Getting Honest With God
It feels difficult because truth can make us wildly uncomfortable and we are creatures bent on seeking comfort. But ironically, we deeply desire to know truth- and that always starts with honesty.
Have you ever experienced the type of honesty that stings and brings relief all at once?
Like when you love someone and you know you have to be brutally honest with them, but it feels difficult because it might cause division or strife?
Yet paradoxically, this honesty, this seemingly difficult thing, often brings us massive relief; like a release of weight.
Honesty is what helps us unlock the truth of a situation or circumstance.
It feels difficult because truth can make us wildly uncomfortable and we are creatures bent on seeking comfort. But ironically, we deeply desire to know truth- and that always starts with honesty.
Honesty is hard, but holding back is even harder.
Without honesty, our life is built on a lie. But when we live in lies, we convince ourself that’s normal, because it’s what we see others doing.
Honesty takes practice. It takes vulnerability. It takes introspection.
There are plenty of people today who have spent a lifetime avoiding every one of those things and the result is that they live feeling disconnected and inauthentic, but can’t figure out why.
This post is about the deepest layer of honesty we can attain- honesty with God.
Your inability to attain this level of honesty with the one that formed your very soul is part of what keeps you distant from the one who desperately desires to be close to you.
I spent my whole life hiding from God, because I was unable to be honest with him.
I never saw this as an honesty issue though; I just knew that I had to keep the erroneous, irreverent thoughts I had about God to myself, because I believed that being honest about my feelings toward God would cause him to hate me and would solidify my biggest fear- that he was mean and harsh and everything I didn’t want him to be.
What I have found in my journey with the Lord, and in my coaching with women, is that the act of becoming radically open and vulnerable will bring you the greatest freedom possible.
Jesus always works in the light, never in the dark.
He can pursue you consistently (and he does.. if you’re reading this right now, let it be known that he is speaking to you!) but if you cannot open your heart to reveal how you *really* feel about him and who he is and what he asks of you.. He won’t be able to dig into your heart space and excavate the truth of the situation with you.
Your honesty is the key that unlocks his truth in your life.
There is a level in which we have all hated God. We have all resisted him and decided to sin against him.
All have fallen short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23
This hate, this disdain, this frustration takes root in us. The roots begin to flourish into lies that inhibit us from believing we can even access God. We believe he is unattainable, he is unreliable, and ultimately we want nothing to do with the idea of the God we have in our head.
I thought I knew God most of my life.
I knew him from what people in church said. I knew him from the rules my youth counselors told me I had to follow to be a Christian. I knew him from how my religious family members lived their lives. I knew him from the agnostics and atheists who disproved him. I knew him from the feminists who told me he was against women. I knew him from christian books and world religion books. I knew him from every side of the spectrum- every angle in the human lens.
And what I knew from all of this was that he was not someone I desired to commune with.
And then there are those of us who take the route of desensitizing. We decide we just don’t believe he exists at all.
And I think for some, it feels more comfortable to say I don’t believe in God, then to say I hate him.
It feels easier to discount all of the wondering, pondering, hypothesizing about him if we just decide to believe he does not exist.
Yet, everything in us points us back to his existence.
Every broken moment when we crave comfort no one can give us.
Every sunset that fades and brings us deep realization that our very lives on the earth will be gone in a flash.
Every deep longing for peace we can’t seem to satisfy when thinking about our destiny, purpose, and future.
The idea of a Creator that has all-consuming love for us, gives us joy in our life purpose, and ultimately desires to bring us into an eternity of euphoria with him is incredibly attractive.
The thought that there IS something more than all the brokenness, sadness, and discomfort we see around us and in us, creates glimmers of hope that shimmer in momentary acts of reflection.
And the promise that there is joy, peace, and love that surpasses any we’ve ever known or experienced in mortality, and can only access through spiritual (supernatural) means now and in the future, stimulates and stirs a deep desire in us that makes us crave this kind of otherworldly experience at our very core.
