Anything: The Prayer That Unlocked My God and My Soul

by Jennie Allen

Great people don’t do great things; God does great things through surrendered people.

A faith that says if God is real then I plan on living like it.

There is nothing more dangerous, more compelling, more freeing, more radical, more real, more satisfying, or more powerful than a smidgen of faith.

Falling in love with God was an intangible concept to me.

I wanted to feel something. I wanted it to be real. I needed it to be real. But how do you make something like God real?

Plastic gods are safe. Plastic gods don’t mess with you.

Plastic gods don’t matter much; they fit in a small crevice of the life you want, the life you were planning

to have. And when everything in life is working . . . plastic go...

Every sin, at its root, is based in something we do not fully believe about God.

Doubt is in all of us . . . if we go there. If we let it rush in every once in a while.

Life’s realities were causing her to wonder why she’d ever believed in the first place, if her faith had ever been truly hers, or if she just believed because that was all she’d ever known.

God can handle your questions, but don’t drag this out. Go there and then decide if he is real or not.”

But his journey for Laura had to begin with Laura deciding whether or not Christ was the way. Until that was secure, everybody was just playing house.

Unbelief is no small thing. It lays the foundation for all the places we struggle,

It is the most damaging thing in us—to mistake God for something small or wavering.

A. W. Tozer wrote, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”1

I used to think knowing about God was the same as knowing him.

The only exercise that works 100 percent of the time to draw one close to the real God is risk.”

“To risk is to willingly place your life in the hand of an unseen God and an unknown future, then to watch him come through. He starts to get real when you live like that.”

I started craving something that had never seemed acceptable to me until that day . . . a reckless faith, a faith where I knew God was real because I needed him, a faith where I lived surrendered, obedient, a faith where I sacrificed something . . . comfort or safety or practicality . . .

Stepping out wholly dependent on God to come through, stepping away from what is secure and comfortable exposes the holes in our faith. And then if God comes through, it expands our faith. Something about stepping off cliffs where God leads allows God the opportunity to move in greater ways. When we step off and he shows up, we see him differently than we would if we were standing safely looking over the edge.

When a story gets real, it does something inside of you.

However, we can believe in Christ and be free and still

be stuck. God was my new master, but I didn’t know how to shake all the old ones. I knew a lot about God, but I still did not know him. I believed he was big enough to save me forever, but now I would have to grow to believe he was big enough to weave in and out of my every day, leading me, changing me. But now he was real, and I was his.

I care what others think because deep down I want to be seen as great—I want to matter. I find it impossible to forgive; to truly be able to forgive people who hurt us must be one of God’s greatest miracles. And I belittle the God of the universe by worrying as if he is not really in control.

Adam and Eve chose evil, but then they found themselves in a place without church or Bibles or pressure from their priest. On their own intuition, they ran from God and tried to cover themselves and their shame with fig leaves (Gen. 3). These were leaves of pretending, the same leaves we call religion or perhaps morality or maybe being good. They tried to cover up just how bad they were.

We think we can appear okay

The state of our invisible hearts takes precedence over all the good behavior, over all the bad.

It physically hurts to see our pride, to see our sin, to quit playing good, to feel broken and to need God. And it hurts even more to let others see it. So we run from falling; we choose large fig leaves to cover up with and not God. We run from that vulnerable feeling that we may not measure up, all while aching to measure up.

First we ask, is he real? And second, do we really need him?

What if the thing we are trying to impress him with was the very thing keeping us from him?

There is something so beautiful about people aware of their sin and their need for God. That is beautiful to God. He can work with that, enter into that.

why. I thought about what it had meant to hold Mom’s hand the last few days . . . a fight, discipline, controlling . . .

I grabbed both his hands and simply said, “Will you hold my hand just because I love you, just because I am your mom?”

I had to redefine my hand for him. What seemed to be a hand that signaled discipline and failure was about something different; it was about a relationship.

God is home to us. He is where we were made to be. He is what we were made for. We just forget all that while we are trying to be good and independent.

Pretending to be good halts God’s movement in our life.

Legalism or religion helps us feel better about ourselves, puffs us up, gives us the posture to be critic...

It made God the hero, not them.

The irony is that Jesus’ blood takes the least good and makes them the most good. It’s beautiful.

We don’t want to fall. We like to see great testimonies of God’s grace, but we don’t want to be the testimony.

I fall because I can’t keep pretending I am okay when I know deep down I’m not. But I also fall because I find God in the sand. I find God with my face in it. And then he gets to be the lifter of my head, rather than my pride.

How deep the Father’s love for us How vast beyond all measure That He would give His only Son To make a wretch His treasure I will not boast in anything No gifts, no powers, no wisdom But I will boast in Jesus Christ His death and resurrection Why should I gain from His reward? I cannot give an answer But this I know with all my heart His wounds have paid my ransom2

You simply lay hold of what Christ has provided.

In one act God did what no amount of effort on our part could do.

The weight of my sin grounds me. Breaks me. Shows me I need Jesus.

What a lie she believed for decades—that revealing the broken pieces of her would push people away, push God away!

If I view God rightly, I run to him the second any weight descends on my shoulders. He deals with it.

Sometimes, when we sit down on our couches with God, we’re afraid he’s the mean teacher from second grade, when instead he is the safest place we’ll ever be. His presence is the only place where invisible weight is lifted. The only place where hidden, broken spaces are mended. The only place where we are defined apart from our successes and our failures.

In love with God and yet eagerly serving everybody but him?