Hello, Joshua Blog! I thought about what to write for this week for the blog, and my heart honestly doesn’t know what to write about. The Lord has been working abundantly in my heart and making himself abundantly present, yet here’s some thoughts from Christmas break when I was really struggling in my Christian walk.
I am learning that my faith is mostly a facade. It is nonexistent. My faith and trust in God is out the window, as soon as I get home, back to my troubles and trials. My trauma and pain have been petty, sad, and pathetic excuses to go back to my sin, full-force, instead of run to the father, run to the powerful one (Elohim). All of this pain built up inside has made me want to run; run away from the God who understands. I am not quite sure why. I want to love God with everything in me and have faith in him that is incomprehensible, yet it is something that I do not have. Instead, I have anger and resentment, and have become like the Israelites running back to what God delivered them from. It makes me angry, I don’t know what to do. God help, show me my ways, show me my sinful heart, change me, make me new, make me yours, make me zoom out of my own life and look at myself from above and see the pretty picture, despite only having the current capability to see my one sided, one dimensional perspective. I am lost; only in you I can be found. Despite the fact that I have think that I want sin more and to run away from everyone and everything, I don’t want sin anymore and I want to stop running. I am so incredibly tired, I am out of breath, gasping for air. There is not a steady breath to be found. Yet, life is but a breath and every gasping breath in fear, and anger, in pain, in desperation… is yours.
I don’t want to drink from this cup… This cup is poison! Yet; there is an enticing nature about it. It is subtly sweet, so subtle that you can barely taste it. You drink from the cup of sin and It leaves you craving more, it’s an insatiable craving. It is blood poured, death in a golden cup. It is killing you slowly, with its artificial promises, lies telling you it will satisfy your insatiable hunger, your unquenchable thirst, your desperate need for hope. Yet, God reminds you that it doesn’t fill that role well. It leaves you thirsty for more. Every single time you taste the subtle sweetness of sin, you just want to keep tasting when it makes you more hungry and thirsty. Eventually, and you might not even realize it, but it leaves you depleted/empty making you completely lacking of any substance, any food or drink. And then you want to chug from the cup of death, like it’s a bottle of water- when it’s really a glass of poison. So raise your glass, and say cheers, because the more you sip from the blood of sin that’s in your cup, the more it pours out of your cut flesh. Soon there will be nothing left.
You can’t drink from the poison of pride, the blood of sin, but need to realize God already paid that price by Jesus dying on the cross. His blood paid the penalty for sin and for death. Why try to drink from your tainted well, this pool of blood that pours out from your open chest. Don’t you see that his blood is enough? His blood is sweet, and it is pure. Your blood is poison; it is pride, it is a vat of death. Drink from the cup of the one who gives you rest, the God who sees and the God who protects. Continuing to go to yourself and your sinful devices is only gonna lead to slow death, to separation, to pain, to emptiness. Yet, it’s making me realize how much I don’t want it. I want a taste of Jesus. I want to taste freedom. Isaiah 55:1 says, “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” And John 7:37-38 says, “On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’“ I want the cup of life, the taste of forgiveness, the well of peace and of grace. With coming to the foot of the cross and admitting my sins and shortcomings and expressing my need for forgiveness and receiving it, this is abundantly possible.
– Aaron (Current Student)