Security in God's promises

I guess the title for this post doesn't say very much about what I'm about to write.

In Jesus I have security. How do I have security and on what basis? By God's promises to me in scripture. 

I think the opposite of security, for me, has been anxiety.

I learned this lesson a long time ago. I relearn it a lot. Giving over to God what is Gods to deal with is the only way to go. There's no point in me carrying things around that load me down today when Jesus came to swap my heavy burden for his light burden. Like the Israelites in Egypt I still prefer myself loaded with the heavy burdens of my former life rather than being amazed at the life of freedom God is calling me to live (leaving the oppression of Egyptian life). We've just been looking at Joseph to Moses with the boys so these pictures are quite vivid while I'm writing this!

I recently came upon this issue during a period of intense anxiety lasting the best part of a week. Prior to this week I had been running on masses of adrenaline in my working week. I'm training in a busy London hospital  which is a great environment for serving others and utilises a lot of my working strengths of enthusiasm, thoroughness and shrewdness. The majority of the year is spent learning on the job, however we also step back from the practice setting and get on with the much needed business of studying hard and analysing what we're doing in light of cutting-edge practice around the world. Along with the study, the opportunity for 11 am starts for a lot of the week. Great stuff, right! Well not for me it turned out. A week into the six week study block and I was a bag of nerves. I couldn't concentrate on anything because my mind was swimming with activity. I couldn't settle on an activity and was jumping about from task to task like a crazed kangaroo. I was feeling beaten down and defeated by my list of self-study work. I also found two jobs had come up, for the right profession and the right area of the country, and found myself panicking over applying for the posts - would I be perfect for the job? Would they choose me out of the competition? What if I didn't have relevant experience or they didn't like my referee choices? Where were my A-level certificates etc. Panic, panic, panic. Stress, stress, stress. I wasn't perfect, couldn't be perfect and never would be perfect and this resulted in major anxiety for me that week. And a result of my personal anxieties, I became difficult in my relationships and suffered paranoia (nobody really wants me around anyway) in my closest relationships. This had a negative impact on my home life; when you start worrying that you are not liked or make no difference you start acting funny and a vicious cycle starts!

Picture from Workplace Psychology online http://workplacepsychology.net/2010/09/18/busy-work-and-fake-work/

And why did this happen at all?! Well because I have failed, in the 'good rush' times to put my security in Christ. I depended on myself. I didn't give thanks when things were going right - I just took for granted that life is supposed to be like that if you put in enough work. When I'm working, actively putting knowledge into practise, feeling needed, valued and keen as a professional, I sold my strength out and forgot about living in God's strength and grace. As a result, really I was tired, and tiring out week-on-week, and starting to find it impacting on my relationships, just little things. Naturally, I'm a bit of a perfectionist; I love to do a good job, even to the point of doing things myself rather than asking others who are willing to help me 'in case it's not seemless, in case they miss something vital out'. I want things done right, I find my satisfaction in things being orderly. This perfectionism tendency is a whole other subject for another day. I guess part of the adrenaline rush is from being busy, getting out there in the morning, coming home tired in the evening. Feeling satisfied by the thrill of work (and I think this is more common than anyone admits).

However...! My security is in Christ, whether I'm doing pretty well or doing very badly. I'm not outside of God's grace when things are going right - in fact God has allowed that situation to happen in his Grace. I shouldn't take credit when things do go right - I'm not the author of the universe, the sustainer of all of creation, the giver of life and health and everything good we enjoy. When I feel tasks piling up on me I shouldn't look to my own strength to complete them - God gives us enough strength to do what we need to do. He gives us every new day.

I recently realised that the reason I get stressed and anxious is because I do not take to heart what God speaks to me in the bible and instead I take to heart what is being said by the people around me. But Jesus says a lot to us about anxiety. God says a lot to us over the whole course of the bible about anxiety. John Piper did a series of talks about battling unbelief in different areas of life to his church back in 1988, which seriously spoke the message home to me in a helpful way. You can find them here: http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/series-index/battling-unbelief
The reason I'm anxious is because I'm not trusting his word to me. Nowhere in the bible does God want us to be anxious. 

I thought I'd start somewhere easy and commit this Philippians verse  to my heart:

 ^'Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand;  do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.'

