Good morning!
Welcome to your morning coffee! May our Heavenly Father invade all of our hidden spaces, all our hiding places, and heal us in the light. Father, we love you. But we fear you. Or perhaps we fear entrusting the whole of ourselves to you. Whatever it is, Father, too many of us hide too much of ourselves from you. You long to lead us out of the tombs of our hiding hearts and to heal us until the tomb becomes a fountain of the Spirit pouring forth gratefulness and praise. Father, in the name of your son Jesus, and by the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us and changing us, bring us out of our hiding and fill us with your healing. May we repent and obey.
Your Morning Song: "The Healing" by Blanca
Your Morning Scripture: Psalm 147:3
He heals the brokenhearted
and binds up their wounds.
...
I've said before, both in these devotionals, and on a Sunday morning, God loves to share his delight with us when we obey him, when we repent of sin and return to him in our daily lives.
But what does that look like? What does it actually, practically, functionally look like? What is God's delight?
Healing.
When we live obedient, repentant lives we are rejecting our hiding and rejoicing in God's healing. And what does this healing look like? Perhaps there is some form of physical healing meant in this passage, but the true depths of the healing run straight to the center, straight to the core. The heart.
Our Heavenly Father calls us out of our daily hiding and into his heart-deep healing.
For me, I struggle with anxiety. My heart is crippled by the stress of fear. Daily. And the older I have gotten, the more biblically obedient to God I have chosen to become, the more I am desperately dependent on Jesus, I have come out of hiding. I used to think that I could manage this by myself. That my efforts would be enough to handle this crippling anxiety. I was hiding from God's healing by facing it alone, by myself, apart from him, though I was still indeed saved.
And then healing!
God drew me out of the false fortress of my own pride and control. He exposed me for everything I wasn't. Strong. Mighty. Capable. Clever. Brilliant.
And he exposed me for what I was. Heart-broken.
I repented, both publicly and privately, of the foolishness of my own pride, thinking I could deal with my anxiety myself. And God brought me healing. He bound up the wounds lurking beneath flesh and bone. And freed me from my own foolish hiding.
God's delight over my obedient repentance is being expressed to me through his heart-deep healing!
I am not completely free from fear, from the heart-hurt of anxiety. But something has changed. Perhaps it is something akin to sin, the power of which has been forever defeated, even though the presence remains.
I think it is likely me who has changed, who has been changed by the one who changest not.
Where in your life are you hiding instead of obediently repenting and accepting God's delight-full healing? What hurts haunting your heart are you hiding from the one who longs to heal you?
Hear Jesus call to you as he did to Lazarus, "come out!"
Brother. Sister. Obey. Repent. And be healed.
