stripped

The way I have come to look at life, especially my life, is to ask the question, " What is God up to?" As I ask myself this question these days the word that comes to mind is stripped.  When I started blogging again this past June I used the metaphor of darkness to describe my situation.  Before I share a few thoughts on being stripped I'd like to refer you to a Scripture I ran across that confirmed the truth that we (as believers) are indeed still in a station of life that can be described as darkness.

   We have the word of the prophets made more certain, and you will do well to pay attention
   to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in
   your hearts.  (2 Peter 1:19)

How can the morning star rise in our hearts if we are already full of light - if Jesus, who is the light of the world, lives within us?  Is Peter aware of something that we as modern believers are blithely unaware of?  Have we confused faith with presumption?

I cannot speak for anyone else. I can only speak for myself.  The longer I live the less I know and the less I have certainty about what I used to feel so sure of.  I am being stripped.  It is a very vulnerable place to be.  As unsettling as it is I do find some comfort in it.  I'm comforted by the thought that this is a necessary part of the process of drawing nearer to God. Whatever that quality is that a young child has that Jesus said was necessary to enter his kingdom, surely that same quality is necessary for growing and maturing within the kingdom.  But that quality is so quickly lost! And if we don't regain it we're in grave danger!  We get a clue as to what this quality is when Jesus says, "Unless you humble yourself as a little child . . ."  A child's humility is very different than an adult's.  It is unencumbered, open-faced, no facades.  The only way we can get back to that kind of humility, I believe, is to be stripped.  A child has no problems with intimacy, as long as it feels loved.  Why am I not quicker to run to the open arms of Him whose arms are always open wide to receive me?  As adults we have to work hard at recovering that child-like humility.  A good place to begin is to start addressing your heavenly Father as "Daddy", or "Papa".  I heard Bob Jones (a modern day prophet who is no longer with us) tell a group of pastors to do that (he himself used the term "Papa" whenever referring to God).  I took his advice and discovered that although it took months to get used to doing that, it has now become my most frequent, one-word prayer - "Daddy!"  That prayer has brought more peace and comfort to me than all the others combined!  So often I simply don't know how to pray, words seem so inadequate.  But I know that He who made me knows my heart and always will hear and respond to the cry, "Daddy!"

So let the stripping continue.  The servant is not above the master.  Before Jesus went to the cross he also was stripped.  We could never go through what he went through for our sakes.  But he does ask us to follow him and in some way become like him in his death.

   I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his
   sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from
   the dead . . . I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me . . . 
   (Phillipians 4:10-14)