Junk in the Cellar of My Soul

Cellars are creepy places. Have you ever been in one? My grandparents had a cellar – the kind you enter from the outside. I don’t recall ever going in alone. It was dark, damp and smelled musty. Reaching into the darkness to turn on the light could involve contact with a spider web or worse a spider. I imagined all kinds of creepiness lurking in dark corners.

It isn’t until the light goes on that you actually see what awaits in the darkness. It is the same when the Holy Spirit lights up a dark place inside a soul – a soul with unacknowledged moldiness lurking in the corners. I remember a day when the Holy Spirit shined a light in the recesses of my soul exposing an unnamed sin. The light exposed a conflict in my relationship with God – feeling unloved when life turned sour and wondering how I disappointed Him. I felt I couldn’t do anything well enough for God to be pleased with me. I couldn’t find a way to finagle a good life from the hand of God. I was unable to receive His deep love of who I am or recognize His love which held me in the storms of life. Instead, I felt as if I broke a rule I didn’t know existed.

I will never forget the realization that I served a God I misunderstood. The truth of this unhealthy relationship was pushed through my conscience while reading a novel – a story woven with an understanding of right relationship with God. Author, George MacDonald, wrote to his 19^th century readers about the glorious love of God – the truest love ever, a love that holds fast no matter my circumstances. MacDonald writes about the God of the Bible, the God who pursues us and loves us unconditionally.

 

Have you experienced a conflict in relationship to God? Maybe I’m the only one to ever put my broken human relationships template smack dab on top of my relationship to God… but I doubt it. Most of you are just like me. You’re trying to live wrapped in God’s perfect love but can’t seem to shrug off patterns of dysfunction that twist your perception of His love. I lived as if God owed me something when, in truth, He gave up His very life for me.

Dallas Willard sheds light on this struggle in his teachings on the 23^rd Psalm. Willard says, “The experience of life without lack depends first and foremost upon the presence of God in our lives, because the source of this life is God himself . . . we must think about God in ways that match what God is like. Without harmony between our ideas about God and his true character, we will never be able to make the kind of contact with God that will give us confidence, grounded in our experience, in the complete sufficiency of God to provide for our needs.”

Willard continues, “ . . . until our minds are informed by the right view of God, we cannot put our minds on God in the right way. . . . All the things that we know about God that ‘ain’t so’ destroy our lives, poison us, throw our lives out of kilter, and throw our bodies out of appropriate relationship to reality. Wrong ideas about God make it impossible for us to function in relationship to one another. We are not able to love one another because we do not have our minds filled with an accurate vision of God” (Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23, Dallas Willard).

There I was, 24 years old and 15 years into my Christian journey, standing in the middle of my apartment startled as if I had been slapped across the face. I saw for the first time how wrong my understanding of God was and how my perception of Him got in the way of intimacy with Him. I cried out in confession, seeking His forgiveness. I confessed to God that I had it all wrong about Him. I asked Him to show me the truth of who He is, ridding me of my distorted view of Him. And then I was compelled by the Spirit to ask Him to show me who I was – the truth about me. I longed to see God and myself through His eyes and not my own blurry vision. I had some awareness that my life story gave me a distorted lens from which to view God; I wanted God to adjust the lens with the Truth. This began a tremendous healing within me and it continues.

My passion for helping others know God more truly and intimately grew out of the recognition and healing of my unhealthy idea of what it means to be in a relationship with God. Do I hear murmuring? Some of you are wondering if it’s true – that we can be in an unhealthy relationship with God. Let me clear up one thing: God is always in a healthy relationship with us. We often don’t realize we bring our unhealthy ways into our relationship with God and interact with Him as we do in unhealthy human relationships.

All that to say, I once was so conflicted in my relationship to God that I can’t imagine why I remained a Christian but by His grace I did. I think it safe to say this journey of discovering the truth of God’s love, the purity and the power of His unconditional love, continues to transform me. Over the years the reality that I am in a relationship with the Creator of the universe changed how I approach God’s Word and relate to Him. If you long to grow in intimacy with God but something seems in the way, be assured God longs to be known by you. He is not hiding; He is inviting you to intimacy. God’s Word guides us in all things true about Him but He can speak to us anywhere, anytime. This morning I recalled and sang a song I loved as a child, “This Is My Father’s World.” The last line of the second verse says, “In the rustling grass I hear Him pass; He speaks to me everywhere.” He desires intimacy with you so much that He shows up in surprising ways – even in the reading of a novel.

If you desire to know your Heavenly Father more intimately, ask the Holy Spirit to prepare your heart to hear His voice. Then pay attention; He has an invitation for you that will transform your life. He will prepare you and free you from things in the dark hindering you from flourishing in your relationship with Him.