September 6, 2012 ~ Issue 32
Hello Friends,
When the Lord first brought me to faith in Him, one of the earliest works He began doing in me was to provide course corrections about what His standards for righteousness are. I had formed my own standards and needed the corrections and instructions of the Lord to get me aligned correctly with how He wanted to work in my life to bring me into His expressed truth. My standards had been adopted from what had been modeled for me growing up, and so I thought they were accurate, but God is holy and His standards are about love, and He began to expose that mine had nothing at all to do with love. Here’s my story…
I was raised in the Catholic Church and educated by nuns in Catholic schools. I am deeply fond of my Catholic roots and enjoyed many aspects of my religious upbringing. However, my training was superficial in that it only provided me a general morality. Being good meant obeying my parents, doing the right things by going to church every Sunday, confession once a month, and participating in all the religious disciplines of the church calendar. I stopped going to church when I graduated high school and left home, which meant to me that I no longer met the requirements for being good and righteous. I operated in a strong relative personal morality that was fueled by the “new” moral freedoms of the sixties. “I’m okay, you’re okay” and “whatever makes you feel good” became a couple of my mottos, and so if I felt like doing something, I just did it with no concern for how it affected others. Actually, I was clueless that my behavior and decisions had any affect whatsoever on anyone else.
As a result, when I returned to church at the age of twenty-six, I picked up religious activity where I left off, becoming generally moral once again. It wasn’t until I was thirty-three when I was born again by God’s grace that I came to see I was really a very immoral person. The poor fruit of my particular morality was born out of years of self-centered, dysfunctional relating. For the first time in my life, I saw my life for what it was, and it was a mess!
I began to allow God to do a work in me, by repositioning my life to be available to Him. During my first two and a half years as a Christian believer, I was humbling myself and repenting of relational wrongs while still trying to do the “right things” based on church assumptions. I actually plunged myself into church activity for the first couple of years. There wasn’t much of a homeschool community at that time; it was still forming underground, but when I began to go around homeschoolers, it was easy to see that they adopted a mixture of ideas, some of which I came to see often contradicted the Gospel they believed in. They seemed to have so many additional standards for righteousness that went beyond tradition. This caused a bit of uncertainty in me at that time, but I trusted the Holy Spirit’s course corrections whenever I started to stray toward false teachings or simply mix with other emphases. Following them would have certainly prevented me from apprehending His life more fully, but the Lord kept me focused on His narrow path toward manifesting more and more Life and Love.
God certainly knows how to lead if we will choose to follow Him, leaving behind other influences. I didn’t always understand what it was He was after in me, but eventually I came to the place of absolute surrender of my life to Him and the fruit of my relationships began to change dramatically. When God set His love in my heart, I was able to see my previous false standards for what they were. I was surprisingly able to continue my church involvement through the Holy Spirit’s leading in my personal life, instead of according to the false expectations of others.
I’m so grateful for the Lord’s loving course corrections, because serving false standards while also trying to serve the Lord, means we’re trying to serve two masters as the Scripture tells us. We will fail to come into the promises of God for our family and relationships if we don’t know how to fully surrender to His leading and work in our lives. The Holy Spirit knows how to lead, but we have to follow even when we have little to no understanding. You can trust the Holy Spirit to lead you to a full surrender to Him and His ways. His love is the only standard for righteousness through faith in Jesus Christ.
It’s critical to allow the Lord to examine your personal standards, because it’s what you follow and trust in to do something good for you. Do you want to understand more about how to recognize false standards in your life that you may not be aware you are serving? You may not relate with my own story of false standards, but perhaps with one of the stories that came from the group of moms in the live version of the “Moral Law” coaching program. I was surprised by the many expressions of false standards that hindered them in their relationship with God. I helped them to see the false standards that were preventing them from receiving His personal promises to them, and coached them in what they needed to do to get more accurately connected to His work.
The “Making Heart Level Connections” coaching programs have been so well received! Barbie and I are excited to see the real changes taking place in the participants. We are currently in live session with “The Holy Spirit” program, which will be available in a few weeks.
In the meantime, if you want to get started in Making Heart-Level Connections, you can purchase the first four programs “Your Conscience”, “God’s Moral Law”, “Your Heart Desires” and “Your Faith” from one of our eStores. Each program comes with all the same materials as their live versions: 4 hrs of audio discussions, topic specific eArticles, questionnaires, plus an edited version of the private Facebook discussions that we had with the participants.
Click Here to Learn More about the programs in Making Heart-Level Connections
Go Here to get the program “Your Conscience”! Regular price is $63.00. LOLACHE members pay only $47.00!
Go Here to get the program “God’s Moral Law”! Regular price is $63.00. LOLACHE members pay only $47.00!
Go Here to get the program “Your Heart Desires”! Regular price is $63.00. LOLACHE members pay only $47.00!
Go Here to get the program “Your Faith” Regular price is $63.00. LOLACHE members pay only $47.00!
Portions of this story were excerpted from the book, Empowering the Transfer of Moral Values and Faith. Go here to read more about this book:
Grateful to be in the Lord’s service,
Marilyn Howshall for Lifestyle of Learning™ Ministries
[Lifestyle of Learning™/LOLACHE eNewsletter ~ September 6, 2012, Issue 32]