This blog is a segment from the introduction of a book I wrote many years ago on Spiritual Warfare. I've never sought to have it published, and I don’t know if it ever will be, but I find my feelings, that I wrote about in the book concerning seeking God’s righteousness and asking him to convict my heart, are still pertinent to me today.

​I remember in one class of the Charismatic ministry of which I was on staff, we were to go to a private place and ask for the Lord to convict our hearts and to bring about radical change in us. My heart was in despair because I so fought even asking the Lord for revelation about my sins. Ugly as they were, they were part of me and comfortable as an easy chair even though I was not, well perhaps vaguely, aware of what they were. ​I went to a park close to where I had grown up. I had been in this park many times in my childhood and had known a lot of joy there. That day I felt only grief and fear. I thought of the passage and how I related from Job 9:30-35:

​I planned to get out of the car and tell the Lord as I walked across the meadow of park grass, that He could have His way with me. His perfect will - although I imagined that I might be chained to a rock like Prometheus for the rest of my natural life and subjected to a barrage of accusations, always new and more detailed with each passing day. I saw the Lord’s angry face and my poor shriveled body on the rock. It occurred to me that was my idea of who the Lord was and who I was in Him, He, the psychotic sadist, and I his poor, little wrinkled prune victim.

​Instead of getting out of the car I put my head on the steering wheel and began to weep. I wondered how David, after sinning with Bathsheba, could have so passionately asked for the Lord to clean him with the words in Psalm 51:7:

Nevertheless, I did ask for the Lord to convict my heart and to transform me. Now I write from the rock where I’m given an hour of free time each morning to record my thoughts before my SlimFast Clorox breakfast.

​Ok, jus’ (don’t pronounce the ‘j’) kidding. Indeed the Lord did clean me out in a very different way than I ever imagined. He would produce the sin in living color - as I was committing it. I would hear myself in my anger, for instance, with my husband, and I would see myself using anger and guilt to control my husband’s behavior, and to get him to feel sorry for me.

It never worked, by the way.

My anger and guilt only made him hostile toward me. Every time. On the other side of the coin I would hear myself using niceness, not because I meant it, but to keep people from hurting me or getting too close. Instance after instance, I began to look at how I protected myself and my low self-esteem, from the world using whatever emotional weapon, at the time, worked, or I thought worked. So, in spite of me and my resistance, the Lord, through the years, had washed me, and I had asked him to, but it was never because I willingly trusted and obeyed him, absolutely never.

Try this exercise yourself - see what happens!