For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. . .  Romans 3:23-24

There are times in most of our lives when we don’t want to go backward. We don’t want to move back to the city where we used to live because it will make us feel as if we haven’t made progress. We don’t want to go back to our old job because it will make us feel as if all of the skills we learned since then were a waste. We don’t want to go back to doing what we used to do, because going backward makes us feel as if we haven’t gone forward. Going backward feels like failure.

There are times, however, we may need to go back to the beginning of our relationship with Jesus. We need to go back to the place where we first started with Him, which for most of us was the place of desperation. We were desperate because we knew we couldn’t save ourselves. We were desperate because we knew we couldn’t change our hurts, hang ups, and addictions on our own. We were desperate because we knew our old ways of trying to earn God’s favor weren’t working. We knew we needed His deliverance. But then as the Lord liberated and healed us, we exchanged desperation for being self-sufficient, so we tried to earn favor with God through being good enough. We tried to do the Christian life on our own without empowerment from the Holy Spirit. This is why we sometimes need to go back to the beginning to the place of desperation where we first started with the Lord.

Continue reading Wisdom Hunters – Why Desperation is a Good Thing →