IBS Application for 2 Corinthians 4:16

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.”

It’s hard to not go through life as a Christian and not feel as though you have made no progress in your walk at times. We can all relate to this on some level. I know for me, this past week has been especially hard in this way. I felt like I was backsliding, and I’m sure that I had the appearance of a backsliding Christian. I fell back into the sin of self-condemnation again. I know now that I am free from this sin, even though I fall back into it on occasion. But I felt in the moment that God had taken His hand off of me and that His Spirit has departed from me.

Again, I know now that this is foolish, but I honestly felt like Saul. I felt as though I was being disobedient in some way that God was not showing me and that He had given up on using me. And this, I condemned myself for the ways I felt that I had failed (though they were not all failures) and for the way that I was reacting in anger. But God cleared up the smoke for me to show me that this too was a lesson that I needed to learn: That sometimes, things will be hard and have the outward appearance of failure, but when it is something done out of obedience to the Lord, it is never truly a failure.

What astonished me was the love that God showed to me in all of my nonsense. He led me to listen again to a discussion on Agape love by C. S. Lewis, and showed me in a very gentle way that I was being selfish in all of this and that He still loved me anyway. Gentle, yet foundation shattering love.


The inward man is indeed being renewed even when it doesn’t seem so. My application for this one will be to walk in this truth this week as I serve Him, being obedient in the face of what seems like failure as best as I can with prayer to combat the lies of the enemy that say that I’m not changing. And I will of course thank the Lord throughout the week (at least once a day) for His steadfast love as He shapes me into the man of God He desires for me to be.

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