In an elevator full of writers I said, “there’s always an expiration date to secrets”… (Luke 8:17) to which an argument ensued about intellectual property rights, overheard conversations, and pithy phrases yelled out in the middle of a cramped space. Which if it goes unwritten and unremembered does it exist? YES. Does that matter? YES.
I have long been against secrets ~
When thinking about their destructive qualities, like the amount of bondage they bring or suffering, or feeling slightly insecure that I have none before God; the proclivity to hide is instinctive and deep, instead of bringing Him with me into those places and asking Him to take my hand, to take a look and tell me why I sometimes do not chose Him. The positive side of secrets is that in the book about you, residing with God, it is full of affection as you remain a masterpiece of His. I imagine there’s an index regarding all the cats I’ve owned in my life He’s brought to me. Or perhaps another sub-category: Glitter and or ‘Flowers she’s admired in my Creation’, so intimately does He love and celebrate us. It might be worth taking a moment to ask Holy Spirit what might be some of the sub categories in the book of you!
But in the place that feels the lie, I’m not holy and blameless before God, I still get itchy- like the good things AND the bad things? Deep breath.
It’s a control issue. It’s an attention issue. It’s an identity issue…. He longs for restoration in all of those places, and where we forgive, chose the good, chose Him, there is another running sub-category: Victories. It is perhaps a deeper theological issue where we wrestle with the idea of how we remain blameless, or how there is no condemnation for His children, or how as it says in 1 Corinthians 13 Love keeps no record of wrongs, and that is so with us. He doesn’t. He never calls us into correction for our destruction. Never. And He would never call us to do something that He himself doesn’t practice. The best place to start is with Him. Are there charges you have brought against God in the pain of circumstance that you need to release back to Him? Are there secrets that are binding your voice or places where you feel unseen? Take a moment and talk to Him about what has just popcorned through your mind. It’s for a reason. Chose faith: He knows and is at work to bring you through the things you think will never solve themselves.
In their right place the Lord loves secrets. Sub-category: ‘Things she’s done for Me in secret’. Sub-category: ‘Times she has come to dwell with me in the secret place,’ etc. He knows. He sees you. More importantly He cares about YOU. A quick search will bring up every time the Bible mentions secrets, and it says, He reveals His secrets to His children. Is there anything on the tip of your tongue that you want to know? And are you willing to pursue Him to find out? Are you prepared to wait? I assure you, in those places His love magnifies. His goodness quadruples. It doesn’t mean it’s not difficult.
We were built for mystery. It’s culture that fights against that and makes us long for certainty—that tells us all we need is comfort and safety. When mystery in itself is meant to draw us toward Him, and draw us into community. Do you wonder where all your inspiration comes from? Your creativity? That it’s all yours and not His too? This sort of intimacy can make us very uncomfortable, possibly rebellious. In our sometimes ungoverned self-obsessed mind we forget that there are things acting upon us, through us, in spite of us, which we simply do not and cannot understand without God. The things we long for, the healing and saving of people or our nation cannot but come through the Lord showing us our part, and or showing us where to step back. That in itself is a secret worth coming to Him with, to seek His answer not our expectation of His answer. Don’t just assume you know the right thing to do when you haven’t bothered to ask. Proverbs 25 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.” When you think of who we are as His kids (holy and blameless!), His voice, His secrets are something we have access to. He wants to talk with us, and give us His inspiration and revelation. This is sacred to Him and should be so to us.
Often through the day or months or years, my thoughts to God have run their course, especially with things I long for understanding in, or deliverance from- whether anxiety or physical pain, or trouble, and I am simply left with nothing to say. It’s an end to striving-- sometimes worrisome. In those places though I practice surrender (and perhaps I can delve further into this in a later post), I consent to His presence.
This takes TRUST.
When you have come to an end of yourself, and to the limit of what you understand or what you feel your heart or body can take, the verse “Be still, and know that I am God,” (Psalms 46:10) takes on a desperate meaning of a being that gives itself over to being restrained by God, like sheep that are spooked they can run themselves to death. It is that kind of stillness. Stop me Lord. I am running and Your Word tells me to be STILL. I’m sure I’ve said this in a previous post. And will say again. It’s that critical. We dismiss it as a phrase so often we don’t understand! how critical it is.
As He has been in pursuit of us this entire time, He rushes with a relentless love to overflowing to do the work He has been longing to do. In that place, it is the Lord’s secret, to do what He pleases, and not at all important that we know it. It’s His secret place. Can you consent to His presence and His work without knowing, hearing, seeing, or experiencing what it is? And to turn over to Him the secret of your life?
There will always be a rhythm to the sewing and harvesting of secrets. It is His pleasure, in His time (the hard part) to gift us with them, and to bring us to places where only He dwells. He loves us that much. We are worth that much.
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