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inmomni · 6 years ago

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No. 14b

I. Intro/Premise:

Hi, my name is Inmo, i am a senior biological studies major at Biola University. I’ve grown up in the church all my life, and I am currently a frustrated, working past it, christian who doesn’t work as advertised.

This became clear to me after my youth group’s 2015 winter retreat that i got “saved” for like, the third time that my best friend and i had an interesting conversation about our sin. I remember we were on a night hike with a few other of my church friends when i suddenly started to get a strong urge for a cigarette. I hadn’t had one since the start of the winter retreat, which was about two weeks ago then and a long time for me. It brought up this kind of frustration in me. Not because the craving was getting worse, but because i had just been “saved,” again. See in my mind, if you were with Jesus, you should be the farthest away from sin because of this new found love that you have for Jesus now; so in turn, that would make you naturally hate sin, ya know? Sharing the comment with my church friend, it sparked some talk about the fallenness of man and how we innately fall away from God, you know the gist, and we went on for about an hour when pent up with frustration about how i still want sin after all that God had shown me, after knowing what He did for me, after experiencing how much He loves me,

I said, “I wish God could just make us love him so much right now that we would never dare to sin again.”

II. Idealistic Picture vs: Reality

Idealistic: [See], I thought I knew what a christian should look like. I’ve been to church all my life, so that being said, I think I have a pretty good idea of what an idealized modern day non-Jesus Christian would be like:

Prays for at least 30 mins a day, an hour if it didn’t cry at all to “push through and seek the Lord”….Or an hour if you did cry cause, you cried and you had a moment with Jesus.

Reads the word every day without fail, even if you don’t have time for it cause you’re too busy serving, you get it in somehow by listening to an ESV ebook bible or through your 2min New Morning Mercies.

Just exudes Jesus everywhere they go, like to the point where you feel so sinful if you’re around them, but somehow they’re so humble that it doesn’t even cross your mind.

Raises their hands every single worship song at some point in the chorus and definitely the verses cause no one raises their hands for those

Every single conversation they have in passing turns into some life changing prophetic revelation for both parties involved

The list can go on.

Past Reality:

As you can see, I think a lot, my mind is always racing, and in science and especially in theology i really like to understand things and how they work, I need sequential process. So if I don’t understand something, I will just sit there until I get it to take an action on it. I need to know what to do, I need direction, and I need it NOW. So in grappling with my newfound faith during my early high school years, my sinfulness, how to pray, what to think during worship, how to know if I’m being genuine, what I need to be feeling when I encounter God, and i started picking away at my own faith with my doubt. And with doubt, I froze, because I didn’t understand it, and because I didn’t understand it I would question if I was a christian at all because I didn’t act the way I thought i was supposed to. I didn’t reach out to leadership, I didn’t ask my pastor or small group leader any questions I had, how to walk in the faith, I simply took what I saw, held up myself against that standard, and graded myself accordingly. And because I wasn’t doing well with the Lord, all other areas of my life would suffer, my overall mood, my motivation, my assurance in God and his character; nothing was stable. So I started to seek refuge from my reality in things like video games, anime, kdramas, sleeping, and slowly that evolved into trying weed for the first time, and then turning that into an everyday thing, with a daily goal of escaping reality and forgetting how terrible of a person I am. I was open to having fun, cause my life didn’t offer much as it was, and because all of this relied on how i felt, it wouldn’t be like this all the time, maybe just months at a time, sandwiched by seasons of “doing alright”, or a year on, and a year completely clean because God did graciously meet me in those moments, but nothing really changed, even if it was a year away, it doesn’t change the fact that I failed.

There emerged a very cyclic pattern starting since senior year of high school:

Summer is so good, it’s great, restful, had a bunch of fun, ready to get back to work

Fall initially is really good, meeting up with friends, keeping up with academics, motivated, I’m doing okay with God, reading here and there, not consistently, but reading at least, not doing bad things and such… then it starts to drop off around late October. I start getting less motivated, missing more classes, sleeping in more, trying to escape reality more.

Winter is super bad, just bummy lazy disgusting, right up until finals week approaches from where I jump up out of bed and turn into a study machine.

This carries on past spring and then probably into summer again. Then it repeats.

Recent past reality:

This cycle got worse every single year, until last year, my junior year, when I failed 3 classes second semester.

It was my junior year, and I’m a bio major. I’m trying to become a doctor, but now I’m not even sure of that anymore.

Present Reality:

If I’m honest today… I’m a slob, my sleeping schedule is a mess, I’m not even properly eating and what the heck is up with that. I don’t go to the gym anymore. I’m not loving on the people that are close to me well at all. I feel so selfish and twisted. I think myself into a pit, dramatically breaking apart my own self confidence and credibility to myself.

