My Mark

My Mark - my challenge

Last week another friend wrote about her Mark and its impact on her life. While my heart broke as I read of her struggles, her message converged with principles flowing into my life from other places and made me face my own Mark. My Mark, those beliefs I hold which keep from from accepting God’s love for me, is insignificance. I always feel as though people look beyond me, as if I were invisible. Nothing I can say or do makes a difference.

In the last few weeks of John, there is choice of accepting or rejecting truth. My leader asked this question, ‘where in your life are you not submitting to the truth you have learned?‘ We read Romans 1:25: They chose a lie instead of God's truth. They worshiped and served created things. They didn't worship the Creator. But he must be praised forever. Amen.

I always believed this was a passage where Paul was truly writing to the Romans, not to me. But when I hold on to all the old beliefs about myself, listen to the tapes that play over and over in my head, I have exchanged God’s truth for a lie about my own life. In doing so, I am listening and following a voice other than God’s. What a sobering discovery this has been for me.

Even with Jesus in my life, I built so much of my life on these falsehoods. Now, seeing the truth, I still want to hold on to them. They are what is comfortable. I prove Paul’s point, I chose the lie over the truth.

At this crises of faith, I find myself thinking of a scene in one of the last Left Behind books. Chloe is forced to stand in a line where she will have to make the ultimate choice take the mark of the beast or face the guillotine. As she moves closer to her destiny, her fears are replaced by God’s power and peace. I find myself taking Chloe’s place in line. When I face the beast and chose death, he says, “Isn’t that odd, you’ve willing bore my mark this long.”

Dear sweet Jesus, I can only let go of these lies through the power of Your Name. Fill me instead with Your truth, Your peace.