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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sara Hagerty
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September 1 - October 23, 2022
“Too good to be true” is humanity’s response to God’s gifts and to the God who doesn’t just hold the files of our lives but also writes them. And studies them. What I told my little girl that night was no different from what I’d barely grasped myself: adore Him here. “The joy of the LORD is my strength,” I told her, quoting Nehemiah 8:10, adding, “Don’t focus on what you’re afraid of, but look at God.”
One middle minute can hold fears and insecurities and mind wanderings. No wonder we long for a highlight reel, for those banner days. But in the middle minutes, we discover who we are and what we carry.
Giving our lives to God wasn’t merely a broad-strokes yes for the shining times when His power is tangible.
Adoration is choosing from God’s Word a part of His character and His nature to meditate on, particularly one with which we wrestle. Adoration reaches beyond our thirty-minute, sanitized quiet time. It can come from our base questions and fears, our honest grappling.
Adoration is finding a pulse behind the Word and then saying that Word back to Him in our dialect. Adoration is asking Him to wrap His fingers around our dull hearts and to slowly revive them. It’s admitting, I barely know You, God.
Adoration invites God into the grit of my life that irritates and exposes, the grit about which He already knows. Adoration is meeting God in the invisible, unaccounted-for minutes I ignore.
Adoration takes my eyes off what I’m not and puts them on who He is at the very moment I decide I’m distasteful.
Adoration is where we bring our raw vulnerability—our “what I actually believe about You, God”—to the place of His truth, expecting Him to change us.
“That our idea of God corresponds as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us,” writes A. W. Tozer. “Compared with our actual thoughts about Him, our creedal statements are of little consequence. Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions.”1
I’m realizing that radical is sustained worship of God, against the grain of the world’s distractions.
Most days when I adore, I speak one sentence and realize I bring a mind full of things that don’t align with what His Word says. Adoration works the muscle of emotional integrity inside us.
For me, adoration oscillates between telling God who He is and admitting to Him the lies I’ve believed about Him (and about me).
The best time to adore is when I don’t feel like it, because adoration is not an exclusion of our emotions. Adoration never requires us to shut down our emotions. On the contrary, it invites us to bring them—all of them—to God. God does not want our polished pretenses. He wants our whole selves, and He wants us to come honestly. So He invites us to wrestle.
My life is shaped by how I respond when I feel exposed.
In the raw vulnerability that temptation surfaces, Jesus pointed to the Word.
We live as if our present reality is our only reality, but God has seen us since the beginning of time.
God is writing a story in us, and we find our place in His story intertwined with our discovery of Him.
Adoration isn’t looking at God; it is looking into Him. It is training my eyes to see His eyes, His heart, His way. Adoration introduces the healing of His Word and His Spirit.
Adoration invites me to come with the whole of my story, hopeful He will breathe life into it. All of it. Not just the easily told parts.
Adoration heals our insides and intercepts our stories, even our histories long past.
Time is a poser. Yet we live as if time is our monarch and let our perception of its scarcity rule us.
the invitation was to let God breathe on the untouched places of me with His Word and His whisper. I didn’t consider that in feeling His breath there, my life would expand and thrive. A thriving life in God starts in the unseen.
The battle within our minds and for our minds could be the most substantive battle of our days. No matter the season, His thoughts are available to us. And they expand. They grow and enhance and bring life—a sharp contrast to the lies we believe about our limitations. Our minds are a battleground. If we win here—or rather, see Him win here—imagine the possibilities.
And yet the cross affords a way out of the riptide of our thinking. Because Jesus lives inside us, we can ask for His thoughts, these mysterious thoughts. We can search after His ways. We can receive what our practical minds, charged with broken histories, cannot give us. Though life on this earth still holds mystery, the swirl of thoughts that dance in our inner worlds and tell us our narratives do not have to drive us. With Jesus, the capacity of our minds expands.
Our history plus the enemy’s lies, years of faulty thinking, and our Bible illiteracy encumber our minds more than we realize. We get inspired by a quick quotable phrase and overlook the deep drink we need of His Word. But we have His mind and He is ready today to help us have that space in our lives to expand, grow, and carry far more than we do right now, but with great lightness. We want a shift in our circumstances or relief in our schedules, and He continues to invite us back to the place that no one sees but from which our days are ordered and derived.
