Daily Devotional

In June of 1980, my family and I moved to Montana.  Little did we know what great adventure and ministry were waiting for us there.  After getting settled in, on a beautiful Montana summer day, we drove with friends to Glacier Park. The Park became a special place to us and was one of the places that our family loved to go camping.  On those quiet evenings in Two Medicine Campground, Lynette and I would sit around the campfire and talk. It was a good time to think seriously about our lives together and to contemplate God's design/purposes for us. I remember many evenings sitting looking into the flames and wrestling with the issues of what I saw to be God's shaping of my life and ministry. I came to realize that true fulfillment and meaning in life could only be realized through accepting and living according to God's sovereign design for me.

Over the next years, God continued to shape me which caused me to deal with areas of brokeness in my life. He wanted to bring healing to the wounds that I tried to ineffectively stuff down. Through the next years I began to deal with the brokenness, I experienced in the death of my older brother. I also began the process of working through what I felt to be a distant relationship with my father. God encouraged and strengthened me to face these issues head on.  That was the only way true healing could come.
 
As you read about the life of the Apostle Paul, he allowed God’s love and grace to heal the deep wounds in his life. He did not allow these areas of brokenness to hold him back but accepted God’s healing that came through Jesus Christ.

Today all of us have areas of brokeness in our lives. We might even say that our lives cannot be different this side of heaven because of the hurts we have experienced. As a result, we stay bound up with activities and ways of thinking that make us momentarily feel better as we try to self medicate our hurts. This is exactly what our enemy wants us to do.  But we do not have to stay chained to those thought patterns and activities.  We can experience true freedom in Jesus Christ who came to set us free.
 
One day, when Jesus was in the synagogue, He stood and read from the Prophet Isaiah.  He stated that this scripture was on that day fulfilled in Him.  It is recorded for us in Luke 4:18, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, And recovery of sight to the blind, To set free those who are oppressed…”  Jesus today wants to set us free.

We often go through life covering our brokenness so others cannot see it. We are medicating our deep wounds with activities or substances that make us feel better for the moment. It becomes our coping mechanism. We feel it is not safe to share our woundedness for fear that others will reject/abandon us or be critical in some way.  In many cases we have retreated into our own private worlds where we feel safe.  We often are afraid to share due to shame or pride.  As a result our Christianity is only surface deep and we struggle to keep up the front before others.

Often we have forgotten how much God loves us. He desires for us to deal with our brokenness that we might be free. Free from the chains that keep us in shame and free to experience God in a real and life changing way. Christ is inviting us to come to Him with our brokenness. His love is not only demonstrated to us in salvation, but also as he relates to us each day.
 
The Apostle Paul is an example to us as we honestly evaluate our lives.  He had to look at the brokenness of his own life. He thought he could please God through his human accomplishments. As God lovingly met with him, Paul realized he had to give up all his human efforts and count them as worthless in order to find healing in Christ.  (Philippians 3:4–9)

Paul is encouraging us today to do the same.  He wants us to recognize those areas that need to change and to allow God’s power to bring healing.  We need to stop clinging to the methods we have turned to in the past to make ourselves feel better.  Those methods are only a quick fix and do not bring true healing.  We need to turn to Christ and allow him to heal us from the inside out.

Prayer:  “Lord, as I look deeply into my life, help me to see and know your great love for me. There is nothing in my life that You, Jesus, haven’t already paid for at the cross. Thank you, Jesus for your forgiveness, cleansing and healing. Lord, I want to live today in the freedom and forgiveness that You have given me as Your child.”  Amen

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