Since 1992 I have been captivated by the work of God to set prisoners free.[1] It was the first time anyone suggested the concept to me, and within months I was so engrossed in fellowship with imprisoned souls that I have been praising God ever since that he attaches to his children before we go through such things. This week, I entered another installment of God’s gracious gift.
For a very long time, I have seen my worth through the collection of rejection-experiences that have followed me all through life. In my 30’s, I discovered I had something wrong with me I now call “orphan-mindedness”. Rejection by so many people had made my inner self feel like an abandoned child.
At that point in my life, I had not yet known the transforming power of my adoption in Christ to offset that pain. However, Father only introduces us to these inner-self-problems for us to get to know him better than we have ever known him before, so things were about to change.
Ever since that time, God has regularly shown me a way I do not yet know him at the same time as he invites me to know him in the way I lack. This week was no exception.
The words Father spoke into my soul were these: “I will take you, one from a city and two from a family, and I will bring you to Zion.”[2]
It was amazing what happened as those words pierced all my layers of self-protection and touched the needy places of my heart. Father was reversing my story.
Although using photo-film illustrations is rapidly losing its benefit, I will share this simply because it is such a good picture for me. Old fashioned photography involved using a film that would give us a negative from which a positive could be imprinted on photo paper. Both the negative and the positive contain the same details. In a sense, the story information is identical.
However, what distinguishes them is exactly what the names suggest. The negative shows a negative image of the event, while the positive (the photograph) shows a positive, or accurate, image of the occasion.
The imagery of God taking a person out of a city of people who do not want him, or even out of a family that does not want him, is the photograph that counters the negative. The negative told me that all these people rejected me, leaving me as nothing more than an orphan-minded abandoned child.
On the other hand, Father’s family album showed a photograph of him rescuing me from a sinking ship, so to speak.
Just in a few days, Father has put the negative into his enlarger, shone the light of truth through the negative onto the photo paper of my heart, and secured a photograph of a rescued child. No longer am I an abandoned child drifting further away from people who threw me overboard, so to speak. Now I am a rescued orphan climbing into the life-boat of God and finding a fresh understanding of my adoption in Jesus Christ my Lord.
I know what it is like to constantly fight the negative messages that I am a worthless orphan nobody has wanted. Father has watched over me the whole time, and has, in a sense, constantly opened my mind to understand the Scriptures.[3]
Today I am reveling in the difference I feel with this fresh replacement of “rejected” with “rescued”. And it isn’t that I didn’t already know the doctrines of such things in my head. It’s just that Father’s gift this week has been to pour such loving truth deeper into my heart.
And for that I am exceedingly thankful.
© 2019 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8
Email: in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)
[1] This aspect of Jesus’ ministry
is explained so beautifully in the parallel passages of Isaiah 61:11 and Luke
4:16-30.
[2] Jeremiah 3:14
[3] Luke 24:45
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