Some great truth here to hold onto:

• God is nearby (at hand); this fact means that he's always there to consult, he's not just left me to my own devices. He's ready to hear my prayers. He allows me to reach out for him.
• anxiety is a normal state of life that we struggle with as part of a fallen world, but at the same time the answer to anxiety is God
• thanksgiving in prayer is an antidote to anxiety
• God will guard our minds in Christ Jesus; because of our union with Christ in his death for us we have the righteousness of Christ, so our own perfectionism is pointless. I do not have to constantly worry about doing everything very well. It does not come down to me at all. It's all about him, our Lord and Teacher.
• Praise Jesus for transcendent (other worldly!) peace from God in our hearts and minds!

Enjoy grace folks

Welcome to House Of Grace Blog (aka the HOG Blog!)

Hello! JWelcome to my blog, House Of Grace.

It’s the first blog I’ve written, so I expect it will have it’s rough-around-the-edges moments. But my prayer and hope is that it will bless those who read it and will motivate me in penning what is essentially reflection on the stuff of life in the kingdom of God.

I started this blog with the title ‘Grace in the stephome’ but decided to change it to ‘House of Grace’ for two reasons. One is that I wanted to bless my friends, nuclear families in the vast majority (by God’s grace, hence I wanted to make the theme more relevant to others) and secondly because I believe that our microcosm picture of this ‘House of Grace’  in our homes – if indeed it is seen!- is pictured in the macrocosm of the church throughout history. I became a stepparent fairly recently, and all sorts of new challenges and questions were thrown my way, all of which in some way or another will always be there but the dust has settled (meaning it's not driving me loopy at the moment, not that I've swept it under the carpet but that I'm happier to change and grow as a result of it!); in the settling of the dust I realised that the challenge to live with grace in the home is not relevant to stepparenting alone, but to the entirety of life this side of eternity, and to the workplace, the nuclear family, discipleship and more!  I am constantly challenged about how to live and respond with grace to my stepchildren, but also to friends, family, colleagues, in all circumstances and even at times (!) my husband.

Way back in the day, Israel was to be God’s grace to the nations, a house of grace. The House of Grace. And the temple played a huge part in that picture – the Temple was where God met with his people. Solomon prayed that if foreigners, not of God’s people Israel came to the temple ‘for the sake of your great name and your mighty hand and your outstretched arm’ , that God would hear them and do ‘according to all which the foreigner calls to you, in order that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your people Israel...’ .  Jesus came because Israel did not want to bless the nations – Jesus threw out those selling and buying in the temple areas where the Non-Jewish God fearing people were allowed to worship saying “Is it not written ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” The church is not designed to be an exclusive club for believers, but a light for the nations, a light in the culture around us, representing the God of all nations.

Mrs Clennam from the BBC production of Little Dorrit, by Dickens http://www.bbc.co.uk/littledorrit/characterandcast/mrsclennam.shtml

Another weirder reason for the name stems from reflecting on what I want to avoid being. That is the House of Clennam of ‘Little Dorrit’ by Charles Dickens.  Plot spoiler alert. The House of Clennam is physically an old building falling down, anybody can see it is ready to collapse. At the centre of this building is Mrs Clennam, crippled by her lack of forgiveness of her late husband and certain of her righteousness before God for her own impeccable behaviour in comparison to her husbands ‘foolish sinful weakness’, when in fact she is hiding a dark deep sin of her own; Mr Clennam junior - hero in the story- is not Mrs Clennam's son and she has deprived him of a warm, loving relationship with herself, just as she has snatched away the love of his real mother, who died broken-hearted parted from her child. I reflected on the pretence of moral uprightness of this woman, clutching her bible and certain that her sin is hidden, and how we can find ourselves behaving in similar way sometimes. Afraid of uncovering our deeply ingrained and serious sin we keep ourselves neat and tidy and do not confess our sin, hiding it and comparing our 'surface' sin with other people's 'surface' sin. Mrs Clennam is an extreme picture, but the reality is here in the church. It's in me. 

The reason I don't have to be afraid of revealing my dark, deep sin is that Jesus has signed his own name against it. He's flung it into infinity ' as far as the East is from the West. That's how far he has removed our transgressions from us'.

Let's be real, the gloopy slime of the real us can be hideous, but to share our lives with others, we need to get serious about tearing down the moral façade. Let's get messy. Let's be church.