Marriage, Divorce, & Remarriage Part Final

Last week, I ended my article with this bit of encouragement: “If you are one of those who, thankfully, divorced after living (incarcerated) in a controlling marriage, but you are finding it difficult to enjoy your newly-discovered freedom, take heart! God never leaves His children in in the bondage of slavery (it was for freedom that Christ set us free!), so you can rest assured that He predestined you for this freedom, and, I might add, there is nothing better than His present provision for your life—absolutely, nothing—not fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, or garlic (whatever they might represent in your life!).”
In other words, whether you choose to remain single or to remarry, God has a new life for you, a life that, on the one hand is terribly frightening, yet, on the other hand, even the thought is exhilarating, giving you the kind of rush I think you would feel just before you made your first bungee jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, hoping you would stop short of the school of piranhas that were eagerly greeting you.

The fact is you stand in one of those God-designed places where you can know better than you have ever known not only that you have died (you no longer live!) but also that Jesus is your life. You have been bought with a price and, therefore, are not your own! What an incredible place to have landed after such an gut-wrenching journey! As I see it you have landed on a precipice, a very high, vertical cliff, and your only way out is a free-fall jump! Sounds just like God, doesn’t it?

Now listen to these words from “Deep Unto Deep” by Dana Candler (p. 143-145): “. . . in my descent, a drawn out cry comes forth as my last request, “Have Your way!” Into His hands, I commit my spirit (Ps. 31:5). I have died, and I no longer live. I have no more rights. Swallowed up in the great deep of my transcendent God, fully His forever. I have taken His name, and my entire identity has been absorbed by Himself. I freefall with arms spread wide, holding nothing for myself and keeping not the slightest grip of ownership upon my life. My life is not my own. I have been bought with a price. And I have willingly surrendered to my position of hiddenness in Him—hidden with Christ in God. When we leave the places of living before men and begin to live before the Eyes-of-fire alone, we cross over into unknown territory. He has brought us to a certain wilderness of transformation. And here in this place we are no longer able to measure our worth by the tangible reality of our success before men. We leave the old measuring sticks at the door, for they are not suited for the ways of God. We depart from the false identity that was based on how respected, known, gifted, and influential we were in the eyes of men and leap into the vast unknown realm, the hidden reality, of who we are eternally in God. In this hurdle, we take great risk for we leave every familiar comfort behind us. To abandon the realm of the seen that we might freefall into the unseen is a daring endeavor and only faith anchors our souls. We voluntarily jump off the cliff of our old identity without an absolute clarity of our new one. Though we know who we are in the corporate sense of the redeemed-body-of-Christ, the mysteries that He formed in us individually and the details of who we are personally in the hidden places, are nearly entirely hidden from our understandings. We are trading in what we have always known and what others have always told us of ourselves for a book of blank pages. We leave all the old voices, however true or false, for the One voice who is temporarily very silent in our experience. He shows us so little of who we are in Him in the beginning because He wants us to experience the ‘drop off’ from the old ways and be willing to plunge into the unseen realm with eyes of faith. We face the pain of the barrenness of our souls. We face the reality of all that we do not yet know of Him, when we once thought we knew so much. We spend a season in this dangling-in-between place—no longer identified as we once were, yet still so foreign and distant from who we truly are in Him and our eternal identity. As we dangle, we pray, ‘Let me be weighed on honest scales, that God may know my integrity’ (Job 31:6).”

Let me be honest: I am scared-to-death of heights, so you can rest assured that I ain’t going to bungee jump, even from a barstool, much less a bridge, so I am certainly not going to choose a freefall jump from a cliff! Interestingly, however, God has His own ways of “landing” us in that place where our only way out is a freefall jump into the unknown. Fortunately, however, we do get to make that “one last request”—”Have Thine own way!”—but even that is a bit nerve racking.

Now, let me be even more honest. I think this author (Dana Candler) is unveiling something and I really want you to see it: Even though it makes you hyperventilate, it IS safe to make the freefall jump into the wilderness of transformation, into that high and holy place where the Holy Spirit, not men, determine obedience for you. You see, in your jumping you leave behind those old measuring sticks—how respected, known, gifted, and influential you were in the eyes of men—and trade them in for a book of blank pages, or so they seem. Thankfully, God has already written the script but He did so with white ink on white paper. To use the words of Dana Candler, “No one, except those rare few with eyes into eternity can perceive who we are anymore.”

So, go ahead and jump; it really is safe! Whether you choose to remain single or at some point to remarry, the best is yet to come, and that is a promise (from Him, not me!). At least, once you make the jump, you are no longer controlled by the mirrors of a thousand religious, self-centered opinions and that, my friend, is quite a measure of exhilarating freedom!
Thanks for all your patience in reading these bits and pieces of “literary genius” from this old codger, who knows very well that he not only knows very little, but also that what he knows is probably a far-cry from the real truth! Let us continue seeking Him, whom to know is eternal life!!