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My head’s underwater and I can’t breathe…
Pull me up because I’m too deep
I’m looking for a sign…
Now I see a shining light…
Oh, won’t somebody come and set me free…
Set me free…
Feeling broken and I’m worn out…
I’ve got nowhere left to go now…
I’ve been trying to make it right…
Don’t care what I left behind…
Oh, won’t somebody come and set me free…
(Jesus), set me free… 1
Jesus said that his main purpose was to set the captives free… Luke 4:18, Isaiah 61:1
Why is life so hard?
They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Some of us are stubborn. Even hard-headed, unwilling to budge. We are even so defiant that it sometimes takes years of being buffeted until we finally realize that our stubborn life isn’t working, we aren’t going anywhere, and we haven’t gone anywhere in a long time. We need something else, but what?
This is me.
Setting us free means we need to change… And for some of us, that is a very difficult thing because we think that we are right all the time.
Over time, I finally stopped and said, OK I am tired of kicking against the pricks. 45 years later… I started to look at it from His perspective, and it wasn’t easy. It was a new way to think. It was a new way of how to treat those around me. It was a new viewpoint. It was trying to see things as He sees them. It’s thinking like He thinks. It’s treating others the way that he treats them, and learning to have the expanded viewpoint that He has. I want to be like God.
We are too selfish and inward-thinking. ME…ME…ME… Always ME! We need to think “US” instead! “US” means our neighbor, our instigator, our bully. Treating others whether they have been good to us or not as ourselves.
Life is a hard schoolmaster… It’s designed to knock the rough edges off us.
God starts by putting us into a rock tumbler. Sometimes we sit in that tumbler for years because we are so hard-headed. Eventually; God comes around to check on our progress…Some people come out of the tumbler and they don’t look like anything has changed, so we get put back in to go another round.
Over time, if we will allow it, we can become more refined, have fewer rough edges, and have that rough part smoothed out.
The first part of being tumbled is getting us to finally set foot into a church with a good paster. We quit complaining about religion and go to feel and hear the good word of God. This is knocking off some of the rough edges…
The next part of being tumbled is to finally get us to open the scriptures and read a little bit each day. This too knocks off another rough edge…
Then the next part of tumbling is to finally get our stubborn heart to kneel down and say a simple prayer. I understand that for some of us, this is foreign, and it might even be hard to just do it… But persevere! This will knock off another rough edge.
These 3 things are part of taking our stubborn orneriness and removing it. These things need to be knocked out of our hard heads. The earlier we learn things the better life will change for the better. If we make no progress, then God comes back and puts us into the tumbler for another round to check on our progress later…
Can I just say that I was getting tired of being put back into the rock tumbler… But if we never change, then God will eventually toss us out and place other rocks into that tumbler so that He gets only the best stones at the end of time.
God wants to take our roughness and smooth it out. He wants to polish us and make us into something valuable. He does this by refining us a little at a time.
Once the rough edges on the outside are gone, He then begins to work on the impurities found on the inside.
He is seeking to purify us. He wants us to be like He is.
Then he cuts sections off from us that hold us back. This could be bad relationships, crappy friends that are not real friends… splitting them off, as they do not add to our greatness but they end up taking away instead.
This reshapes us. It even makes us appear different than before.
Now comes the high gloss polish. It allows the inward side of us to show up on the outside, where we become transparent. Nothing is hidden or secret anymore.
There is an inherent beauty that forms after we have gone through this process. We become a candle that is set on the hill where everyone can see the light, and it sparkles with flawless purity for everyone to see.
Jesus is the author and finisher of our faith. If we let him, our value will become priceless… and our appearance of what was before will change into what we have become now…
C. S. Lewis described it thus: …Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing, so you are not surprised. But presently, he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of — throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage, but He is building a palace.
Maybe we don’t see ourselves for what we truly are. We’ve been told that we were not good enough. Too stupid to amount to anything… Maybe we’ve been told that we were ugly or too fat. But God sees through all of this…
Maybe we’ve even had others belittle us in front of our peers or behind our backs. But God looks at us and sees something much, much more. Indeed, we may start as a little cottage, but God wants to make us a palace fit for a King.
1 Lyrics by: Jake Oliver Warren, Dana Elizabeth Kelson