Tryst | All is Well

Blessed Gift of Assurance

October 24, 2015 By Shelly Durkee

Assurance

Definition: Being certain, in the mind

Yes

We all want this, where God is concerned. We want to know not only that He is real, but that we are His. That our standing, as His child, is certain.

Certain.

We want to know.

And yet, assurance can be a tough thing.

Maybe you are like me. Maybe your brain works similarly, to mine. I am. so often, uncertain. About many things, but particularly about God.

Maybe that’s just mine–or our–penchant toward doubt. Let one. little. question. enter the odd place that is my mind, and I can take off after doubt and cynicism with speed that would break the sound barrier.

Or, maybe we are wired that way, with intentionality on the part of God. Maybe there is a purpose in why He created some of us that way.

I have come to know that, when I wake in the morning and I am plagued by doubts, or questions, or cynicism, or fear that either God does not exist, or that I am not His child, I have three choices. And only three choices.

I can sink into despair and the dark hole that is depression
I can ramp up my cynicism and hard-heartedness, which naturally and sinfully pushes past my thoughts and extends to life in general
Or I can fight.

We must do battle, every single day. We must. We are a people prone to discouragement, prone to doubt, prone to throwing our hands in the air and saying “I quit. It doesn’t matter. If I can’t know for certain, why bother.”

I want to choose to fight.

A heavy-weight boxing champion does not go into the ring without his boxing gloves, and expect to win. And he certainly doesn’t step into the ring, without training, first.

And, neither should we. We need tools and training to fight for blessed assurance.

Time
- We can not do battle in our minds, if we don’t allow space for prayerful study. Reading Open Windows or Jesus Calling (do not get me started on my thoughts about that book) for 3-5 minutes each morning is not going to cut it. I can walk every day to the end of my drive and back to my house, and I guarantee you I will not lose a single pound.
- No. We must be willing to rope off, cordon off, sanction off and protect–as if our lives depended on it–time for prolonged scripture work and prayer. Because–our lives do depend on it, because our souls depend on it.
- Is each chunk of serious time you devote to such activities always going to produce right thinking, or a sense of God’s presence? No. I wish that wasn’t the answer, but no. To think so is not realistic. Instead, it is the consistent day-by-day-by-day discipline of study and prayer that will build and build on itself, that will settle your mind and wrap it in assurance.
Tools
- Scripture:
  - I have lots of thoughts about what I want God to look like, and how I want Him to behave. But I can guarantee you that my thoughts are tinted blue with sin, and are cloaked in my experiences, my opinions, and my worldview.
  - I have to fight to stay away from my predilection for certain thoughts on God, and instead drown those thoughts in scripture.
  - We fight with this tool by spending time studying what scripture says. Reading it, digesting it, writing it out over and over again, and using scripture to interpret scripture.
- Prayer
  - You can’t know a person, if you don’t communicate with that person. So it is with God. He longs to hear His children. He longs to hear you, and me. And He is a safe place. Read the Psalms, if you have any doubt that He is a safe place. He is the only safe place, to bring all your questions, all your doubts, all your fears, all your despair.
- Worship
  - This is an area I tend to neglect, personally. It is a regular part of my morning routine, and yet there are times I rush right through it, to get to what I consider “more important matters.” How wrong of me. Worship is not a Sunday-Morning-Music-Set activity. Worship–it is our expression of adoration, respect, and the acknowledgement that God is holy. It is drawing near to the only one capable of helping you, in your fight for assurance.
Trust
- A big part of the fight, is trust. And this is why we can refer to assurance as being blessed. Trust is hard. So crazy hard. I can set aside time. I can make sure I have the right tools, know how to use them, and work to implement them. I can train myself in Spiritual Disciplines. But unless I am going to trust what I know to be truth, all of the above is useless. I have to ask God to give me the gift of assurance in my mind and soul–the gift of certainty–and then I have to trust Him to grant it. Assurance is a gift. A blessed gift, to be cherished.

¹¹And we desire each one of you to show the same earnestness to have the full assurance of hope until the end, ¹²so that you may not be sluggish, but imitators of those who through faith and patience inherit the promises. Hebrews 6:11-12

Let’s fight, with earnestness.

Two gifts I long to share with you today, in this quest for blessed assurance.

First, at this link, you will find a list of scriptures about assurance. Save them. Think on them. Pray them. Soak them in. You can find them at this link: DesiringGod.org: Helping People Have the Assurance of Salvation

And then, this song. New, from Sovereign Grace. Listen to it, embedded above. A new take on an old hymn (written in 1873), I’ll be introducing my church to this song in November. When I hear, or sing this song, I want to shout. I want to yell the words; because they are fighting words. They are words that say, “Yes, God. This is truth. You are truth. Help me, to trust that. Help me, to trust you. Help me, to know with certainty, who You are, and Whose I am. For the battle, be my heavenly sword.”