It’s easy for me to think: “God, I feel like such a failure. I’ve tried so hard, my bootstraps ripping into the palms of my hand, to be a Christian, to stay in the faith, but it’s too hard. I don’t get it, and i don’t understand it. If i did, then maybe i wouldn’t be like this. If i was a christian, I wouldn’t be doing X, Y, and Z or i would have fixed this part of myself ages ago. I should have had a consistent routine with God by now, talking with him, I should be the ideal christian by now.” IF I had truly been a christian up til now, holy, I’ve lived 21 years exposed to the gospel, and I don’t know how to do this thing. I should just give up.” I couldn’t even trust myself, the feelings and emotions I had, my all my actions can be accompanied by an army of voices questioning my intentions for everything. Everything was falling apart, my future, my faith, my academics, nothing was solid, nothing was stable, the way I am right now, I can’t even pick myself up again. I can’t do this.

III. Realization & God-centered Reality

But that’s when it became clear to me. If you’ve noticed by now, I’ve used the word “I” so many times up til this point. God just started highlighting all of the I’s I used, and he started replacing them with His name. and it all started to click. Maybe the reason I failed all these times was to bring me to a place where I could say, with my heart inside out, “God help me please, I don’t know what to do.” I tried to do things my own way for 3 almost 4 years now and i failed every single time, maybe it’s time to look towards God and not myself.

God reminded me of a passage in Numbers 21:6-9 where it talks about God sending fiery serpents to the people of Israel. In short, God sent fiery serpents to the people of israel because of their disobedience, killed a lot of people, then told Moses to construct a bronze snake so that people could look at it and live. Notice God didn’t say be healed from their afflictions. He just said that they would live, like NIRV even says that they “remained alive”. So what are the takeaways here for me? As you live your life, with or without God, you’re going to get bit, like 100%, when God said he sent serpents that killed many, I’m sure it wasn’t just a heist size group of snakes that ravaged the entire population, but a disgusting amount of serpents. You can try to fend for yourself, or you can look up at God and get through this thing with him.

The amazing thing is, that when I look to him, I see the moments where God affirmed me in my spiritual growth, all in retrospect of course.

I remember a time at Chick-fil-a with the same Caleb after serving at VBS where one of these moments happened. We had just finished up a day where the theme was the good news.

I started asking him about what he thought of the entire day that we just ran through. He responded with a “It was kinda weird”, not really a straight answer, but to see more what I’m thinking. I started explaining how they didn’t do the gospel justice, how this wasn’t something that was deserving of being rushed or just gotten over with, especially if it is for these kids. At one point, some guy paraphrased the gospel to,

“uhh we sinned, Jesus died on the cross for them, and, oh shoot were out of time, can the crew leaders explain the rest on the way to the next station” Everything was so rushed, paraphrased, cut off, I understand we were pressed for time the entire program, but dang did this topic deserve more respect.

I was getting really emotional, and tears started running down my eyes at which point caleb asked me why I was crying. I didn’t understand his question, until i remembered that all the conversations we had and all the things he’s seen me do don’t point to an impassioned college student upset because his church’s VBS didn’t do the gospel enough justice when presenting it to 5-10 year olds. That was when I realized God has taught me the weight of his gospel

There were other instances like this:

When i first got to Biola, and I hated it, but God told me through the` song i hated the most during high school (Christ is Enough) that though i may think that i failed because nothing went to plan, its all according to his. He’s bringing me to a place where I can say Christ is all I need, and he placed that desire in my heart.

Placing me in Torrey, a great books program at Biola, so that I would have a deeper knowledge of the word and how to converse with people, to have that show up at a party filled with a bunch of non-christians who were talking philosophy of a higher being and of a purpose in life

Seeing that through every cycle of highs and lows, regardless of how low that low was, I still came back to a place where God met me.

IV Conclusion:

To be honest, I still don’t fully know what I’m doing. I’m trying to read more. Pray more, I don’t know what it looks like to do what I said just now, or what that actually looks like. But regardless of what I know, or what I understand, God is doing things behind the scenes for my good. That there is no other reason, there can’t be any other explanation than the grace that God gives me and sustains me with. In this most darkest season of my life, I have never understood more clearly what it means to work out your faith with fear and trembling, to know that I am a christian despite all my crap, and that despite how hard I may want to leave, not even I can pluck myself out of God’s hand, because of the way He’s been teaching and shaping my heart. He’s locked me in. Once you know, you know, with this sort of thing if you know, if you’ve seen or tasted just a fraction of his grace, you cannot go back. Grace prepares the heart for salvation, it is grace that one receives salvation, and it is through grace that salvation is sustained and sanctification is occurring. I don’t know how I got here and how to get to where I need to be, but I just know that God’s got this.

So I’m just going to take that and run.

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