But then there are the lies.
The inhibitions.
The fears.
The very substance of what snuffs out those glimmers of hope; the black clouds that withhold the purity of light to break forth into our perception.
And oh, how many I believed.
Each lie, each frustration, each piece of bitterness took root in me. It became like a big spider web- thin and veiled, hardly perceptible upon first gaze; but powerfully sticky and messy when I started to touch it and see it for what it was.
I wrestled with the concept of God my whole life.
Partly because I grew up in a Christian environment that pressed me to think about it.
And mostly because there was a deep and visceral part of my soul that wanted to believe God was good and real and tangible.
But I was thoroughly convinced he wasn’t.
And I wasn’t honest with anyone about those feelings, until I hit my 20’s.
I speculated in my head every time I was in church. I inwardly scoffed at people who worshipped the Lord. I grew increasingly bitter that all I ever heard being taught was to have faith in God (read: blind belief).
How could I just ‘have faith’ in something I didn’t like? I wasn’t attracted to? I got nothing out of? I felt no connection to? What was the point of that?
My nature, my wiring, my bent is authenticity. I need something real. I need something tangible. I don’t blindly believe anything and I honestly used to be disgusted by people who do.
So that is where I found myself- despising all of the people who said God was real and loving and faithful when I was experiencing NOTHING from the Lord.
This formulated into a lie that God expected everything from me, and gave nothing in return. I was to sacrifice every pleasure and piece of my existence to him for a life dedicated to bland piety and hope in something that really didn’t exist in my mind.
To do that- to follow through with a blind faith that required nothing but sacrifice- felt incredibly impossible to me. Like a death to my soul.
So I began to despise him for his demanding nature that required me to live a life I would hate. A life that would steal my ‘true’ identity.
This lie then began to spin into another.
God didn’t want me to experience joy. He didn’t want me to experience freedom. He didn’t want me to be myself.
I felt this most deeply about my sexual life.
My version of love, pleasure, and ultimate euphoria was experienced through sex.
And ultimately, I knew that to live for Jesus, meant to stop doing that before I was married.
Why would I do that? Why should I give up something that’s good for me- that brings me pleasure and connection?
My relationships were rooted in love and acceptance. I didn’t understand the problem.
This lie became so deep and so strong, because my bodily/physical expression had been such a core piece of my identity for so long. It comes back to that edge for authenticity, for tangibility and visceral experience. My body was the primary way I was able to flesh out this need in my soul. To cut that off felt like it was going against my identity in every way.
And so the cold, hard lie that began to seep into my blood was that God didn’t want me to love my body or appreciate my body.
He saw my act of expression as dirty and wrong. Consequently, he saw my body and my desires as bad. I became the victim of a villain who wanted to rip me from my body and my pleasure.
This lie started from a young age, and as I stepped farther and farther away from God, the enemy strategically confirmed this lie to me time and time again.
Once I began opening up to a few women in my life who had bad experiences in church in their younger years, they would affirm my feelings. They ALSO didn’t believe in God or the church because he expected them to give up their freedom, spontaneity, and connection to their feminine body through sex.
I read feminist books that would hit chords in me and resonate with the bitterness I felt against volatile men. Suddenly, I found myself reading the same theme over and over again in these books- God was one of those volatile male perpetrators – religion was created to withhold women’s freedom and expression. The concept of God and the ideas in the Bible were the reason I had been pushed down, made to feel shame over my sexual choices, and ultimately the reason I felt such disdain towards the idea of God. To be a Christian was a hoax; meant to destroy my expression and alienate me from my body.
It was like drinking tasteful poison.
It felt good going down. The confirmation felt soothing and empowering. But once it hit the heart, it poisoned any life that had been there. It turned black any bits of truth I had known and birthed a false confidence in my ability to overcome this religious system of oppression. The premise was that THIS was freedom. This was the truth that would liberate me and my femininity. God was holding me back, and this truth of denying him and his oppression was here to set me free.
