Totally Naked

Have you ever had that desire to completely bare your soul to the world to stand thoroughly unclothed in the midst of people who desire to dress you in all the wrong colors? While I know for sure society cannot handle the person completely unfettered  in every area of life, still I wonder how much the person can handle never being free for just a moment from the corset of conformity. Not for a moment do I speak of being free from morals or doing those things that are right, but for the person who has to care about the things they don’t care about or can’t feel the things they know they feel then you may just understand what I mean. If you’ve ever read the novel The Awakening by Kate Chopin you know just how far this line of thought can go, farther than I certainly think is acceptable for the person living outside of a novel or Lifetime drama. It is true, however, that there are moments in life, or maybe just in mine, where you see that people know you for what they want to see and there is no one who knows you the way you wish to be. It is to my comfort and my conviction that at least I know that there is One who sees all of me. Funny how frightening that exposure becomes. There may be moments we wish to bare everything, but once you’re naked you can’t help but search for something to put on.

 

For those who haven’t read the book, read the summary: http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/awakening/summary.html

Those things we just can’t do…

Isaiah 30:15
This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says: "In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength…”

Jesus often showed that the proper response to sin is repentance and yet in and of ourselves we have not the power to repent and the forgiveness we receive we do not earn ourselves.

"It is the glory of God that he can do all this without any injury to the person who is forgiven. It sometimes happens that if a man has offended you and you forgive him again and again, he may thereby become hardened in his sin; but the Lord’s sweet way of covering sin is one which always melts and changes the heart. Sin is never so heartily hated as when it is covered by the blood of Christ. No man does ever thoroughly loathe sin till he has seen it put away in Christ; but when he has seen Jesus put it way by his own griefs and death, then he really hates the sin that made the Redeemer mourn and nailed him to the tree. It is the glory of God that he can cover sin in such a fashion as this, so as not to injure the offender whom he forgives."- CH Spurgeon

It is the Holy Spirit that works in us, that captivates us and that changes us. Where we once were blackened by sin, with faces like that of death, ‘til Christ came and made us white with faces bright with life.

You are all fair, my love; there is no spot in you

Song of Solomon 4:7

 

Is it not amazing how our God can say this to His church! He can say to His people that there is no spot, no flaw, no blemish because I your First Love have taken them all away. We are not blameless because we never sin but we are made clean through the blood of Christ. Isn’t it amazing that even more difficult to clean blood off of an article of clothing is it to clean the blood of Christ off of His people. It cannot be washed away, scrubbed away or taken away! The cleansing power of the blood of Jesus for a believer is worth more than every ounce of blood in the body of that believer. God loves His church and for it He has shed His blood there may be no spot and He can call us beautiful!

Awareness

Around the world there are millions of people held in slavery, whether it be sexual slavery, adult forced labor or child labor. There are people who have been kidnapped and drugged day in and day out, intimidated and threatened in order that they might comply with the things being inflicted upon them. There are those who make the argument that one reason such slavery occurs is because the policing systems along with other government agencies in the places it occurs is so poor. While this assertion may be true to a large extent, how do we then address the fact that in the US alone an estimated number of 17,000 young women and girls are forced in to the organized sex industry each year. How do we as Americans explain the terrors of young girls and children being drugged prostituted against their will in our own country? Many of these girls are kidnapped from their neighborhoods and still even more either illegal immigrants or foreigners visiting America. Visit the site below to hear “Katya”s story as a Ukrainian foreign exchange student who as reported y MSNBC was kidnapped and trafficked.

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/22083762/ns/today-today_people/#slice-2