Strip Search

Matthew 3:12

“He is ready to separate the chaff from the wheat with his winnowing fork. Then he will clean up the threshing area, gathering the wheat into his barn but burning the chaff with never-ending fire.”

Mirror, mirror on this bathroom wall...take a deep look. Yes, take a good look at yourself the next time you come across a mirror. A really deep look. Who are you? Who do you want to become? If not today, there will come a time in your life when you must face the person in the mirror. You could be a really good person and still need some type of transformation. Especially, when you follow Christ and yearn to do things His way. First off, there is always room for change. Secondly, you must be willing to go into those murky waters of confrontation with “Self”. I don’t mean that quick surface evaluation. You need to be nicer. Have less attitude. Stop being so angry. I mean deep down. Where sometimes you don’t even know things exist. The constant strongholds in your life. The root to multiple issues that you may have. A place only God can see and help you with, if you are willing to be humble. That’s why sometimes, God has to strip search you.

Strip. A verb. Defined by Merriam Webster meaning “to remove extraneous or superficial matter from”. To be God-stripped is to remove everything you have that defines you outside of Him. Everything you felt a secure stability in more than Him should be and will be removed, just to make sure you remember who your source is.

It takes real commitment to the process to see it through. The rewards are well worth it. Ask yourself before you are forced to a realization, what do you cling to? What are you afraid to lose? What do you fear that if lost, you would then lose you? Often times you can’t even answer this question until He has started to bring it to your attention.

For all of us it’s something different. A job position. A car. A relationship. Achievements. Your soft demeanor. Your comfort zones. Does just the thought of losing it send you into a panic? Do you feel the need to defend these things to God as if He doesn’t know what He’s doing?

The thing is, letting go of things can be daunting at first. But when you find yourself in a season of stripping, that first step into the unknown waters is unpredictable and scary. But once you let go of your fears just long enough to leap, it can actually be relieving. And self discovery happens for real. The part of you that was hiding you can now cultivate. No longer dependent on the superficial, but on your original source.

Please do not confuse this message and believe God will bring you pain to teach you. We live in a broken world. So bad things just happen even to good people. But God is so good that He is intentional. He will use the pressure moments of life to develop you in ways that comfy moments cannot. Pressure makes diamonds, right? And then there are also those times where everything is going good on the outside, but you still feel the urging push from inside about things you need to change. The earlier you recognize that helping hand, the more headache you can prevent.

Hebrews 12:1

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us.

Keep digging. God wants you to show that boss in you that has yet to show up to the world, but only if you dare to see yourself stripped and free. And soon you will look in the mirror and see that woman that you knew was there all along but somehow could not reach. Now, take a deep look, trust me she’s there. She is well worth the journey.