But the fruit of that never came. It was only a fleeting sense of self-justification. It didn’t change anything about my heart or my will or my peace or my joy. It didn’t give me more freedom, just more bitterness. It was a counterfeit.
The sister lie was birthed next.
To follow Christ was way too difficult. Too many rules for religious living. Totally unobtainable. Overwhelmingly complex to live out in the 21st century.
Not fun. Not desirable. Not easy.
It was so much easier to do life my way. I was a kind person. I had dreams and hopes and desires that felt good and normal. I felt happy sometimes.
What did I need from Jesus that I couldn’t get myself… without all the rules?
The web kept getting bigger and tighter and stickier. Little lies became big ones and those became my driving force for keeping distance between me and God.
It brought me to a place of giving up all together.
Doesn’t make sense, not worth it, and frustrating to even think about.
Satan thought he had me there. His goal was to wear me out and wear me down.
That’s the goal he has set on your life too.
Back to the spider analogy.. the lies of the enemy are like the little eggs spiders lay. If he can get you to a place where you allow the web to formulate, he can lay the eggs. The eggs will embed themselves there. Once they hatch, they wreak more havoc. More webs. More stickiness. It starts to feel overwhelming. Uncontrollable and ultimately frustrating to get out of.
So then you just exist with them.
You live in them and from them.
You ignore the problem until one day, the lies become your truth.
Such a great, compassionate God I serve that he pursued me in the depths of those lies. He walked into the mess and was determined to bring me out.
Even when I hated him.
Even when I was determined to stay stuck.
He came for me.
And he’s coming for you too.
There came a season where feelings of hopelessness and despair were not fleeting anymore. They became my companions.
I would wake up in the morning and not want to get out of bed. The first thought in my head was “what’s the point?”
I would see my life in front of me- my hope, dreams, and desires; some I was currently living. And as I would play them all out in my head, the end of each just looked like more disappointment, more struggle, more sadness in the things I couldn’t control.
I wasn’t deceived by the promise of money, or love, or escaping my life anymore. The reality I was now facing was a bottomless pit of hopelessness. The thought reverberating in every still moment I had- ‘Is this really it?’
I had never once contemplated suicide in my life. And I can honestly say, it was not something I ever planned to do. But I became very afraid of the thoughts that were starting to develop in me; thoughts I had to push away while feeling astonished they had even come to mind at all.
One of the main thoughts was that this world is too hard, and this life is too much.. living is a burden, not a gift. It would feel better to leave it behind.
The Bible tells us that out of the heart, a man’s mouth speaks.
The lies in my heart were affecting me in deeper ways than I could have estimated or foreseen. The lies I believed, the disgust I had for my Creator, and the distance that was so vast between us was consequently allowing death to conquer my heart.
I wasn’t living my daily life in deep depression. I didn’t struggle with anxiety. I was emotionally healthy from the outside looking in. I was stable and loved by friends and family.
But it does not matter who you are, what job you work at, how much people love you, or how many medications you are taking.
Satan’s goal is still the same for me and for you- to create beliefs in us that perceive our lives as unworthy of being lived.
While you are living and breathing on this planet, there is still an opportunity for you to accept Jesus and the freedom he died to give you.
But if Satan can destroy you here and now, you will be in eternal death- never to have that opportunity again.
His mission is strong to eliminate that opportunity- but Christ’s blood is so much more victorious than that. God is serious about eternity, and he will do anything to redeem you.
It was very cunning how the enemy was planting seeds of death and suicide thoughts in my mind. If I suddenly fell into deep depression and admitted to friends and family I was having these tendencies, people would have stepped up and started praying for me. They would have helped me and shown me the love of Jesus.
But they were fleeting thoughts that I easily pushed away and consequently became all the more lethal. Anything that is seen as arbitrary requires no immediate action or attention.
