Zebra Ministries

Good morning Zebras,

I love you.  Of all the posts this week Tuesday’s was my favorite, but it was also the least “liked.”  It was such a freeing truth that I want to make sure you heard it because until you can get over yourself there is always going to be something between you and God called pride.

So, at God’s request, I am going to repost the unedited version of Tuesdays z-mail with additional insight.  (If this was a movie it would be the Directors’ Cut.)

Psalm 51:15–17: “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.  You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.  The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”

Can you see how encouraging those verses are?

God does not want us to busy ourselves trying to “do things for Him,” nor does He want us making big sacrifices just to prove how much we love Him.  What He wants is our broken and contrite heart. He wants us to quit thinking so highly of ourselves and start thinking more highly of Him.  He wants us to realize we are dust.

My husband once said to me, “You don’t realize how bad you are.”  And he was so right!  I didn’t!  I probably still don’t but I’m closer.

Job 42:5–6 My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.  Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

Giving up your “self-esteem,” your need to “prove yourself” and your desire to always be right is so freeing!

You’re a mist that’s here today and gone tomorrow (James 4:14,) everything you do without the Spirit of God is dirty rags; wood, hay, and stubble, or at best incomplete (Isaiah 64:4, 1 

Cor 3:12, Rev 3:2) and God is the only one who is always right. I’m not thinking this one needs a backup verse.

Years ago, I had a friend who suffered from infertility.  She adopted her daughter about the same time I had Katherine.  I always felt she treasured Maggie more because she knew she had been given something she could have never gotten for herself.

In the same way people who were saved as adults, especially those who were saved from addictions or other horrible circumstances seem to treasure Jesus more.  They realize that He gave them something that they could never been able to get for themselves.

But all of us have been given something we could have never gotten for ourselves because the distance between sinful man and Holy God was far too great for us to ever overcome.  Only Jesus, the perfect lamb of God, was able to close that gap.

When you understand that and you are willing to quit striving to earn the grace and love you already have, God gives you everything including a sense of peace and self-worth unrelated to the world and its values.

Psalm 8:3–9 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.  You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.  O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!  

Oh, if all of us would only have eyes to see that truth and remember it, because it’s a truth that will set us free to just abandon ourselves to the task of loving God, from which every other action will flow.

I love you Zebras, talk to you tomorrow.

Jill