Joiner

I watched a video this morning that someone sent to me. It was such a profound message. It is about God, or Jesus being the bridegroom and the church, or believers is the bride. In this video Jonathan Cahn speaks of God being the Khatan, which is a Hebrew word for God, but also means joiner. He says that God wants to be joined to us. The thing that struck me the most though, was the way he said that we come to God with all our baggage and He accepts us that way, and because of that no-one can separate us from Him. Suddenly it all fell into place for me.

What we normally hear is that we have to give all our burdens and all our baggage to Jesus, and He will handle it for us. Even mature Christians often have a problem doing that. It’s difficult and the responsibility is on you to be doing it. I would guess that 99% of the time we try to do it, and by trying, it becomes self-effort. We do it in our own strength. We know that we aren’t supposed to do things in our own strength because it doesn’t work! What Jonathan Cahn says is that we come to Jesus together with everything we have all our sin, all our bad parts, every part of our lives that is unsightly, everything that we’re ashamed of, and I’m going to add, everything that we have trouble believing.

We come to Jesus as a package deal. We don’t separate those things from ourselves and give them to Jesus. We jump into the river of His grace boots and all. What Jesus then does is He accepts us with the mud on our faces and starts to wash us clean. He starts to change our hearts and to heal our hurts. He teaches us the way we should be living. He does it. Not us!

Psalm 51:2, Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from sin.

1 John 1:9, If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Once we accept Jesus as our Saviour we are supposed to be living holy lives and not sinning anymore, but because we are humans, we can only do that step by step. I think the thing which trips us up the most is stress and worry. I have said so many times that we should just give our worries to Jesus and He will take care of them. And He will. The part I was missing though was how we should give them to Him. Instead of distancing ourselves from our worries, or stress, or sin, or whatever, is by giving ourselves to Jesus. We should come before Him and offer ourselves to Him.

Romans 12:1, I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

Here Paul says it. We must offer ourselves to God as a living sacrifice. We only realise what it is to really do God’s will when it’s a sacrifice, when it costs us. We come with that worry and we allow God to separate that worry from us. We don’t do it in our own strength. He does it. And it hurts because we like to solve our own problems and we like to be in charge and know what the outcome is going to be. We don’t like to give someone else the control of our lives. We have to give our lives to God every day, and sometimes multiple times a day. He knows the plan, He drew the map. We can trust Him with every little detail. We don’t give Him the problem, we give Him ourselves. We just have to say, “Here I am, together with this worry, together with this problem that is threatening to overwhelm me.”  Try it! It will change your life!