Come Above Your Worldly Oceans

I woke up this morning with twinges of stress, sadness, overwhelmingness, and disruption in my spirit. It was tolerable, and then it wasn’t. As I was out tending to the animals on our farm, the heaviness of these emotions began pressing more intensely onto my spirit, trying to “take me out”, as a close sister in Christ likes to explain it.

My reaction to the pressure of these emotions, none of which are from the Lord, was to reach out to a trusted friend, but even that was not where I needed to go. I needed to go to my Lord.

Sometimes our initial reaction as humans living in the world, is to seek help through something or someone we can see, hear, or touch in the physical, but many times we are not dealing with the physical, we are dealing with the spiritual.

When people ask me how I know there is a God, I give them one of my many testimonies where God literally shifted my negative emotions in moments by reading His Word. His word is alive, and when you read it, truly read it, it washes through you like fresh water. Such as this morning, not even twenty minutes ago, when I was in despair, and now I am typing this message with renewed strength.

Reading God’s Word in moments of despair is different each time. Some days, on those days when darkness is around every corner and Satan is chomping at your heels, you have to be in the Word as often as needed. Some days, the Word is “a life raft in a great ocean”, but all oceans have shores, and all you have to do is remind yourself that as vast as emotional oceans can seem, they have limits, but God does not. He will always be able to encompass any amount of worldly pain any one of us experiences.

Picture that in your mind. Picture God wrapping Himself as a great big net around your ocean of troubles and struggles. As He lifts the net, all of those troubles and struggles fall away, and all that is left is you in the Lord’s hands. You are now looking at the Lord face to face on a higher level, above all of your worldly issues; they are washing away just like Pharaoh and his soldiers who relentlessly pursued Moses and the Israelites as they fled from slavery.

Living on a new level with the Lord does not mean you are no longer free from despair or any other worldly emotion, but what it does mean is that you are building your strength to endure them in a different way – a way that will continue to lift you higher, not lower. A way that does not burry you or cause you to lose yourself as you live life in a fallen world. A way that allows you to truly live and know who you are, and who God made you to be in His kingdom. Because once you get a glimpse of who God truly made you to be, you will start to make sense of all you have endured, and use it to strengthen yourself and the rest of God’s kingdom. It is empowering to know yourself through Jesus Christ, and you will truly begin to feel like a warrior worthy of God’s armor. That is empowering!