10 For thus says the Lord: After seventy years are completed at Babylon, I will visit you and perform My good word toward you, and cause you to return to this place. 11 For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. 12 Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. 13 And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. 14 I will be found by you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back from your captivity; I will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you to the place from which I cause you to be carried away captive.
Jeremiah 29:10-14 (NKJV)
Captivity
Have you ever gone through a time of such darkness and hopelessness that the weight of it all was too much to bear?
Have you ever struggled through temptations, or had problems that overwhelmed you? Ever felt like you were wading through your days, as if someone somewhere had pushed the slow-motion button? And nights where you’d crawled into bed only to lay there staring at the ceiling unable to sleep?
I’ve recently gone through times like that. I’d cry out to God but I felt stuck and guilty in my circumstances. I lost hope that God would answer my prayers.
I only had myself to blame. I’d allowed things into my life that God says in His Word are abominable to Him. I’d opened doors into idolatry and the occult, things I knew were sinful, but I thought I could handle them. Needless to say, I couldn’t and I suffered the consequences.
My circumstances bogged me down, so much so, that all the spiritual warfare prayers and Bible verses I’d learnt up to that point seemed to disappear in a cloud of amnesia dust..
A Case for Purity
Another sleepless night and as I lay there, exhausted on my bed, I began to contemplate my life. and the circumstances I was in. My struggles were mental, emotional and spiritual. Mind, soul and spirit. After another desperate cry, the Holy Spirit began to deal with me. He began to show me the importance that God places on purity and how important it was that I remain pure for Him, for God.
Did you catch that? You see, until then, I’d been under the misapprehension that keeping pure was only for myself. But now, the Holy Spirit showed me that purity is for God Himself.
The Lord God Almighty – our Heavenly Father, Creator of all the earth, worlds, and galaxies – wants everyone who says they love Him, to see Him. To see Him. To see Him as He is. For isn’t that where we find our true joy, in His presence? But, we can only see Him, actually see Him, is if we are pure, if we keep pure, remain pure and keep ourselves pure.
The Holy Spirit taught me that knowing Bible verses and the spiritual warfare prayers were all well and good. But, if I say that I love God, and that I believe in Him but failed to follow His word, if I was disobedient, then where was the sense in that? I realised that I had to will my heart and mind to choose the true path.
I had to be honest with myself and ask myself whether seeing God was something I wanted. Truly wanted. Do I want to see God? Do I want to see the God who created me, the same God who created the universe? Don’t I want to see this God who loves me and loved me enough that He sent His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross on a lovely hill on Calvary and wash away all my sins and that of the whole wide world?
Don’t I want to see my God, my King, my Kinsman-Redeemer, and thank Him for loving me? Isn’t my heart and mind full of questions and things that I’d like to say to Him, things that I’d like to ask Him?
God is God Alone
God is God all by Himself. He is pure and holy all by Himself.
There is nothing that we can say, do or think that can make Him more or less than Who or what He is. The only thing that what we say, do or think changes is how we relate to Him. We either come to Him acknowledging Who and what He is – truly, rightly is – or we diminish ourselves. We diminish ourselves when we limit God in our thinking.
God Himself, as He is, is not diminished or limited in any way. We are the ones who limit Him according to our perception of Him, how we relate to Him, and the measure of Him in our lives.
Wouldn’t it be sad to go through life not knowing God?
Even though I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour, and I identify myself to others as a Christian, wouldn’t it be sad to get to the end of my days and look back with regret? Regretting that I never took a step forward toward Him? Never got to know Him at His own terms, and know Him for Who He is and what He is?
If that happened to me, I would die of shame.
You’re on His Mind
Time immemorial is one of those English phrases that reminds me of the fairytales I read in childhood. Of far-away kingdoms, gallant knights, chivalry, fair maidens and happily-ever-afters.
And God’s thoughts – it seems to me – are from time immemorial and of now. Think about it, Almighty God says in His Word, that He thinks thoughts towards you. Towards you, and me, and the whole wide world. His thoughts are from before He created us, before He moulded us in the palms of His hands, and they are of us now, as we live, and breathe and move in Him.
His thoughts towards us are for our peace, for our good, for our future, and is our hope.
It is when we’ve lost that God breathes into us and rekindles the dying embers of hope in us. He sets us into our right minds again. He strengthens us to reach out and grasp the hem of His garments. He not only heals us but lifts us up and out from the dark place our sins placed us in.
Pray, Seek, Found
t’s easy to feel overwhelmed with guilt when we’ve sinned. Guilt is one of the many weapons Satan uses to keep us in captivity.
And when we’re overwhelmed with guilt it’s easy to think – thoughts from the Devil? – that God hasn’t heard our prayers and will never answer them. That’s one of God’s oh-so-good-its-divine surprises. He keeps that ember of hope glowing, even in the midst of the most destructive of thunderstorms with rain lashing at us threating to drown us. Wild flashes of lighting intimidate us. So we crawl back into ourselves, back to our cramped little safe places and we don’t catch a glimmer of God’s sunrise of hope. Scared into not praying at all.
But aha! Have you counted without Almighty God, the One Who created the sun, moon and stars? The Mighty God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?
It is He Who fans those dying embers. It is God Who surprises us, and places a teeny-tiny thought at the doorpost of our mind, that tinkles through to our heart, and ever-so-slowly we just know that we must keep on praying, we need to keep praying. And we do. And God answers and takes us by the hand and leads us – and carries us – through the ‘paths of righteousness for His Name’s sake’.
It is the path of the seeker, for we seek Him, not knowing that all along, it was Him Who took our – what would have been – ill-fated decision to turn from Him. It was Him Who turned us back to Himself. And because through it all, He continues to cleanse us through His Word, creates a new heart within us, purifies us that we pursue Him with all that we have, all that we are, that He allows us to find Him.
And He sets us free.