The Test of ‘Choosing God Over Myself’
Man, surrendering to God is something we have to remember to do every single day.
It’s a commitment, and the weight of that commitment can feel heavy when we’re not surrendering daily.
When you forget to surrender, as I often did, you could suddenly find yourself discouraged, even experiencing depressive symptoms, when just a few days ago you were standing ever so joyfully and strong with Him.
I was left confused.
How can I, a follower of Christ, feel this low when I am called to live in Joy?
I am sure you, as a reader, can relate. But a few days ago, the power of prayer rescued me, and I want to share what happened.
Just as I said before, I felt my state of mind shift into a state of depressiveness. I experienced a heaviness that took away all my happiness toward the things I normally enjoy; I couldn’t think clearly; and it brought a level of sadness I can’t even put into words. At the same time, I was confused about why I felt this way when I knew I stand with God and that I’m actually okay, so I asked God, “what is going on?”
I tried to encourage myself and speak life, but it wasn’t working. I turned to God, confused about why speaking over myself wasn’t helping, and in that moment of turning to Him, something happened within me. It was like a switch flipped, and I immediately found courage and spoke boldly.
I said, “You wicked spirit that has been lingering on me for who knows how long, you are not welcome here. This body belongs to God. I serve God. I know why I’m feeling low right now [personal hardship spoken]. But, once again, I’m starting to feel the weight of choosing Jesus. But, it doesn’t matter, I am not who I once was:
I’m not going to fall for this ‘out cry to God for things to be different’ [devil’s snare] and lose my way in Him again.
I am not choosing myself anymore.
I refuse to choose the things that feed my personal desires or others’ expectations.
Today, and everyday after, I am choosing Jesus, the One who saved my life and gave me a second chance to live a life through His.
So you, wicked and demonic spirit, I command you to leave. You have no place in me, and you never will, so do not even think of returning.”
All of a sudden, my entire body suddenly became extremely hot in this cold weather; as if I was placed in a fiery furnace, yet there was a coating that protected me from the burn while still allowing me to feel the heat; it was so warm it felt like an embrace.
But, what I didn’t realize at the time was that I had an encounter and received a visitation from the Lord. What I did moved God’s heart, and He came to me and told me, “…The Lord out of heaven, you shall embrace, filled with all the fulness of God in glory by Christ Jesus…”
Embrace refers to drawing something or someone in; it is an act of openness, whether physically, emotionally, or spiritually. That declaration I spoke over myself was not merely words. It was an act that showed God I am willing to let His Son come close, let Jesus affect me, and finally let Him become part of my life. Which is insane because I thought my life already reflected that!
It then dawned upon me that we can’t trick God through our words or our actions; He looks at the conditions of our hearts and judges us there.
There was a cloud over my heart. It made something within me feel dark, giving my internal world an eerie feeling and creating a discomfort that made my heart feel tight. It is only now, as I am writing, that the Spirit of God has made clear when the cloud came. It was right when I recommitted my life to Christ as an adult three years ago and told Him that I wanted to choose Him but felt I could not. There were barriers in place that were preventing me from becoming who I truly wanted to be. That was an earnest cry to the Lord. I finally faced the parts of myself that haunted me. In that moment, the Holy Spirit led me to say, “If You [masked]… I’ll be Your walking, living testimony,” and from that day forward, I have been tested on that spoken word.
God kept up His end of the bargain, but I never kept mine. I was still living in a confused state, mixing my desires with God’s instead of fully surrendering myself into His hands and abandoning everything I had ever known. And when the plans I put together failed and my desires never came to pass, I would always choose to stand by God and be okay with it, yet I never noticed how the condition of my heart was growing dark.
A cloud came because of my actions: brushing aside how I truly felt in order to be with God. But even in that state [brushed feelings aside], how could God use me for His purposes when, deep down, I did not really want to be where He was? It sounds crazy to say, but it was true. 90% of me was with God’s plans, but 10% still wished for my own and wanted them to come true.
The problem was that I had not yet matured into the version of myself who chooses God not because I think it is simply the right thing to do, but because I want to, because it is my earnest desire. It is only in that place that God gets all of me, not just a part of me.
So God tested me. He paved ways that enabled spiritual growth and positioned my heart to earnestly choose Him, yet I kept missing the mark every single time. Oh, the trials and tribulations that came with every failed test, I do not even want to talk about it, lol! But now I see that my suffering was not for nothing; it was actually all for me and my fellowship with God. It was all for the desire I once had, long ago, that sat at the forefront of my prayers to God [before I got distracted]: the desire to choose Him.
God said, “let’s test that desire.” Then proceeded to give me the “test of surrender;” “the test of choosing God over myself.”
Those tests allowed my heart to be exposed to a dark cloud that sometimes took days to escape from. But that exposure had a purpose. God allowed me to enter that state of heaviness and did not answer my prayers when I asked Him to take the pain away, because He wanted me to speak over it. He wanted me to see it, to recognize the condition of my heart, to understand why I felt that way, to tell myself its okay with how I was feeling, and then to humbly come before Him, release the feelings and thoughts that were weakening me internally, and speak peace and truth over them, and most importantly, actually believe what I was telling myself.
It is important to know that I was never in a constant state of feeling that low. The weight would return out of nowhere, almost like it came in cycles. After a period of convincing myself that I was standing with God instead of choosing what I wanted, and then grooving with Him and keeping him at the center —boom: Whatever I had done to protect myself from the weight before, God broke through it, and there I was again, faced with the true condition of my heart and what it looked like beneath the surface.
But praise God, hallelujah! The day finally came; the day of exposure where I did not back down. It was what God wanted for me and what I had wanted for myself four years ago. And I will say this: my devotion with God throughout the past few weeks had prepared me for that upcoming test.
My takeaway for anyone reading this is to not be afraid to share with God how you truly feel. Invite those feelings in, not to live in them, but to examine them and find clarity about where your heart is rooted. Validate those feelings, because there is always a clear reason why they are there, and that awareness will show you what needs to be done next.
The Holy Spirit will lead you into building a strong foundation in Christ Jesus that you can stand on, and for those who have an upcoming test, that might be the very ground you need to stand on to pass it.
I will leave you with this: Often there is something forming quietly within a person, and it slowly develops until the day it becomes visible in its fuller form on the outside. The question is, if you were a fly on the wall and had to look at the state you are in, the visible part of where your heart is rooted within, what would you see?
Remember that I saw a cloud.