There’s something about opening the pages of a new journal this morning that sets my heart on fire to see what my walk with Jesus will hold this trip around the sun. The 3 journals stacked here on the left chronicled 2015.
And today…today there’s fresh new pages. There is a fresh new year to see God’s GOODNESS, to report of His GLORY, and to experience His GRACE revealed in the most wonderful of places and the most unexpected of scenes.
But before I move on too quickly, I always love being able to look back at what God was saying to me this time last year. I wrote a blog about the word He gave me and my best friend for 2015 about prayer (which you can read here). God DID radically transform my prayer life last year. As I flipped through those early dates of 2015 I came across this…
It’s what I penned on 1/18/15, here’s what it says:
“Whenever, though, they turn to face God as Moses did, God removes the veil and there they are—face-to-face! They suddenly recognize that God is a living, personal presence, not a piece of chiseled stone. And when God is personally present, a living Spirit, that old, constricting legislation is recognized as obsolete. We’re free of it! All of us! Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of his face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.”
2 Corinthians 3:16-18 MSG
We all get to come. Unveiled, bare, holding nothing back, no doubts, no fear, no fighting what He’s saying, no resistance, no fluffing up or puffing up, no pouting or whining, no dressing-up or messing-with. -God, remove the veil; nothing between You & us, Lord God.”
—So, this morning when I was reading this very entry I was amazed again at God’s perfect timing. It was just last night I was standing in front of my mirror about to brush my teeth, and I was looking at my face. I was pondering what it must have looked like when Moses’ face shone radiantly after having been with the Lord (so much so that he had to wear a veil). I was thinking about what it means to be beautiful and how different God’s definition of beauty is compared with ours.
I want my life to shine like that, don’t you? I want a life of beauty and a face that shines His love. And the thing about what Paul is saying here in 2 Corinthians is that we get to be face-to-face with the Risen Messiah at any second of any 24-hour period. No wait necessary, and no veil needed. That thing was torn in half the day He defeated sin & death once and for all eternity (Matt 27:51, Heb 10:19-22) .
So, in 2016, let’s get rid of the veils of self-protection we love to wear.
Let’s run so close behind Him that the dust He kicks up gets all over us.
His ways becoming our ways.
Our lives looking more & more like His.
And just like the Message so beautifully translates 2 Corinthians 3:18… let’s shine brightly & beautifully the awesome LOVE and passion of Yeshua, our Deliverer and our Friend.
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