I’m Ready To Be Messed Up!

I still don’t have answers to a lot of the questions I’ve been asking lately. But one thing I do know:
GOD IS IN A GOOD MOOD!
My Papa is HAPPY. He loves me. He LIKES me. He is always thinking about me. He is excited when I wake up in the morning because He’s ready to spend time with me and share His heart with me — He wants to be my friend.

How discouraged have I been lately because I’ve felt misplaced, or because I’ve felt like what I was offering was either insufficient or went unnoticed or unappreciated?
This past Saturday, Holy Spirit was renewing my mind on the subject of God wanting to be my friend. I was deeply moved when He showed me that He feels the same way when I miss out on Him! He told me He wanted to fill that spot in my heart for perfect friendship; that He wanted to rid me of all my insecurities about myself and fill me up with confidence of His incomprehensible love for me; that He wanted me to be so messed up by His love for me that my heart would no longer be preoccupied or distracted by the desire for man’s approval or applause.

This week at Kingdom Culture, our speaker Chad Cline talked about how so often believers can become jealous of new believers who are in flames for Christ…they think things like, “why can’t I tap into that same fire anymore? I’ve been following Jesus for ___ years…” Well, here’s the secret that religious Christianity doesn’t teach: YOU CAN.

There is always MORE!
I don’t want just fragments of joy, moments of laughter, seasons of prosperity and dancing and singing. I want to live every day with all of those things. And the crazy and amazing truth and reality is this: I CAN! Because Jesus paid for it all.
He paid the ultimate price for me to live in constant righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit; it’s readily available to me at all times. “Ask anything in My Name and it shall be given to you” = persistantly demand what is rightfully yours in Heaven because Jesus already paid the price for you to receive it! He’s in a good mood because He beat sin, and because of that, He gets US.

“He rescued me BECAUSE HE DELIGHTS IN ME.” (Psalm 18:19)

I am His highest treasure. I was the joy set before Christ when He took on the cross!

The Church can get so cautious when people long for an experience with God. “It’s about worshipping God, not getting an experience”, they say (…and I used to be one of those people).
But the Lord has been renewing my mind to understand that HE IS the experience. If there’s no experience, no encounter, no internal change of heart and mind, no external demonstration of the Kingdom after time spent with Him, then we’ve missed the purpose of the Gospel, and we’ve missed out on Him!

“The Word, in print, is supposed to lead us to the Word, the Person. The process is incomplete without the encounter.” - Bill Johnson

I know my finite self could never contain the full weight of God’s glory. But I am hungry and desperately longing for more of Him. I want to fall flat on my face, laugh uncontrollably, dance and run around like a mad woman, literally out of my mind for Jesus because of being in His Presence. Because I want to be near to Him…because I want His heart and nature to engulf my heart and nature. I want to be so encapsulated by His goodness that my only response is to be deaf to the judgments of man and instead share with the world the Love of Jesus.
I want to be so messed up by His love for me that people will be transformed just by walking past me in the line at Kroger or drinking coffee next to me at Un Mundo. I want to see people in my city be freed from every fear, every doubt, every lie they’ve ever been told simply because they came across a woman who carries the manifest power and glory of God on her shoulders and actually believes it.
I want to stop with the agendas of Christianity.
I don’t just want to invite people to church, or to a program or minsitry or Bible study.
I don’t want to just talk about the Love of God; I want to bring it!
If all I have is theology, if all I have is a book about God, then the world is screwed.
The world needs God Himself! The world needs Love. Boundless, religiouslessness, scandelous Love. And that kind of Love is a byproduct only possible through an EXPERIENCE with the Author of Love.
So I’m going for the experience. I’m going all in. I’m ready to be messed up from His love. I’m ready to look like a complete fool, to face my fear of how people see me so that I can see Jesus. Love the crap out of me, Papa.
I’m ready for more of YOU!

                                                    - Aly Todd