Think with regards to a runner together with her heavy backpack to be with her back. How think will she manage to even make it to the finish line? Now think about a lady dying of suffocation and she or he has layers of thick clothes on her. How easy you think can she be helped and revived? This time, imagine yourself as a home decorator and your client does not want to get rid of anything in their house. How easy could it be for you to do the decorating?
All these are generally analogies of how we are when it comes to our walk with God. We can end up like the runner with a heavy backpack on her back. We may still be carrying a great deal of baggage along with us while running this race. Now are you currently wondering why you’ll find those who are barely so that it is in this walk?
Or we can be like that lady covered in layers of clothes. We are suffocating through the attacks of the enemy and were crying out to God. But just how do God revive us quickly if there are layers and layers of our own hurts, unforgiveness, and anger?
And here were asking God to restore us and make us whole. Just like the decorator, how can He make our home beautiful if we don’t would like to get rid of the old stuff we have… our past relationships… our achievements… and plenty of other things from our past?
God is within the healing, restoration, renovation, and revival business. All these require an overhaul and a stripping away from those things that are not anymore needed. You and I realize that an overhaul can be pretty messy, yet if it is done without interruptions or delays, the result might be astounding.
God destroys so He can build. He eliminates so He can change it with new things. This is the very concept from the death and resurrection of Jesus. The power isn’t so much on Jesus’ death but on His resurrection. However, death was necessary for the resurrection. And that death was severely and excruciatingly painful.
Unless a grain of wheat grouped into the earth and dies, it remains on its own alone. But if it dies, it creates many others and yields a rich harvest (John 12:24).
God doesn’t want delays in relation to the work He is doing. Though He is patient, He wants unflinching focus when He starts working. He is being a goldsmith who works with utmost precision and strong concentration. Any resistance on our part not simply delays the task but affects the caliber of gold that is certainly being produced.
The refining of gold is just not easy. Since it is most common to have a physical mix of gold and silver, the separation of silver from your gold becomes difficult. Other materials can even be mixed with gold, which makes the task very tedious.
This holds true for us. We are that way gold obtained in the earth’s crust. We have residues that we brought along with us when we surrendered and committed our lives to Jesus. For Him to be able to do a thorough restoration process in us, He has to strip us off. He has to remove all our dirt and impurities. These impurities might not exactly even come off as too obvious. We may even think there’s nothing wrong with it. Yet, not even silver might be mixed with gold if what are the goldsmith desires to produce is gold.
Take the storyplot of Joseph. His father Jacob gave him a robe of countless colors being a symbol of his being highly popular with his dad. There was nothing wrong your coat, yet God was required to strip it off. Thirteen years later, Pharaoh became popular his signet ring from his hand, put it on Joseph’s hand, and arrayed him in official vestments of a good linen and place a gold chain about his neck. He is made second in command to Pharaoh (Genesis 41:42). Jesus’ robe was also stripped far from Him. Yet, when He resurrected, He was clothed in His resurrected garment.
The stripping off is necessary for the fulfillment of God’s promise… for bringing us to the next season… for promoting us to a higher level.
The first thing God stripped removed from me was my business. He knew which it was my pride along with the fruit of my self-sufficiency. After taking away my opportunity from me, He took away my capability to make money. He closed all doors and opportunities for me to make money. Then He stripped me off my power to make plans by putting me in a very long waiting season or what I would rather call a “neither here nor there situation”. Then He removed my spirit of independency by giving me a husband and subordinating me to him. He still is constantly on the strip me off my pride, something I didn’t know I had a great deal of.
This means of stripping off isn’t fun. I always feel my flesh screaming and kicking and holding on tightly as to what God is removing. Most in the time it will require me days before I finally surrender everything to God. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to immediately surrender. It’s just that regardless of whether I say “I surrender”, my head and emotions don’t follow. Subjecting my thoughts and feelings to God when they are rebelling against my spirit takes the force out of me plus it really pulls me down. This is when I just opt for God’s flow and wait for His help.
Believe me, though I am totally committed to God and thus passionate in serving Him, my flesh still resists all the time. There was obviously any good recent incident when God exposed my pride again and my husband corrected me. And boy oh boy, my flesh hates correction. After some exchange of words, we finally joined together in prayer. I cried so hard in prayer, asked forgiveness from your Lord, and surrendered everything to Him. And my, oh my gosh, after praying, my flesh started rebelling again. I could hear this voice in my thoughts saying, “you shouldn’t have prayed that prayer generating your husband feel that it was your entire fault”. See that? Just after being led with the Spirit to pray, my flesh started acting up again.
It seems like my flesh will usually cling from what it has for ages been… a sinful nature. It will forever cling on the residue and toxics that have a great deal become a part of it. And this ‘s what God is stripping off. This is the thing that He is constantly on the break from me almost mercilessly because I want to be thoroughly restored. Though my flesh resists, I continue to surrender to God and enable Him to do His thing in me. Though the procedure is painful, I always bear the anguish and subject myself into it instead of run away from it. Though it drives me crazy, I choose to go through it realizing that I will shine like a precious gold, free of residues and impurities.