True Richness by Freya Kennedy

True Richness by Freya Kennedy

Isaiah 53 says, “He was despised and forsaken of men. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And like one from whom men hid their face, we did not esteem Him. Surely our griefs He Himself bore, and our sorrows He carried; yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the chastening for our well being, fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed...he was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He did not open His mouth... But the Lord was pleased to crush Him...My Servant, will justify the many, As He will bear their iniquities. Therefore, I will allot Him a portion with the great, Because He poured out Himself to death...”

This is Him, the One who was dead and is alive. Who knows poverty and tribulation. Who knows what it is like to be spoken of in lies, to be spit upon, rejected, betrayed by those who claimed to love Him, beaten, misunderstood, and mocked. He absorbed the full extent of all the poverty, tribulation and blasphemy. Only He can know and give you what you need to overcome, and turn your sorrow into joy. It is not enough for God that you aren’t sorrowful, He always wants to pull you through to JOY. We are promised by Jesus “In the world you will have tribulation, grab courage as you focus on Me, for I have overcome what the world offers.” He has overcome tribulation.

We all have our own poverty, distress, and ways that people define us that are untrue. These are difficult things, but they are allowed by God. If you focus on your feelings about the circumstances or the circumstances themselves, you will despair. I feel like Marilla in Anne of Green Gables sometimes saying, “to despair is to turn your back on God.” You turn your back on God to indulge in fears and feelings and false realities, when in fact looking into His wonderful face and meditating on His life will keep you on the journey to make you more like Him. He died and so must you.

In the Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis, the senior demon writes to his young demon pupil, saying, “Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself (God) we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills...We want him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one of which arouses hope or fear. There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human’s mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.”

I have been thinking a lot lately and getting pretty fired up at how weak we are compared to other generations. We have so much that comes so easily to us. “I know your poverty and your tribulation...BUT YOU ARE RICH!” (Rev. 2:9). Remember what has been said, “for you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich!” (2Cor 8:9) We’ve had nothing like the Great Depression, we drive through in the comfort of our cars and have someone hand us a foofy coffee drink, people paint our nails FOR us, and we have responded with entitlement. Disconnected from people, but fully connected to our wants. We are really not suffering for much, but our characters are. In Smyrna people were being burned at the stake, eaten alive by lions, accused of hideous acts, on a daily basis, just for being Christians. We are ridiculous! The easy road has seeped into our minds as being the preferred way and our characters are showing it. We are self indulgent, self focused, our constant goal is our comfort. It’s horrible. We are missing the mark by a long shot!

So many things are distracting us and making it so we’re not really engaged in life. Ask the Lord to awaken you and to help you to engage what He would have you hear.