DIG DEEP
Excavating the Depths of God and His Glorious Riches
August 5th, 2022
IMAGERY
Matthew 6:21, ‘”For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”’ (NIV)
We are learning that there is vast spiritual wealth available to each one of us who call ourselves Christians, who consider ourselves children of God. It is buried just under the surface of the Christian life, waiting to be discovered and drawn out. This month we are headed on a dig, so we can explore, excavate and extract the glorious riches God has for His children.
God created mankind in His image, this Holy God, made messy mankind in the perfect image of the Godhead. There is literally no way to define this. I remember when I was coming to terms with my sinfulness, my wretchedness—after having been a ‘Christian’ all my life, but realizing I only knew about Jesus, but I actually never knew Jesus—I could not comprehend Holy God not only loved lowly me, but He also created me to look and be like Him. Wow! I could not reckon with this; especially when I pictured what my life had always looked like, what I looked like on the inside of me. I’m telling you, there were no riches, no wealth, no buried treasure deep inside of me, I would have sworn.
I remember one day, while praying for breakthrough and to be dressed in the breastplate of righteousness, it hit me full force. I was suiting up in the armor of God and putting on the breastplate of righteousness, the piece of armor that only the righteous should wear. And I realize He saw me as righteous. It took my breath away. For weeks, months, whenever I prayed that Scripture in Ephesians 6:14b, ‘having put on the breastplate of righteousness’, I would weep. I could not wrap my mind around the fact that Holy God saw this misfit, misfortune, mistake as ‘righteous’, someone worthy of pulling on a piece of righteousness. That truth began to transform me. I realized I needed to war in the confidence for which Jesus gave His life; I needed to comprehend how He saw me; I needed to see myself through His lens, and that was having been created in the image of Christ. I needed to walk in the freedom Jesus came to earth to expose mankind to.
When we see ourselves as filth, we cannot accept, nor imagine or conceive, we are anything but trash. When we think of ourselves as wasted, all we will ever speak into existence is about our uselessness. When we scrape ourselves off the concrete or dig ourselves out of the dirt day after day, we never have the ability to pick our head up and consider any value whatsoever. But when we entertain we are a daughter of the Most High God, we walk differently, we carry ourselves differently, we begin to believe differently, and we dream of bigger and greater things.
God kept working at it, working on me, dredging up all the things that had long been buried, unearthing all the ghastly images of who I portrayed myself to be for all those years, extracting these morsels of His goodness from somewhere inside of me. Don’t get me wrong, none of us are worthy of anything Jesus Christ has done for us, especially me, but I began to sing a new song from a new place, once He pulled me out of my miry pit (Psalm 40). I realized I cannot show others all Jesus has done for me if I am wrapped in rags of self-condemnation. I cannot bear His image if I pull on my everyday leprous sinful skin, certain the world won’t want to get close enough to touch Him through me. It is impossible to see Christ in me if I bear false imagery of who He is.
You ever gone to school or worked in an office or been friends with that ultra-confidant person? They just walk differently, don’t they? It may be raining all around them, but it’s not raining on them. Ever. Right? That sanguine, hopeful, enthusiastic cheerleader on the sidelines of life, giving it their all, cheering us all on, buoyantly realistic, bold and dauntless, courageous and determined, about the Christian walk, its purpose and its hope. That’s who we are to reflect.
So, as you mine today, or as you allow yourself to be mined, let the Holy Spirit dreg out of you what looks like Jesus, what resembles Him, what reflects Him, what mirrors Him. It is how you were made. In His image.
2 Corinthians 2:10b: ‘The Spirit, not content to flit around on the surface, dives into the depths of God, and brings out what God had planned all along.’ (MSG)