Blessed Assurance

Come, Holy Spirit, my soul assure
Relieve my fears that I no more
May doubt the love of Christ for me
That my debt is paid, that I’ve been made free
O Comforter, in me reside
When the tempter speaks be my faithful Guide
Show Your promise is for me secured
For the battle be my heavenly sword

CHORUS
Blessed assurance; Jesus is mine!
Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!
Heir of salvation, purchase of God
Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood

VERSE 2
Illumine me with the Savior’s light
To dispel my thoughts in the blackest night
In darkest hour to my soul reveal
The wounds which all my sorrows heal
Impress that seal, His image leave
And by Your pow’r to His grace I’ll cleave
Until faith be sight and prayer be praise
When beholding Jesus face to face

BRIDGE
This my story, this my song
Born of Spirit, washed in Blood
This my story, this my song
In my Savior I belong

Early Morning Watching

June 10, 2015 By Shelly Durkee

5:00 am, God. And I’m watching. Again.

I’m good at watching. At observing. At analyzing.

I’m good at sitting back and watching people. Coldly making my observations; my evaluations.

In a few hours, I’ll be sitting in ATL, watching what often seems like all of humankind scurry from gate to gate. And, I’ll watch, observe, analyze, evaluate. Judge even. “Where is he going? I wonder why they look so angry? That carry-on looks far too large then what should be allowed. Middle-aged men should not sport Beats by Dre while wearing business attire. Oh, look, yet another person reading yet another shallow and poorly written ‘Christian Fiction’ book. Is that person really going to buy luggage at Brookstone? Who does that? I hope I’m traveling when I’m 87 like that grandpa, and doing my own walking like him and not riding in that obnoxious, beeping transport between gates.”

I’ll watch. With a mixture of interest and cynicism; of fascination and study.

I even, oftentimes, watch myself. I can pretty easily “step outside of myself” and coldly observe my mind and my soul. Analyze, evaluate, examine, compartmentalize into columns.

But, God, I often do the very same, with You.

Particularly when soul work is involved. Particularly in the morning, when I give you your “allotted time”. When I pull out my tattered and smudged sheets of paper with lists of verses on them or fire up my computer files with the same, that have become such a part of my morning that they are like brushing my teeth–I can’t imagine the morning without them.

When I approach you, and I approach scripture, and You say to my mind and soul, “This morning, I am going to probe at the core of this sin in your life, or show you were you need to be obedient, or command you to care for this need, or teach you this about my glory, or invite you to really look at who I am, or invite you to really look at my love”, so often, my response is to “step outside” and coldly observe. Analyze. Tear apart the facts, put them in my columns, and study them like a scientist.

And watch. And note my evaluations, much like sitting at the gate in ATL.

I don’t think that is what is meant, by psalmist, in Psalm 5:3.

O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice;
in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch.

No, far too often I skip right over the “in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you” part, and go straight to the watch part.

But, what is this sacrifice you desire of me; what is this sacrifice that I am to prepare for you?

This morning, I see in the dictionary a definition of “sacrifice” that I’ve never considered before:

“The surrender or destruction of something prized or desirable for the sake of something considered as having a higher or more pressing claim.”

And, maybe that hits close upon the core of that which I am to prepare each morning. There is much I pridefully prize, that must be slain, each morning. In fact, I pridefully prize my pride. I prize my independence. I prize my work ethic. I prize my intellect, even. My ability to observe.

I prize my watchfulness. I prize being able to watch, unaffected, coldly observing who You are, stepping outside to analyze. And evaluate.

Sinful pride.

And, in keeping with the dictionary definition of “sacrifice”, I am to surrender all of that in the preparation of what I am to offer You. But, maybe not only surrender, but also destroy.

Slay.

The concept of sacrifice involves not only death, but an offering up as well. A giving. Kill pride, then give. To God. To others. But what? The limp carcass of my pride, of my sin? Or something more?

Hebrews 13:15-16 teaches this:

Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name. ¹⁶Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

A sacrifice of praise. First a sacrifice of surrender and destruction, then a sacrifice of worship. Or, maybe the surrender comes in the worship. A sacrifice of rightfully acknowledging who you are, and who I am in light of who you are. An acknowledgement of your name.

