Let the light in.

Have you noticed how God sometimes allows you to see just how messed up you are in a certain area of life? He doesn’t do it to be mean. He doesn’t do it to make you feel less great. God wants you to be great that’s why He allows us glimpses into our humanity. Glimpses into our frailty and into our shortcomings. What I’ve learnt over the years is that there is a right and wrong way to respond when we get these glimpses. Our response can be governed by humility, pride or fear. Humility recognises our need of God. Pride tries to fix it. Fear tries to hide it.

Humility says, “God You are the Potter, and I am the clay make me more like You.” Pride says, “I’ve got this, I can do better.” It focuses on self and on what we can do not what God can do. Fear says, “I can pretend to have it all together so no one ever finds out how messed up I am.” The only way to transformation is by yielding and letting God be God in our lives.

We need to stop hiding and start asking, “Make me more like You Jesus.” Have you ever prayed this prayer? Last week we were talking about the transformative work of the Holy Spirit. When we yield to the Holy Spirit, we can’t help but want to be more and more like Jesus in every area of life.

2 Corinthians 3:16-18 says, “Whenever, though, they turn to face God as Moses did, God removes the veil and there they are—face-to-face! They suddenly recognize that God is a living, personal presence, not a piece of chiseled stone. And when God is personally present, a living Spirit, that old, constricting legislation is recognized as obsolete. We’re free of it! All of us! Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of his face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.”

God wants to remove the veil from our faces, He wants to remove the things we hide behind. The lies we have come to embrace as truth. The fears that have kept us bound. God wants to remove the veil not so we can be vulnerable and exposed but so we can see Him for who He really is.  We don’t get freedom by pretending to be something we are not, we get free when we face the harsh realities of life with God. When we do this, we experience the presence of God in that situation and it’s as though we are seeing God face to face.

God’s presence is a light that helps us see clearly. It is a light that exposes the darkness that tries to hide deep within us. When we let the light in, we can then begin to see God for who He really is. When we see ourselves clearly and we see God as God even in our messiness and embrace Him as Lord over our lives, we find freedom. Our lives are transformed from the inside out, and gradually, our lives become brighter and more beautiful.

Gradually, because as much as we want God to invade all of us all at once, it is a process. It is a process of surrender. It is a process of learning to put His will above our own will. It is a process of learning to put God first above self. It goes against our human nature, but it is what we need to do to let God in. To let the light in. It is summed up in Matthew 16:25 like this, “For if you choose self-sacrifice and lose your lives for my glory, you will continually discover true life. But if you choose to keep your lives for yourselves, you will forfeit what you try to keep.”

But what great joy to know that as we embark on this journey and let God into our lives, we become more like Him! All we have to do is to keep yielding to the Holy Spirit. Following and obeying what He asks of us. It is about being aware that we are not living this life on our own or for ourselves. This life that we have, we now live it with God, for God.

Love and blessings,

Melissa Tsingano.