Had a great time hanging out with Sister Chicks at Prairie View Camp last weekend. They planned a fabulous retreat in a beautiful setting and I was privileged to perform and speak twice. And that is something I love–hanging out with forty plus of my new best friends!
What a fun, funny, gracious group of ladies! And such precious heart’s for Jesus and for each other! Every detail was a testimony of the prayers of the planning committee. God showed up and lives were changed.
I love an event like that!
The Scripture theme was Matt 6: 21, “Where your treasure is, your heart will be also.”
What a perfect verse to meditate on when so many “treasures” vie for our attention. And if you are like me, many of them are “good” things, necessary things, some are even gifts from God…..but they aren’t God. And that is the quandary. How do we balance all those things and still put God first.
In the morning, I performed the Woman at the Well and asked what words would we use to describe this woman who met Jesus. Words like lonely and broken were suggested and I would agree. But what if she’d walked into our church…..before she met Jesus. It is easy to see her pain and loneliness when we see “the rest of the story.” But is that how we would see her if she came to our church still in the midst of her sin?
When I was in High School, we would have called her trashy. And one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, but especially so when the “other man” is Jesus. He saw her value and deemed her His treasure…..just as He sees us in our sin and desires to love and redeem us. No one is beyond the grace of God.
And that includes us. How do we treasure Him above all else? One way is to see ourselves as He see’s us. To accept His grace. Though we are not worthy, He offers us the free gift. Though we are imperfect, we bear the Imago Dei–the image of God. We can accept His love by accepting what He says about us. That we are His beloved and He died because He loves us so.
To think we are not, is to put ourselves above God–that we know better than He does. Oh, how He loves us! But we must accept His love.
In the afternoon, I performed Mary, the mother of Jesus and I think we’d all agree that she was a treasure. God sent an angel to tell her that she was highly favored of God. She was not sinless, but something about Mary caught God’s eye. I think it was her availability–when given the news that she had been chosen of God, she said “Yes!” not knowing what the future held.
But even Mary had to come to a realization that she needed the grace of God. She had born not just the Savior, but HER Savior!
As “good” as she was that she found favor with God, no one is “good enough” to not need Jesus.
So the two ends of the spectrum. No one is beyond the grace of God and not one of us is without need of the grace of God.
So if we can accept those two things, we can begin to see ourselves as He sees us and walk in His love. And as we walk in His love, our whole life will become an act of worship, not a “to do” list. We treasure Him as we love others. We treasure Him as we care for those we love. We treasure Him as we entertain strangers. We treasure Him as we do our work as unto the Lord. We treasure Him with every breath. He becomes our life and our treasure as we are His.
Where is our treasure? It is in loving God and loving people as women of God. No matter what vies for our attention, when we do all as unto the Lord, it becomes no competition at all. He is our treasure…..and we are His.
I can rest in that.
Have a blessed week!
Kim