There is a reason why “Adoration” comes first, before Confession, Thanksgiving, Intercession, Supplication, in my approach of You, even when my approach is timid or sideways. It’s worship. It is the acknowledgement of Your name. It is the sacrifice of praise, that brings life and not death, though the slaying of my pride and the destruction of the pull to evaluate and observe you is most certainly a type of death that is only achieved through rightful acknowledgement and worship of you, followed by prayerful confession of the sins that make up who I am.

When I do the work of preparing sacrifice before you–of worshipfully acknowledging your name and destroying my pride–when I do these things first, then the “watching” I do that follows, looks very differently then the “watching” I do in cynicism and as an observer and analyst.

It is only then that my “watching” turns to anticipation.

Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you,
and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you.
For the Lord is a God of justice;
blessed are all those who wait for him.

Isaiah 30:18

Slaying Dragons

May 6, 2015 By Shelly Durkee

Each day, the most intense work I accomplish, is accomplished before breakfast.

I was reminded of that this morning when I noticed that a link to one of my all-time favorite articles by Michael Hyatt had come across my desk: Slay Your Dragons Before Breakfast. It’s not earth-shattering or life-changing, but it is good, solid words.

And so true.

Each day requires the unknown of us. Most days are incredibly ordinary–and every person’s ordinary looks different. Some days, though, are any thing but ordinary. They may be extraordinarily amazing. Or extraordinarily devastating. Or, extraordinarily challenging. Or extraordinarily peaceful. Or extraordinarily harried. The only thing certain is that there are going to be things required of us.

Maybe you are the type of person that jumps out of bed, exhibiting exuberance and ready to carpe diem all day long. I find that I have days like that, too, on rare occasion. In reality, though, I am much more likely to not be of that mind frame when the day begins.

So, the idea of slaying dragons before breakfast makes perfect sense to me. One reason is that I love breakfast. Gosh, I love breakfast. And breakfast is so much more enjoyable if I’ve done the hard-work of dragon-slaying first.

But, more than my pull to breakfast, I often wake up unsettled in my mind. And my soul. There is a fair amount of preaching to myself that must occur in order to push forward with the day. There are things that I work to establish in my brain (and soul) each and every morning.

It’s the stuff of Psalm 143:8:

Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love,
for in you I trust.
Make me know the way I should go,
for to you I lift up my soul.

In fact, I’ve gotten in the habit of praying this each night before going to sleep. Psalm 143:8 and Psalm 4:8. Praying these verses are my way of reminding God (as if He needs reminding!) that, if He grants sleep, in a few short hours, I will be awake again, and begging Him to be real and present.

I’ve found that there are 3 battles I undertake each morning, between 5:00 (ish) am and 8:00 (ish) am. Maybe you can relate:

Mind and Soul

I get nowhere in a day, without battling the hardest, ugliest, most challenging dragon first: my own incredibly sinful mind and soul. Each morning this battle looks the same, while also looking very, very different. What I mean by that is this: The battle framework is usually the same. The weapons are always the same. But the course of the fight is always different.

My framework is the same each and every day: Study, and prayer. Adoration. Confession. Thanksgiving. Earnest prayer for a handful of others. These 4 things are lifelines for me. They are anchors. They are swords.

In addition to that work, I have, over the past year, started wrapping up this battle with a checklist of sorts each day (yes, a literal checklist). It looks like this:

God is real.
God is who He says He is.
Scripture has to be truth.
God forgives, even though you don’t deserve it.
Grace is a real thing.
His mercies are new today, and will be new tomorrow as well.
Love your crew well.
Care well for those in need.
Work hard. Work hard. Work hard. Work hard.
Life is short, Home is real. There will be a day.

This is the most challenging battle of the day. This has become what makes me or breaks me by noon. Some days I don’t get very far. Some days look much more like study than prayer. Some days look like nothing. Some days tear my brain up. Occasionally, well, yes, sometimes I emerge from this battle a bit bloodied. But it is the dragon that has to be taken out before any other dragons, because it is the one that attacks the most furiously and relentlessly. There is no rest from this dragon.

Routine

I am a creature of habit. When my routine is off, I am unsettled. If I can knock a few things out of the way, first thing in the morning, then I am much more likely to stay motivated to work hard throughout the rest of the day. It sounds crazy, but there is a sense of accomplishment in things like making your bed, unloading the dishwasher, doing a load of laundry. So, while I’m seeing my crew out the door to school or work, I also tackle a few of these things. Every day. Without fail. They only take seconds to do, but just that sense of accomplishment (Bed made? Check. Laundry started? Check.) pushes me on to the very next task. Some of my favorite tools I use to keep on track are on my Productivity Resource page located Here.

