Lift Up A Word – Lindsay Schmidt
May 22, 2020

Inadequate. This is how I feel sometimes when trying to talk with God. Like I can’t express correctly how I feel or I feel like I have fallen short of what He might be expecting and therefore I feel like I have no right for him to listen to what I have to say. We get this way, don’t we? From time to time we feel that we haven’t done everything just right and therefore we have no right to have God be a part of our lives. And the truth is that he doesn’t owe us anything. He doesn’t have to take a second out of his existence to pay us any attention. We are all sinners right? We all fail. But here is the beautiful truth about God: no matter how inadequate we may feel, how fallen, how broken, how imperfect we may be, God loves it when we talk with him. He doesn’t care if we stumble over our words or say things perfect, he doesn’t care if it is 3 a.m. when we talk with him or 15 different times throughout our day. He doesn’t care if we are five or ninety-five. He doesn’t care if we have a degree or if we didn’t even graduate high school. He says this in Romans 8:26, "Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words."

The only thing he cares about is whether we choose him. Whether we choose to speak, to have a conversation, or to simply come into his presence and let him move on us. All that matters is that we do it. Jeremiah 29:12-13 says "Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart."

There are many stories in the bible that show us that God does not discriminate. We can read over and over about how God talked with the sinners, the broken, the hurt, the lost, the stutterer, the weak. He sought out those who were imperfect. In fact the bible says in 1 Corinthians 1:27, "But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong." Why do you suppose he chooses the weak to lead the strong? It is because it is in our weakness that he can step in and do what we cannot. God can work in us and through us when we reach the end of our strength. If we all were at a point in our lives where we could speak with perfection and pray with words that sound like they are from the King James version of the bible, God would not love us any more than he already does, even with all of our imperfections. That is because God sees no imperfections when he looks at you or me or the lady who is homeless on the side of the road. To him we are equal. To him, his love is poured out evenly to all of his children. And his love for us was poured out on the day he died on the cross. That love has not lessened or grown from then to now. It has stayed the same because God is an unchanging God. He will never love us more or less especially because of our faults. For it is in our faults that we are made stronger in him. So when you are going through a really rough day and you feel like you have failed 15 times over and you feel you have nothing more to pour out, and you begin to think to yourself ‘I cannot bring this weak version of myself to God let alone ask anything of him’, that is when he is whispering to us “come and rest in me and I will make you whole.” God wants us to see ourselves the way he sees us: perfect in all of our brokenness. It is when we begin to see ourselves through his eyes that we will run to him in any state, at any time, with any baggage and he will be right there waiting, ready to listen, ready to love, ready to pick up our broken bits and put them back together. There is no part of us that he doesn’t love. There is no amount of black on our hearts that he cannot make white through the blood he shed on that cross.

Speak to him. Any way you know how. He already knows every part of our being, there is nothing hidden from him. He already loves every part. Do not think for a second that God looks at us the way we view ourselves. His thoughts are so far and high above our thoughts. And there is nothing we could do that would make him take his love away from us or to change his thoughts toward us. Finally, I leave you with this verse from the bible that lays it all out there for us plain and simple, 1 Thessalonians 5:17, “pray continually.” Just pray.

​He gives us Roots so we can Fly. Roots and Wings.

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