I woke up one morning and it was gone. Suddenly the companion of heaviness that lived with me every day had departed and the rocks in my heart seemed to have simply melted away. I was left with a joyous freedom that I could not describe and I realized that God had done for me what I could not do for myself.

See, as we all do, I had people and things in my life that impacted me very deeply and personally. While I had made the choice to forgive it all long before and sometimes multiple times, there were times and circumstances when something came up or a name would be mentioned and I would feel my body tighten and clench up. Sometimes I would get angry or frustrated and sometimes I would just feel this sense of annoyance and agitation toward these people and situations. Even with forgiveness and attempting to pray about and for these people, I just couldn’t manage to completely let it all go and I didn’t know why.

Recently I was at a meeting where someone was talking about asking God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. I was pondering that and thought that I would take the idea of putting things in the God box that I needed to ‘let go and let God’ and use it for the one person that I knew for sure I carried some bitterness towards. I wrote the person’s name down and prayed something along the lines of ‘God, I have chosen to forgive this person but I still have a hardness of heart towards them. I no longer want to have this hard spot in my heart and I ask that you remove my heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh.’ I realized that although I had chosen to forgive the person, I had done so in my own strength. I needed to go a step further and be willing for God to remove the hardness of resentment from me because I knew it was hurting me. The key was awareness, a willingness to let go, and finally, the choice to hand it over to Him because He is a gentleman and will not just step in and take it. One day this person came up in conversation and I realized that I had no reaction or response to their being mentioned and I knew God had taken it away.

What I didn’t know at the time was that God was leading me down a much deeper path of dying to myself and relinquishing my will by choosing to align the rudder of my will with His. I became open to Him doing something unexpected. In multiple books I have been reading, speakers I have been listening to and friends and family speaking into my life; I found that while I said I wanted to do His will, my actions actually indicated a desire to, at least part of the time, control, hang on to things and do my own will. I found that things I ‘knew I should do”, like forgiveness and loving others, were something I tried to do in my own strength. I read about being willing to be willing and knew that it was time for me to come to Him and ask Him to do what I could not and make the conscious choice to say as Jesus did in the garden of Gethsemane in Matthew 26:39, ‘not as I will, but as you will.’ So I did. In humility, I came to Him,  praying and confessing my own independence, and told Him that I didn’t want to deal with these people, situations, and hurts. I told Him that I knew that if I did not deal with all this stuff, it would ruin relationships and things in my life that I didn’t want to damage, as well as hurt me. Finally, I told Him that I was willing for Him to change me from the inside out and not just make me a better version of myself. I knew that I needed Him to transform and remake me and now I knew that I was willing to be willing to let the master potter reshape me to His image for me.

After that prayer, I didn’t feel any different, but I kept up a similar prayer for the next few days and left it in His hands. I don’t know how many days passed, but on the morning I woke up feeling different; my heart was joyous and free, overflowing with love, and I had an incredible sense of peace that could only come from God. I knew that I needed to always remember and ‘Give thanks to the Lord and proclaim His greatness, tell the whole world what He had done’ (Psalm 105:1).

Practice for Today

Jesus says in John 15:5, ‘I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.’ I will choose to abide in Jesus, asking God to search me and show me as I pray for an open mind, a courageous heart and a willing spirit to do God’s will and be willing to have Him change me and do what I cannot do for myself.

Ezekiel 36:26      And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

Matthew 19:26     But Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”