This is a great quote. I loved it when I was looking through many others about resistance.
However, when you read James 4:7 you realize that you cannot paralyze fear. You can only keep it on the run. You are the only one who can be paralyzed by fear.
James 4:7 says, “Submit yourselves therefore unto God, resist the devil and he will flee from you.”
So how do we learn to persist in the storm, in the desert, in times when we feel the resistance from evil the most or remember during the least resistance?
Persistance In Resistance
This morning I was so exhausted. This is normal for me, but it was unusual so I hit snooze and woke again thirty minutes later. I got ready, the family was sick, so I was going to church alone.
Broken and alone. But, it did not matter because I knew the one who could put me back together is Jesus, and it had been weeks since I had attended a Sunday worship outside of my home.
I turned the worship music up loud, and I drank in each word. I prayed and I cried.
I had recently been doing a study to answer, “Who do you say that I am?
All my life I have been one to look at all that I am not and take an hourly assessment of what I had done wrong in that time. With a microscope that has subatomic potential I zoom in on my faults, my inconsistencies, my weaknesses, my shortcomings. However, this morning God showed me something that has me singing a new song of thanksgiving.
A Burning Bush
In Exodus 3:1-14, God is talking to Moses. He is telling Moses to go into Eqypt and tell Pharoah to let His people go. Moses is like, “But God, I……, and please don’t ask me.”
I never really thought about it before, but Moses had a subatomic microscope of sorts too. Forty years wandering in the desert with your sins, shortcoming, and weaknesses sure do narrow your perspective.
When Moses finally concedes he asks, “Who do I tell them sent me?” I love this question. Moses is like I am not even going there unless I have back up, and someone else’s authority. I’m not one people would believe. Do you think that he was rolling his sins over and over in his mind? Or considering why God had him in this desert place for so long? I do.
But Then
Suddenly God says something I have been wrestling with in my mind. He says, “Tell them that I AM sent you.”
As I wiped my tears, praying I would still have makeup on when I got to service, I realized why the resistance has had such a hold on me. I have been so busy looking at me and the I’m not, that I have forgotten to magnify the I AM. I have stocked up ammunition for the enemy to continually use against me. So I said, ” Lord, I lay down the I’m not, and I am running to the I am.”
When it came time to pray during the service I asked for prayer for healing, for deliverance from the Egypt of my life, and help to hold onto the anchor of our souls. Jesus. The I AM.
I laid down everything I didn’t want anyone to know and held the hands of Jesus with skin on people who prayed victory over my life and confirmed continued prayer for my family and I more than once.
[Tweet “I ran from everything I’m not straight into the arms of the I AM.”]
The resistance was pressing hard against this weary soul. But the gates of hell could not stand against His church when I submitted to the Lord and His truth, to His bride and their fellowship, to taking the shadows into the Light and watching the roaches of evil scatter.
We must first submit to God so that the enemy flees. We must be persistent, and when we can’t do it alone grab the hand of a praying people who can bring us to Jesus. Who can change our perspective from I’m not to that of the I AM.
Would you join me in journaling about being persistent in submission to God and against resistance? On your own, in the comments, or on your blog.
Link up will be each Wednesday. Write your post any day of the week, and then link up to share. I pray the community here will be a place where we can submit to God, and watch the enemy flee.
Blessings Beloved,
♡ Melinda McCray
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Have a Rockin’ Day!
Another Samaritan Woman 