Step 7 Freedom From Shortcomings

Step 7:  We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

The only way any shortcoming will ever become something of our past rather than our present is for our hearts and lives to be filled with enduring love that keeps us safe and negates the need for destructive and broken behaviours and habits.

I pray that out of His glorious riches He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:16-19 NIV)

We come asking God to apply His unconditional love to our fears to the gaps in our heart, to the pain in our memories.  We apply the cross of Jesus to our minds and hearts – the cross that says that every sinful broken act done to us and done by us is carried there by the suffering Jesus.  We ask God to remove our shortcomings by giving over to God all the disappointments in others and ourselves, all the judgments of ourselves and others, all the doubts about our ability to commit to one another in faithful love.  We come to God asking Him to pour His forgiving love into us, for our wrongs, and a generous supply for others who have wronged us.  We come to God genuinely desiring Him to remove from our minds and hearts all connection to trauma, to violence, to rejection and abandonment, to harsh words, to abuse of any kind, to hatred, to betrayal, to misunderstanding, and to anything at all that set in motion our destructive thoughts and behaviours.  How else could we ever follow the words of Jesus who commands us to bless those who’ve harmed us?  Anything less is a shortcoming.

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.  And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors ...  For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.  But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.  (Matthew 5:43-44; Matthew 6:12, 14-15 NIV)

We commit ourselves to the love of God – to receiving that love and staying in the presence of that love and holding our hearts in that love daily until we are filled completely with that amazing love and every other destructive influence is washed out of us.