Into the deep

Remember swimming as a kid?  You stretched out your leg to touch bottom … and it wasn’t there!  Maybe your eyes got wide with fear and you felt that instant panic start to whirl in your gut!  It was terrifying, if only for a brief moment, until you regained your footing.

He said, Come! So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water, and he came toward Jesus. -Matthew 14:29

Jesus invited Peter to do what was impossible — walk on water.  Peter, a seasoned fisherman!  He’d just worked all night and came up empty – he knew that he knew that he knew, there just aren’t any fish there.  (Luke 5:4-5)

In both cases Jesus told Peter to do what seemed impossible and what was impossible.

Jesus invited Peter to trust.  Jesus invites us to trust.  Step into the unknown.  Step deep, where you don’t know what will happen.  Step deep, where there is nothing underneath you.  Step deep where your fear will well up in you.

REALITIES ABOUT STEPPING INTO THE DEEP

It’s Risky

So please tell them you are my sister.  Then they will spare my life and treat me well because of their interest in you. -Genesis 12:13

Sarah had a decision to make; a forced decision.  Not due to anything she had done, but because of how beautiful God had created her.  Abraham had enjoyed that beauty so long as it was good for him, but as soon as it became a liability, he sold her out.  Because of Abraham‘s fear and tendency to lie under pressure (it happened twice), he asked her to sacrifice herself rather than sacrificing himself.  Sarah chose to risk.  There will be risk when you put the needs of your spouse ahead of your own.

It’s Radical

Don’t hit back; discover beauty in everyone.  If you’ve got it in you, get along with everybody.  Don’t insist on getting even; that’s not for you to do.  “I’ll do the judging,” says God.  “I’ll take care of it.”   Our Scriptures tell us that if you see your enemy hungry, go buy that person lunch, or if he’s thirsty, get him a drink.  Your generosity will surprise him with goodness.  Don’t let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil by doing good. -Romans 12:17-21

We all know what Jesus is saying here, we just don’t like what it means and how it will make us look, especially when it‘s applied to marriage.

A deep step will cause you to appear different from those around you.  I don’t mean you’ll look like a religious ‘geek’ or a throw-back from the 1950/60s.  There is a love that the world won’t allow but it will show up in your relationships.  It will supernaturally funnel its way through you like it did with Jesus.  Radical mercy doesn’t fight for its own rights.  Radical grace is about others, not self.  Radical love doesn’t consider how it was wronged, only about how others are going to be hurt by God’s revenge, “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they’re doing.” -Luke 23:34.  It will look radical when consider your spouse ahead of yourself.

It’s Counter-intuitive

And when those who belonged to Him (His kinsmen) heard it, they went out to take Him by force, for they kept saying, He is out of His mind (beside Himself, deranged)!   And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, He is possessed by Beelzebub, and, By [the help of] the prince of demons He is casting out demons. -Mark 3:21-22

The deep you step into will feel crazy and people will back up this notion.  To your human senses it’s unpreserved and unprotected.  The ones closest to you will appeal to your sense of self-protectiveness.  People will say you are crazy and not hearing from God; but Satan.  It’s the voice of the world, not the Spirit, that says choose self.  It will feel counter-intuitive to choose your spouse over yourself.

The Outcome is Unknown

Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.  Hebrews 11:1

If we knew the outcome beforehand, we wouldn’t need faith.  The deep we step into will always be a weakness and that’s what scares us.  Like standing in a lit room when the lights go out; engulfed in darkness, there’s no way to tell what the outcome will be, only God knows.  Being blind in the natural strengthens your confidence in God.

God Knows What Your Deep is

The temptations in your life are no different from what others experience.  And God is faithful.  He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand.  When you are tempted, He will show you a way out so that you can endure.  -1 Corinthians 10:13

Everyone’s deep is different because we are all growing from different places in our relationship with God.  Our deep feels deep because it is weak.  Those particular faith muscles are small, but will be bigger and stronger after you step into the deep.  We miss-step and fall and God knows that, that’s why Jesus is there!  On the water with the waves that toss and threaten to overtake the boat.  See here where Peter was invited to walk!

Peter’s storm can be a metaphor of what it might feel like inside ourselves during a turbulent circumstance or relational crisis.  And the more chop there is, the greater the temptation is to try and escape.  To run back to the boat … away from Jesus.  If the choice is to leave the ’storm’ and run back to the boat of protection, a way to endure is not needed – God is not needed.

When troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy.  For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow.  So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing. -James 1:2-4

 

 

Courageous

I recently watched the movie Courageous, it was great.  As I was watching, it struck me that courage is not just for husbands, but also for us wives.  It takes courage to be married.

