An interesting thought occured to me as I struggled today - what I do daily as God works on refining me.
It all began as I sat down for breakfast. 5 minutes before class was about to begin, I was polishing off my bowl of cereal when God clearly and distinctly said, "Love Me more than you love yourself."
As you can imagine, this statement left me speechless and slightly embarrassed. Then I got to thinkin', and the following are the results of my ponderin':
(I'll put this in list in order to make concrete what was just previously abstract)
1. You don't realize how much you love yourself until God asks you to love Him more than you love yourself.
2. And in shock you will mull this over...
3. You don't realize how difficult it is to love God more than yourself, once fully understanding ALL implications of that simple request.
*Simple - Ha! FAR from...*
4. It's only then, in this state, that we realize how self-serving we are, that we realize our narcissism, our love of self...
5. And in the midst of all of these thoughts floating around, unorganized within your head, another equally stretching thought passes through:
6. That though it has been about ourselves all along, we can't--even in our vast experience of self-serving--help ourselves along this time.
7. Rather, we STILL can't. We never could. We only thought we could.
8. And then you realize that when He asks you to love Him more than you love yourself, He's also asking us to recognize our capabilities and our limitations--
9. That not even when He asks us to love Him more than ourselves are we ABLE to do so!
*Just take a break here, get some water, stick your head out the window, do whatever you need 'cause we're going back for more*
10. Upon realizing your size and insignificance, all the reasons you held (perhaps subconsciously) for serving yourself, living for your own benefit, seem microscopic, smaller than an amoeba, smaller than an atom, smaller than electron, really really really small--
11. BECAUSE--*...this is good...*BECAUSE--we can't even help ourselves to love ourselves less than we love the Father!
*Just swim to the surface now and take a breather*
Refining is so uncomfortable!
The reason why I'm so adamant about this, is because as one currently affected by the refining process, I want to make sure that I go through it as soon as possible--self-serving, I know. However, this requires of me that I lay everything down.
My mom once told me this, "The easier the silver yields to the Silversmith, the less refinement the silver has to go through, the less the Silversmith has to work at it to get it smooth to where He can see His reflection in it."
I don't know about you, but I rather give in than drag my feet through this. The harsh reality is this (for those of us followers of Christ out there): refinement is inevitable--otherwise we are incapable of truly being servants of God. Your refinement might be different from mine, but it's refinement all the same.
This is what you CAN control, you can control your attitude, the attitude that affects the decision you will make regarding the difficulty, duration and intensity of the refinement.
