Holding on When You Want to Let GoSample

Day Six

Our Whole Self

Scripture: Psalm 32:3-4; Psalm 51

When I sat down to write about holding on to God even in the hardest moments, I found myself asking: Why are so many of us who love Jesus so unhappy? Why are we just hanging on by a thread? Why is nothing quite as great as we thought it would be? Why do we keep messing up over and over again? 

I wonder if it’s because we have not allowed salvation to do its full work. Let me explain what I mean. When we embrace a life of faith, we know that our sins are forgiven. We are no longer sinners; we are sinners saved by grace. While that is gloriously true, I think we forget the full reach of what sin really is. 

In his masterful work The Reason for God, Timothy Keller quotes French author and activist Simone Weil: “All sins are attempts to fill voids. Because we cannot stand the God-shaped hole inside of us, we try stuffing it full of all sorts of things but only God may fill it.” She wrote this after her dramatic conversion to Christianity.

I used to understand this quotation as applying to those who have not yet come into a relationship with God. But when I examine my own life, I see that even though I gave my life to God when I was eleven, I’ve resisted letting Him fill all the void, the broken places, the fear-filled places, the tear-stained places, the messed-up places. This was not an intentional resistance, just a broken understanding of how great and wholly invasive God wants to be in our lives. He wants to be our everything. 

In other words, being a Christian is more than just “giving our lives to Jesus” and knowing that now we’re saved. It’s being our whole self in God’s presence. It’s being transparent, not all bad or all good but human and real and messy. It’s loving Him above everything and everyone else. It’s finding our very identity in Him. It’s finding our only identity in Him. 

God wants all of us, our strengths and weaknesses, the things that make us laugh out loud and the things that make us cry. It’s often at our most broken that we realize how loved we really are. 

Father God, I want to give you my whole self. My 100 percent this-is-who-I-am self. Thank You for wanting me to come to You just as I am. Amen.