We are blessed to live in a time of such equality for women.  Shouldn’t we wives elevate ourselves to the call to be courageous as well? Equal freedoms call for equal responsibility.   Just because the law of the land has given us the freedom to walk away from our commitment to our marriage when (not if) it gets tough or scary; does that make it right to do so?

Let’s face it square on, so to speak.  Your husband is a fallen son, he is wounded and broken and his bent is toward evil¹ … but, so is yours. It’s going to take courage on both parts to make it work.

Satan has definitely increased his bleed on the institution of marriage and year after year he continues to stick more tubes into this foundation of the family.  If we want to stop this hemorrhage, we will have to give more than 100% of what we are, and this will take courage.

The lyrics in the song Courageous by Casting Crowns are profound and seek to inspire men to truly change, but they can be swapped out and applied to us wives:

This is our resolution, our answer to the call

We will love our husbands and children

We refuse to let them fall

 

I believe God made me to be a courageous wife.

Did He make you to be courageous?

footnote 1 – Gen 8:21

corrected vision

I’ll be honest, when I first met Sarah I thought she was mindless and weak.  Sarah obeyed her husband, Abraham, and called him her master …  And you are now her true daughters if … I didn’t want to be her daughter; I liked being a daughter of the feminist movement and much preferred the mantra, “I am woman hear me roar!”  I thought this made me powerful and strong; I didn’t know that these very attributes had already been infused into the core of who I was as a woman, and that I was feeding them fuel, from the world … and not God.

Sarah embodied the opposite of everything I was, and knew about being a wife.  There appeared to be an uncrossable chasm between us and when I read verses like the one above, the chasm widened as my inner woman squirmed, “he’s not the boss of me … he can run his 50% and I’ll run my 50%.”  Now that’s equality in marriage.

And so began God’s battle with me, to straighten me out and show me that the 50/50 split was not His view of marriage … it was the world’s.  He slipped a little burr in the middle of my back.  This burr had a name:  it was called marriage.  It also had a face:  it was Darrell’s.  This burr stuck to my skin and as I wrestled and fought with God, for 14 years, it rubbed my back raw.

All my crying out to God seemed to fall on deaf ears.  I wanted Darrell to listen to me.  I wanted to do things my way; it seemed that he made most, if not all, of the decisions.  I had ideas and solutions about how to run our family; but it was always so conflicted between us whenever we tried to talk about things or solve problems; and it just kept getting worse.

Weeks turned into months and then into years, and every passing day I became more and more contentious about NOT seeing any circumstances or solutions …  Darrell’s way

…and the burr just kept slicing away.

I had created a war zone in our home, and a hardened-heart within myself.

Finally, in a woman-child pout, I screamed at God, “fine, I just won’t have an opinion about anything; is that what YOU want?”  God responded with silence.  A deafening silence.  I had been in our kitchen doing dishes and slamming cupboards and the silence stopped me dead when I realized what I had said through gritted teeth, and Who I had said it to.  I fell to my knees, not so much in repentance of my somewhat calloused heart, or  adoration of God, but in a slump of emotional fatigue and confusion and started to cry.  “Why did You give me a brain if You didn’t want me to use it?  There will be nothing left of me,” I sobbed to my Father.  Then I heard God’s voice, “Yes, there will be nothing left of you, and that is the point.”  He paused (I think, to let that sink in a bit) then continued, “My Spirit can’t work in you, with you in the way.”

That was the beginning of the end of me.  It was that day on my kitchen floor with a tear stained face and a badly bruised pride, that I saw the first glimmer of understanding and freedom that comes with the death of self.  God showed me that because I had been so focused on getting my own way, what I thought I deserved, and my own “rights” that I had clouded the insight and change of what He wanted to do in me.  It wasn’t about obeying Darrell because he was always right or me not using my mind; it was about God using my husband through our marriage to shape me into who He had created me to be.  I had been so focused on the natural, the earthly situations, that I couldn‘t see the bigger picture of what I needed to learn and what was important … the supernatural.  I had turned our marriage into a “he/she“ issue and pitted myself against my husband and was living in the fruit of what a 50/50 marriage really was.

I was reaping what I had sown.

Marriage cannot work this way.  A home divided against itself will not stand. (Mk 3:25).  I had to be 100% for the marriage; not fighting for my 50% of the marriage.

This is what I hadn’t liked about Sarah.  She was 100% for her marriage.  Looking at her through my 50/50 vision, her way seemed totally wimpy and unacceptable to me.  But as I began to view her through God’s lenses, I saw a whole different view of marriage; and a brand new part of God’s personality started to emerge for me!

If anyone would have asked me if I was 100% for my marriage; I believed and would have answered, yes.  But clearly my words and actions didn’t connect.

Something to think about

Does what you say reflect what you believe … in your relationship with your husband?

Does what you do reflect what you say … towards your husband?

Or is there a disconnect like I found that I had.