Health

This is my final early morning dragon. If I don’t exercise early, it won’t happen. Too much happens during the day to get in the way, plus many of my co-workers live on the West Coast, which means my work day rarely ends before 8 pm. Also, there is something settling about walking early, seeing the sky, sorting things out, sweating, stomping along like a hippopotamus. I don’t listen to music; I think.

Slay your dragons early, Michael Hyatt says. Yes. Ok. Because when we don’t, they seem to grow, and then we can’t. Or else, we can, but they take much more energy and prevent or prohibit us from other work, other battles, other tasks that may make up the remainder of the day.

Slaughter them early.

Then eat breakfast.

The Good Portion Will Not Be Taken From Her

March 16, 2015 By Shelly Durkee

It’s been a challenging couple of months.

The reasons are unimportant. They are “light and momentary” in the grand scheme of things, I suppose. And, probably, for many of those reasons, the fault lies with me. Not all. Definitely some.

And, as I am prone to do, I have managed to couple the hard stuff of life with a hard heart.

But, that hard heart has, in part, also been related to a deep fear that I was losing the already tenuous grasp that I have on the things of God. The things that we can hold on to—the very “realness” of Him. And, after that, the very “realness” of His love. And, after that, the very “realness” of His forgiveness. And, after that, the very “realness” that He sees and knows–and acts. He has seemed, so very silent.

This past week, I read the ubiquitous “Mary and Martha” story. A story that, in the past, has quite irritated me. I imagine because of all the poor illustrations and uses of it that I’ve heard since I was a child. The whole “Busy Martha is up-tight and wrong, Mary is the right one.” How often have I wanted to say “Get off your butt and help wipe the table, Mary!” I am, after all, a doer. I love me a good checklist.

But, I have also, over the past 5 years, spent much time “at the feet of Jesus”. Nearly every morning, in fact. Even during the ugly months. Even this morning, since about 4 am. Sometimes I approach that time eagerly. Sometimes I approach it with weariness. Sometimes—o, how wrong is this—I approach it with an incredibly rebellious soul. That certainly has been the case over the past couple of months.

But earlier this week, I saw a phrase in the Mary/Martha story in Luke 10 that I had never seen before. It’s found in Jesus’ response to Martha. You know the one–where he shuts Martha down and praises Mary (or, at least, that’s how I’ve always viewed it. Until this week.) Here’s what He said. I’ll italicize the part I’ve never seen before:

“…but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.”

Which will not be taken away from her. What is this referring to?

It is referring to the Good Portion.

And, what is the “good portion”?

The opportunity to learn at the feet of Jesus.

But…and here’s the thing….I don’t think it is just the opportunity to learn at His feet. The opportunity to sit and listen. The opportunity to, every morning, study and pray and write and think and pray and study and learn.

No, I think that not only is the opportunity (or invitation?) to do so is the good portion, but the very things learned in those moments are also what will not be taken away from her. Or, from me. Or from you.

Do you see? Do you see?

I have, to some extent in recent months, feared that much of what I had settled on as being truth in recent years, may not be truth, after all. Challenging circumstances and my own, foolish mind have led me there. But, most of all, fear. Fear and doubt. Tremendous fear and doubt.

Intense fear that the hours and hours of choosing to sit at Jesus’ feet had been taken away. Had come, to nothing.

But, this verse–no, this small phrase in this verse–suggests otherwise.

This small phrase has produced an ember of hope in me that I thought might be permanently gone. That, I was afraid, may have been taken from me.

According to this scripture, it has not. Scripture is truth, right?

And so.

And therefore.

I will need to continue to fight to choose the good portion. The good portion of sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to His teaching. Every. Single. Morning. Every single Sunday that I have the opportunity to sit under Biblical preaching.

It is a fight. I wish it wasn’t. I wish I could easily sit there, like Mary. Eager. Anticipatory.

More often than not, though, I either drag myself to His feet, or I plop down with a cynical air, or–much more often–I tremble and refuse to look into His eyes. Or let Him see mine.

I try to write authentically here. This has been a hard post to write. I’m not sure why. Maybe the rawness of the past couple of months, and fear of the continuation of that trend in my own soul. But, after attending church for the first time in a month yesterday, and after seeing that small phrase that “it will not be taken away from her”, I am more hopeful than I have been in weeks. Weeks, which have stretched into months. And, maybe you need to know that for your own soul today. That when you choose the good portion of sitting and listening to Jesus, it won’t be taken from you, either.

I am clinging to that, this morning. With white-knuckles. Please, God.

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