Faithful and True

For the Word of the Lord is right and true; he is faithful in all he does- Psalm 33:4

If you ask my kids or my husband about me they will probably tell you that I’m too hard on myself- Too critical- To quick to judge myself and find myself lacking.- Too concern with doing everything right- Too worried about what others think of me- Too uptight about making a mistake. I suspect I’m not the only one.

We too often try to keep up with others, or at least what we think others are doing- all those perfectly touched up social media lives and perfect Instagram photos. Have we lost sight of our real selves, in favor of trying to be who we see on our phones? Have we lost the uniqueness God has placed within us? Are we allowing ourselves to imitate others, like we post our tik tok videos? Can we allow ourselves to be real, open, vulnerable, and admit we are not perfect? Can we be original, instead of copies?

We make mistakes. We can fail. We can repeat our mistakes and fail many times. But that never lessens what God thinks of us. He knows we will fall short. He knows we try. More importantly He knows our hearts, our intentions. And yet He loves us. Many of you I’m sure have John 3:16 memorized, or at least have seen it at football games- that is back when football games had fans in the stands. God loved the world. But do we really get that He loves us? Personally? I’ve heard before that its a good idea to insert our name in place of the “world” when we recite this verse…. Try it. For God so love_______, that He gave His only Son for her/him, that if ____believes then ____will not perish but have eternal life.

I know, it might seem extra to you, but the point I want to remind you of today is that God is faithful. He loves you. Nothing will keep Him from being faithful. Nothing will stop God from loving you. He sent His Son for you. He knows you cannot measure up to His standards. That’s why He sent Jesus.

And He knows that trying to seem perfect, to try to live perfectly in an imperfect world, is impossible. Trying to be like someone else, is impossible. He created you to be you.

Believe me, I know how difficult it is to let yourself off the hook, off the endless futile cycle of trying to do everything perfectly. Just to be clear, I’m not saying we shouldn’t care about what we do and become lazy, but just that we need to realize since God understands that we cannot measure up and sent Jesus, then maybe we should try to extend more grace upon ourselves. To let ourselves make more mistakes, not intentionally, but just not deal with ourselves so harshly. We all have what is known as self- talk, how we talk to ourselves. Aligning this self- talk with what God’s Word says about us is so important. We have been fearfully and wonderfully made. He never makes mistakes- we are who we are because God created us that way. We are all just works in progress. Someday we will be finished, looking like Jesus, but until then, we will be ourselves, imperfections and all. God Bless- Nancy