By the mighty grace of God, I began to recognize this pattern and these thoughts as destructive and deadly.
It was then that I began to feel an urge to step towards life, because it was then that I tasted the reality of death.
One morning, it all came to a head. I was exhausted with the lifestyle of addiction I kept finding myself in, and the hopelessness rising up in me day by day.
I stood in my apartment alone and cried out to Jesus for help to take it all away. I didn’t want to feel this way anymore. I didn’t want to be this person.
And suddenly, I started to spill out every thought I had ever had towards him. In this moment, it had nothing to do with church or friends or books or education or debates.
It only had to do with a soul that was reduced to bare vulnerability and desperation – reaching towards the one thing I was inclined to believe could change all of it.
I told him I had hated him for so long, but I wanted to love him.
I told him I didn’t see him as good, but I really wanted to.
I told him I was tired of my pride and feeling like I could rectify my own brokenness and disconnection, and I didn’t know if he would change me, but I knew I could not.
I cried the hardest I have ever cried in my life.
Waves of shame, regret, and desperation were breaking over me.
For the first time in my life, I was face to face with the war that sin had waged on my soul. Sin that was mine.
It was nothing short of glorious, because in the face of all that pain and shame, Jesus came and touched me with deep love.
There will never be words to describe an experience with the living God, but as I cried and released, I felt a weight begin to lift.
I felt assurance that He was there with me and he wanted to save me from this pit I had been in.
Tears of shame turned into tears of wonder when I could feel his presence wash over me with tangible peace and healing.
After an hour of this, I sat in silence. The enemy immediately came in like a flood- ‘it will never work.. you’ve tried this before.’
I began to feel afraid that it was only a moment of connection, to be followed by more disappointment.
Immediately the Spirit of God prompted me to go to my bible and turn to Isaiah.
As I flipped to Isaiah, a scripture immediately stood out to me-
See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; don’t you perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
And streams in the wasteland
Isaiah 43:19
I marveled at the fact that God had just spoke to me in this way.
Several minutes later, I sat on the couch and the enemy came at me again.. ‘This is too hard, remember? You’ll never be able to stick with it.’
Suddenly, Jesus’ words were ringing in my ears-
Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. Matthew 11:28-30
And it was then that I knew- God was for me, not against me.
I had just expressed everything I had held against him, and asked for him to change my feelings and wash my soul clean from sin and death, and here he was- holding up truth in the face of the lies to set me free.
I cried for a few more hours and more healing began to take place.
I felt all of the depression and hopelessness dissipate in the following week.
I was no longer desiring to smoke weed.
I felt light and energized.
I felt loved.
I felt hope.
Best of all, I experienced lasting peace.
I would meet with him daily, in solitude, and ask him the questions I had. I would invite his presence, and the first several months of my walk with Jesus, I would sometimes cry for hours. It was always a release and a joy- tangible internal feelings of healing taking place- even though I wasn’t always sure what was healing.
For the first time I began talking to him out of love and willingness, not out of spite and animosity. And honesty was at the forefront of every conversation.
And in the following weeks after my conversion, the Lord began to break down every single lie that I had believed about him.
There were various ways he did this, but one circumstance was particularly lovely.
I really love to read. Books are the primary way I learn. Jesus knows this about me.
One week, I had been praying every morning for understanding and heart change- I was still attached to the view that God had a lower view of women than men in the Bible.
I was asking the Lord to give me insight- to help me understand his truth and his heart for women.
Later that week, I visited a friend across town. I wasn’t usually on this side of town, and I remembered there was a library that I loved in the area.
I told myself that I didn’t need to go, because I was already reading several books, but I felt a strong pull to go to this specific library!
So after visiting my friend, I headed over.
I walked up the stairs, aimlessly wandering so I could browse- and in the very first section in front of me, a bright yellow book was pulled forward; sticking out on the shelf.
