RENEW

R e n e w.

Each year, I have a theme for myself to live by and focus on.
This year, it is RENEW.

Ezekiel 36:26-27
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

After a great year of God revealing himself to me in so many different ways once again, this year is another time for renewal. Though God has been so gracious and merciful in allowing me to still be where I am today, I have gotten distracted countless amount of times even while doing God’s work. My focus has become from God to just simply doing routine and habitual work. My fire and passion that was once there had somehow found its way towards apathy which made me not care about a lot of things as much as I used to, especially myself. I didn’t stop doing work, and God can still work in the midst of any sin because he is that great, but that was just not the life God called me to live.

In Ezekiel 36, the Lord had made a new covenant with the house of Israel. Telling them to turn away from their wicked ways and come back to Him; to keep His laws fresh in their minds, and to allow God to work through them. God, again, showed them mercy and forgave them from their sinfulness.

He told them he would give them a new heart and a new spirit. A new heart means

Ephesians 4:24
to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

…And a new spirit means he will put in us the Spirit of God that will enable us to walk in God’s ways. As I look back in 2008, I saw how my attitude has changed a lot. It’s something I can’t explain, but I know and I can feel it isn’t of God. I know this attitude leads me to sin and leads me to not care about certain aspects of life I should be caring about. This attitude drew me away from discernment and knowing the will of God; knowing what makes him joyful and knowing what breaks his heart. Sometimes, we allow ourselves to get too distracted that we really lose sight of God in the picture. If we don’t allow the Spirit to work in us, he won’t, and we won’t see the great things that God has planned for us.

Therefore, putting on a new self doesn’t mean to not be Joan anymore. It means to repair and restore our relationship with God in a much deeper level. Just like a rose, we want to pick all thorns and dirt away that make the flower look dirty and unclean before giving it to someone. We don’t leave it there afterwards though it’s already beautiful by itself. But we want to put it in a beautiful vase so it can stand on its own with the help of the vase. And so that this rose looks so much more attractive then when it was sitting by itself collecting dust and growing thorns. That’s what God wants to do in us and he wants to be our vase to keep us standing straight and beautiful. He wants to rid us of all the unclean parts that make us look dirty.

We measure God in our own limited eyes, thinking that he can only do so much in us and so much in the world, that our Christian life, after maturing and being a leader – it ends there. But it doesn’t. God is more than our human minds can ever imagine and we have to allow him to be that big in our eyes.

Only God can renew our minds, allow us to forget our past, look to the future and make us clean again. None of that is possible without Him. And if we didn’t have God’s grace, we wouldn’t be able to live with ourselves; after knowing all the sin that dwells in our hearts.

Ezekiel 36 also speaks about removing our heart of stone and giving us a heart of flesh. A heart of stone doesn’t beat, it is not living, and it has no emotions. A heart of stone cannot do anything because it has no life. When I think about a heart of stone, I think about a person who is always angry, bitter with the world, and sitting in the darkness. When we think about a heart of flesh, it is something the lives. It breathes and desires for great things to happen. Only God can give us that heart of flesh, a heart that is willing to press forward in Him.

“10% of the population read the Bible, and the other 90% of the population read the Christian.”

How true is that. Even when we are in school or at a work environment, we rather listen to what a human being has to say and teach us about things in a hands on fashion instead of us having to sit in a room for hours reading on instructions and us having to do all the work on our own.

Same with Christianity, many people don’t want to read the Bible. They say the Bible may have mistakes in it, humans wrote it, and it’s just too difficult to understand. Even some Christians themselves hesitate to flip through the Bible because it just seems like a whole bunch of words written on a page. To many, the Bible is just a book and a novel, but what this book really is, is sacred and holy, and it can give life.

Because society can’t really comprehend this truth, we as Christians have to live the renewed life from God to show them with our actions what God is able to do once we let him into our lives.

2 Corinthians 3:3
You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

As Christians, we have to live as Bibles for others, and when others read us, they will be able to read God through us. They will see that our lives have been transformed to be like a little Jesus. And though it’s not possible, we strive for perfection because God has allowed us to.

As it says in Ezekiel 36, only God can do this. Only God can put this new spirit in us to allow us to follow his decrees and to do it carefully. Over the past months, I know that I haven’t been following his decrees carefully, I haven’t been so cautious about my actions and that was all me. I didn’t allow God to help me be an exemplary Christian to others around me, I wanted to do it on my own because I thought I was strong enough and I can surpass any sin not by fleeing from it but even walking into the occasion of it.

I have that independent nature in me, thinking I don’t need anyone or anything to help me in this life, God says different.

2 Corinthians 3:5
Not that we competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God.

We are not capable of doing anything. We are like babies who need a helping hand to walk their first steps and to learn how to walk, then run. We need to get fed from others before we can step out to do anything on our own. And here is where we have God to lead us through it all.

This year, I have hope that God is going to renew my life to live and dive into a deeper level with him that I won’t be able to fathom. He is telling me that the old life I lived, the life I lived a couple of years ago, that’s nothing compared to what he has in store for me. Even when I was on fire for God, passionate and cautious about every action I took for God, God is telling me that this is not it for my Christian life. He’s not letting me end there, but he is going to bring me far deeper, and I can’t wait.

A couple of months ago, I was at a prayer meeting and my friend was going around in a circle, relying on the Spirit to speak to us so that we may be blessed by her words. She told me that I’ve been living under this oh so perfect Christian mask and God doesn’t want that and he’s going to break that. He wants us to be real with Him and real with all who are around us. In the meanwhile, he is going to put obstacles along our way to measure how faithful we are. He’s bringing me to a deeper level and in 2008, he let me learn that none of this, I can do by myself but only by His grace.