These are the words He’s been whispering into my spirit. The same words He spoke to a barren Israel. At the moment of her greatest shame and lack, He asked her to dream about spiritual prosperity and restoration. When she wore her disgrace like a mantle, He spoke to her about expansion. He promised this desolate one habitation.
While I would say my life is definitely looking up, and things like despair, shame and disgrace are not in my everyday emotional portfolio (though they’re recent enough to not be unfamiliar), the same words He said to her He has been saying to me.
Do not spare. Do not spare in what you ask of Me. Do not spare in your expectations of what I can do.
The truth that has been serving to sober me is that my expectations of God are far too small. My plans for the kind of restoration He might do in and through me are starved of supernatural confidence. God wants me to ask of Him things that only He can do, yet I am too often strapped by my own human parameters. They have calcified to my thinking in such a way that only rare moments of escape allow me to see how bound I am by my humanity.
God promises to do exceedingly, abundantly above all that we ask or imagine and I am in danger of living a life that settles for so much less than that. I look around me and expect my life to look like what I see. The rare moments where the God-sized dreaming takes place in my heart are almost immediately intercepted by human logic.
And then He says to me again: Do not spare.
Oh, Father, let me not arrive at the end of my life only to discover I had aspects of your character and nature and avenues of your redemption and restoration just beyond my fingertips.
And I had not, because I asked not.
