I was reading my daily devotional on the Bible app this morning and it said something I found to be striking. It said that self-deprecation is pride also. I never thought about it like that. When we talk negative about ourselves whether it be about our weight or saying things like, "I'm such an idiot."... It's still focusing on self. Both angles put the focus on ourselves and not on God. Whether it's puffing ourselves up OR self- deprecation we are focused solely on self. I didn't understand it fully but it hit me hard. So I laid my head down and just started to meditate on it. You just lay there sometimes begging God to heal you but it feels like your prayers are hitting the ceiling. You actually stop asking and believing. You start to think he's going to do what he wants to do anyway so why bother. All of that creeps in so slowly. That's when we unknowingly start focusing on OUR FEELINGS and not on HIS PROMISES AND POWER.
I just started to have this vision, there was a mirror and it was all smashed. I looked into it and I was all distorted so I picked up all the pieces and put them in this basket and I lifted them up to God but even all of the little tiny glass mirror fragments rose up at the same time and it was all sparkly. He took all of the pieces even the little micro broken pieces and next thing I knew he lowered it down and he had put the mirror all back together but all the cracks were filled with gold and he had put this pure gold frame around it that was beautiful. But here's what I learned, when I looked in the mirror and focused on me I was all distorted and it was disturbing and nothing made sense. But when I looked at the mirror and focused on the beauty of what he did there was a sense of elation, joy and completeness! And it goes back to what I said in the beginning if we're focused on our performance OR lack of, if it has anything to do with self, if it's about what a great job we did on our own or how we failed and put the focus on us as what a failure we are, we will feel distorted and not complete. But if we focus on the work that he does and the work that he's doing in us and in our situations, like how he filled all the broken places with gold. Then, we see him and his majesty, his power and his love instead of our failures, brokenness OR our self-worth. We can do nothing apart from the Vine. All glory is his.
Don't focus on your brokenness OR self-help. Focus on what he does. We so often think that we figured our way through something but it was him who got us through. Other times we beat ourselves up because of our weakness and see ourselves as failures. Both are pride. Our brokenness is Holy and sacred ground where God sits with us as he teaches us, restores us and redeems us. It's where he fills all of our cracks with gold and turn us into his image. It's all about him.
After thinking about all of this I realized that he has the wisdom and the power to orchestrate a much larger picture then we could ever imagine. So many times we activate our need to control and that also is pride. We have to learn how to trust, rest and be still, knowing just one thing, that he is God and we are his sheep and he loves.
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