Creator's Joy

Renewing the mind

We are God’s beloved sons and daughters if we give our lives to Him and accept His acceptance of us!
We may have had an encounter with the love of God for one moment in our lives and even given our lives to Him as a result of it.
Hopefully though we keep experiencing his love on a daily basis. But often we don’t even if we somewhere deep down know this love to be true, we don’t feel it all the time. Why?
Because our minds need to be renewed. We are used to thinking we are rejected, abandoned, not loved at all. In part because people hurt us and fall short of loving us the way they should. And in part because we often don’t understand the reason of pain and suffering in our life and in the world and therefore we blame God and don’t believe He truly loves us. At least not at that moment when we are in pain.
But truth is that He loves us all the time. His love for us does not depend on how we feel or how we have been doing that day. We can’t earn it and therefore we can’t loose it.
It’s a choice we daily have to make to keep believing in his love for us even if we don’t feel it. Even if we are in pain. Even if we messed up. Even…you fill it in…It’s there all the time!
It takes an intentional effort to do this. Maybe a thousand times a day. To stand up against the lies that come into our minds due to people and circumstances and failures, lies that say we are not loved, we are not wanted, we are not accepted. But we are loved by the God of the universe who is our Father, and He is a good father no matter what other’s are saying.

Another thing that we need to do to stay aware of his love for us is to come into God’s presence daily by which I mean we take time to become still and acknowledge his presence. We focus on him the way you focus your attention on someone you are speaking with. It’s kind of hard to experience his presence if your mind is wandering of, thinking about the things you need or want to do, or keep repeating in your mind how much someone hurt you, or how much you failed at something. You can’t have proper communication with someone if you don’t turn your attention to them. You have to be present in the moment, and the same goes for communication with God.
Yet with God we don’t seem to be used to do this since, after all, God is omnipresent and with us all the time, which indeed He is. But still an awareness of this presence is not likely to come if we don’t intentionally turn our attention to him, and him only, without having other occupations in the back of our mind. Hurts, activities, how we can fix things and what we can do to be seen and loved by people.
Yet the lover of our soul is always right there with us by our side. We only have to turn our face to “see” him (we can see God in the spiritual realm) and to listen so we can hear him speaking to us, often through a subtle tought in our own mind, that’s how he usually speaks. He doesn’t have to shout with a booming voice (although he still might, if needed) because He is near to us. And we can have a conversation with him like we can with everyone else. Just quiet all the other voices in your mind and listen. You will hear him.

Another way to renew our mind is to read the bible (you might want to start with the new testament, the book John is a good place to start and then the other gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke and the rest of the NT).
But although everyone can read the bible you can only understand it through the Holy Spirit, who is the spirit of God that lives inside every believer.
So when I read it I take time to listen to the Holy Spirit to reveal to me what it means and how it speaks to my own life. I do this through meditating on it, so He can bring thoughts to my mind about what it means so it comes alive and is not just some dead meaningless book I’m reading.

The thing that mostly speaks to me though about God’s love for me is when I ponder the cross.
That’s the moment in time where God revealed his love for us more then anywhere else.
I was just reading in the (bible)book of Luke about the last supper Jesus had with his disciples before He was crucified.
It speaks about two cups of wine Jesus took and told the disciples to drink and keep doing that in the future as a reminder of what they stand for. I believe the first cup is a picture of the forgiveness of sin we have through the blood of Jesus that was shed in our place and therefore erased every guilt we have.
Then in a similar way it speaks of the bread Jesus took and broke and gave to his disciples as a picture of the body of Jesus that was torn for us on the cross so we could be forgiven and did’t have to pay the penalty of our sin ourselves. He did that for us.

God is like a judge that gives someone a sentence to pay a huge fine because that is what justice requires. He also knows though that this person is not able to pay this fine in his whole life no matter how hard he works.
Then the judge, after pronouncing the punishment, takes out his checkbook and pays the fine himself. God is like that judge!
The dead of Jesus, the son of God who came down from heaven to us, was the payment of the punishment we owed to God.
And God now sees us as someone who’s debt is payed and we are now in rightstanding with God.
Jesus was our ransom. The price that was paid so we could be delivered from the consequences of our sin.

The second cup is called the cup of the covenant. We are not just debtfree to God but He now makes a binding agreement with us. A treaty, a covenant that cannot be broken. Like a marriage that is to be for a lifetime. Except that God will never divorce us.
It’s called the blood of the covenant because the blood of Jesus is the assurance that it won’t be broken. This covenant is not based on our good works but based upon what Jesus did for us. Upon the death He died in our place of which the blood speaks since it was poored out when He was killed.
When this truth, the meaning of the blood of Jesus that was poured out for us, truly sinks in so we understand it with our heart and not just with our head, then at last the light of truth shines through all the darkness of the lies and we can truly say: indeed I am God’s beloved. And the more it sinks in, the more we become rooted and grounded in love. Then we start to blossom, and become the person we were made to be. The person God was seeing all along when He looked at us. And then the world and we ourselves start to see the beautiful person God made us. It may have been covered by dirt like a rough diamont, but God is not fooled by the dirt and He sees our true beauty and worth, that no amount of sin can ever erase.

You are God’s beloved

So BE loved

You can’t earn it and therefore you don’t have to

Just be and receive his love

Let him wash you clean and remove the filth of you

You cannot do that yourself

Enjoy the bath, it smells great

Be blessed!

Love
Hanna

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