identity

There is absolutely no part of you that can be labeled dark or unclean if you are a believer in Jesus! His righteousness is your righteousness and you have wholeness within you! Your humanity has been completely redeemed!    

Welcome to Week #1 of our Journey to Living Fully Alive

The Lie: There are dark places within us that WE have to fix or clean up

If you had a chance to read our stories, you will have discovered that the journey to ‘Living Fully Alive’ for us was really all about our hearts. We tend to believe that this is also true for every human being on the planet. Our hearts or our spirit (words that are often used interchangeably), were designed from the beginning to be known and to be loved.

Our greatest desire is to be known and to be loved by God first. We want to know that He is pleased with us and desires to have a relationship with us. But when the things that we are taught and the experiences that we have, seem to speak the opposite (that He can not be pleased with us unless we are perfect and He can not be with us if we make a mistake) – our hearts are crushed.

We spent most of our lives hating ourselves because we did not feel like we could ever be good enough to be loved by God or that for some reason He had not chosen us or did not want us, or maybe we had too many dark places inside of us to be accepted or worthy of love.

If you too, are like us, you may feel like you have some “dark places” that prevent you from receiving love. The most common examples of “dark places” are:

• Failures – mistakes, poor choices, bad behavior, addictions
• Imperfections – lack of motivation, natural desires, appearance, lack of giftings or talent, not being enough, not being able to measure up
• Priorities – lack of diligence in spiritual disciplines, putting relationships & money before God, not loving others well, not being able to accomplish dreams or tasks
• Body – negative emotions, unhealthy lifestyle, bad cravings, shape & size of your body, hormones, sexual desires, PMS, sickness
• Mind – destructive thinking, crazy thoughts, imagination

It is sad to realize that we have actually been taught to believe that God is not present in these so called darkened areas of our existence. If we believe God is not present in these areas of our life, and God is Love, then we will keep love from these areas of ourselves that need it the most. It is even sadder when we realize that the result of starving ourselves of love is living with disunity within ourselves, shame, guilt, condemnation, pain, and exhaustion. And how were we taught to deal with this pain? If you are like us, you were taught to find a way to fix yourself, hide your real self while keeping it all together, or deny the pain altogether by throwing a scripture at it – until one day you eventually explode and break down.    (more…)