self-confidence and trying to find my self-worth. This struggle has been something that has haunted me and been my number one enemy for many years. Yet it took leaving the country and coming back for me to realize that God laid it out so clearly. He loves me. There is nothing that I can do that can separate me from the love of God and everyday that is becoming more and more clear as God continues to lavish His great love upon me. I'm not gonna lie…some days are harder then others but I am coming to fully accept and live in this gift of grace, freedom, and unconditional love that our Father freely and wholeheartedly gives to His beloved.  I am His and He is mine. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Time to Learn

As orientation has now finished, I have been placed here in South Africa, where I will be working with the Hazeyview Service Centre Team. What this means... I don't really know yet. I haven't quite figured that part out. All I've been told is that I'm to build relationships with the individuals that work within the service centre and encourage and support them with the work that they are doing. If they need help with some work, then I will help, but most importantly I am to follow them in what they do and to learn from them. I think that the reason that we are not told much is that they don't want people to go into this time with the Service Centres with high expectations and also they dont want people to go in thinking that they know everything. We are told to have "big ears, and small mouths." This next 5 weeks will be a time of learning, and gaining more insight into the work that the Service Centre does on a regular basis. One of my favourite moments
Read more

Daring to Hope Part 2

Throughout the last months, I have realised that when I look at poverty and incompressible suffering and heartbreak, I find it easy to slip into a way of thinking that blames God. I find myself choosing to ignore the evidence of God’s goodness and faithful and instead I allow my heart to be filled with a feeling of hopelessness that if don’t to God and surrender, threatens to consume me. Yet as I read this book, I was reminder of the reality that despite the pain, I have seen God’s redemptive hand at work in the lives of the most vulnerable and my own. I was reminded that hope is “our great expectancy that we will know Him in all our circumstances, even the seemingly hopeless ones.” Having hope doesn’t make sense to the outside world. It logical doesn’t make sense to have hope in God when there are child dying and being physically abused. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve found that it can be emotionally and spiritually tiring to have hope and faith in situations that I migh
Read more

Selfless giving

As I sit in my room contemplating what to write, I am conflicted. I am conflicted because although more than a month has passed since my last blog past I feel as though nothing has changed, and yet I also feel as though so much has happened. As I debated what to share, I came upon the conclusion of sharing on my most recent community stay. It is fresh in my mind and I am fresh with emotions revolving around the poverty that I see and experience on a daily basis.  The poverty that I am surrounded by never ceases to overwhelm me. Whenever I go into community and look around at the children with tattered clothing, runny noses, cuts, scrapes, protruded stomachs from a lack of nourishment, my heart shatters more every time. It never becomes easy going into community and seeing poverty. I don't think that anyone can every become ammuned to it. When I think about poverty, I question how it can exist when the western-world in comparison is so wealthy. I think about my home which is a
Read more