I was obviously drawn to it, and as I picked it up I understood why- the title of the book was Jesus Feminist.
I knew it was for me.
The book answered hard questions I had wondered about for so long, and ignited a new love in my heart for Jesus- the man who is always the first to respect and affirm women when no one else is.
God knows every question, desire, and thought you have. He desires to satisfy everything you need, including your questions. And he will, if you open up your heart to him.
Sometime after this, I began to reflect on what made the difference of my connection to God, my ability to hear him and feel him and love him, compared to my past attempts.
I realized that it was two things: my honesty and my genuine repentance.
I would be remiss if I did not drive home the point that honesty with God is meaningless if you have not also recognized your sin nature.
If honesty is the key that unlocks the truth, asking forgiveness for your sin is the lock that fits it.
I used to hate the idea of sin. I thought it meant I was bad- just another trick to keep me feeing disconnected from my true self.
In reality, it just means I am broken- under a curse that leads me to death. When I came face to face with that in my soul, it became undeniable.
But Jesus rectified that- he shed his blood and laid down his life so that the curse would be broken on our souls and we could choose life in and through him.
The choice is yours-
See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. Deuteronomy 30:15
But pride is the ultimate opponent of repentance, and my heart was certainly prideful.
We hate to think we are wrong in some way- we resist anything that creates change in us. We are bent on comfort and comfort does not allow for productive change.
I didn’t want to admit I needed Jesus, yet my life was not bearing the fruit that I was craving, no matter how hard I tried.
I was always thirsty- seeking pleasure, peace, and connection… with nothing to fully satisfy that thirst.
Listen to what the Lord says-
‘Give careful thought to your ways.
You try and do and hope and strive.. but you’re still stuck.
You still have nothing.
You still desire more.’
Haggai 1:5-6
It’s like when you’ve done all the yoga, and meditation, and drugs, but still can’t grasp peace.
When you’ve finally bought the thing you wanted, but still feel the insatiable need for more.
Or when you’ve achieved marriage, degrees, and titles but still feel like you’re missing the mark.
Why?
Because you have neglected God.
You have left him out.
You have harbored hate against him and focused only on what you can do as mortal, completely ignoring the almighty that gives you breath and life and desires to satisfy you with good things!
The one who not only has a legacy of peace and purpose for you in this life- but also in the one to come.
This is what the Lord says about repentance bringing blessing-
‘Return to the Lord your God.
Your sins have been your downfall!
Take words with you and return to the Lord.
Say to him:
Forgive all our sins and receive us graciously,
That we may offer the fruit of our lips.
I will heal their waywardness and love them freely,
For my anger has turned away from them,
I will be like the dew to Israel;
He will blossom like a lily.
Like a cedar of Lebanon
He will send down his roots;
His young shoots will grow.
His splendor will be like an olive tree,
His fragrance like a cedar of Lebanon.
People will dwell again in his shade;
They will flourish like the grain,
They will blossom like the vine.
What more have I to do with idols?
I will answer him and care for him.
I am like a flourishing juniper;
Your fruitfulness comes from me.”
Now listen to what he says to those who recognize that repentance is the road to life…
Who is wise? Let them realize these things.
Who is discerning? Let them understand.
The ways of the Lord are right;
The righteous walk in them,
But the rebellious stumble in them.
Hosea 14
I can testify to the truth of his word, because he has loved me freely and blessed me in every way. I am now bearing the fruit that I could never attain on my own.
Believe he is real and available to you, understand your deep need for him, repent of your sin that has caused the disconnection, and seek the kingdom of God.
Your journey is not mine and your thoughts, ideas, and pride might show up in different ways than mine did.
But I implore you to get honest with yourself and your Creator with all of it. That honesty is the catalyst to your freedom.
He beckons you into that place, and waits for you there.
They shall know the truth, and the truth shall set them free. John 8:32
Ashley