“In the school of adoration, the soul learns why the approach to every other goal had left it restless,” Douglas Steere writes.12
At every juncture of my life and my day I am given an opportunity to ask and respond, “What will I feed my soul? My thoughts or His?” Adoration is not only reprieve from the mind spirals, it is the feast that my mind offers my soul. Dallas Willard says it this way: “The ultimate freedom we have as human beings is the power to select what we will allow or require our minds to dwell upon.”13
His Word spoke a better word over my life than my comparative analysis.
Adoration retrains the eye to behold. And eventually, we become what we behold.
Let Him draw near. Let Him bend low, awkwardly, against your understanding of a God and King. Reach in to you, right where you are, and speak to that moment, that space, the lower rung.
“But we have learned from the Bible . . . that God’s interest is to magnify the fullness of his glory by spilling over in mercy to us. Therefore the pursuit of our interest and our happiness is never above God’s, but always in God’s.”15
The truth is, adoration starts with our lack—not just admitting it but inviting Him into that place. It’s here I find Him gentle, circling around me on my hardest day. His gentleness lifts my eyes up, and I learn the first step of becoming—beholding. Adoration is most powerful when I start where I am.
But to worship God as great—truly great, the kind of great that has our hearts racing at the thought of Him, that leaves us wanting to be on our knees on the carpet because His expression in our lives feels too holy to stand under—we need to let Him into the sides we protect. We need to find Him in our weak places.
Every craving in my life is met by God, but I don’t know this until I expose the cravings and bring them to Him.
We feel presumptuous adoring God from the place of our greatest need, and yet when I see God respond to the deepest cravings of my heart, it feels guttural to adore. This cyclical nature of God’s meeting me in my humanity, then my responding with praise that I’ve finally been seen and known and responded to in my darkest places brings God great glory.
He heals me with Himself, and as I allow the vulnerability that incites His healing hand to reach me, my life and mouth can’t help but respond. This is the cyclical nature of adoration: from my weak place I reach for His strength, and in the healing I receive from that tender strength, I offer Him the glory that moves His heart.
The more we look at Him, over time and in the middle minutes, the more we grow into the tree that reflects Him.
Our religious notions, coupled with a task-driven American experience of Christianity, often leave us overlooking the corners of our life that are opportune for communion.
“We begin [adoration] right where we are in the nooks and crannies, the frustrations and fears, of ordinary life.” And later, “We do not learn adoration on the grand-cosmic scale by centering on the grand and cosmic, at least not at first.”22
You came hungry, and I expect you will leave more aware that your much resisted neediness opens the door to vibrant strength and awe-producing beauty in His world.
I felt discarded, carrying a barren womb in sight of another’s growing girth, until I understood that His nearness to the brokenhearted means that He brought all of Himself into their pain. Even His eyes. He heals with His eyes, His sight into my pain.
You are my strength when I have no strength. On some days I despise my weakness, on others I ignore it, and I often miss You as strong. You are available to me in the moments I resent, casting strength and lifting me out of what I would rather endure. You change flesh into holiness when I come, weak, and see You as strong. My weakness is not a reflection of You, but Your strength changes me. I adore You for turning a despised moment into glory with Your strength. I praise You for making strength reach down and come near when I can barely reach back. You move close with Your strength in my
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Hope isn’t safe, but it is healing.
I never questioned His ability to heal, watching the testimonies of His hand in the people around me and reading the testimonies of His hand in His Word. My question was whether the goodness of His healing would ever rest on me.
The boundaries of time and life and existence were His to supersede. He had the stone moved on His way to heal.
As you adore, ask Him to reveal Himself to you as a healer—on the inside (in my opinion, the harder place for us humans to receive healing). Press pause on asking for the physical manifestation of His healing (allow all the mental traffic that might come as you wait on that ask) and ask Him to heal your heart’s understanding of Him as a healer.
our newlywed days held strife. I wanted all the attributes of a godly man in his forties or fifties, with little understanding of what those men walked through in their twenties and thirties to get there. I wanted a hero and a best friend, a man with strong arms to carry me through my weakness and a strong heart to process his. I wanted him to have wisdom beyond his years and the playfulness of youth. And I desperately needed to feel his fierce, unwavering commitment to me, despite my demanding and unrealistic expectations of him.
However . . . however, even the man Nate is at forty-two cannot meet the longing God placed in me, from birth, for a bridegroom. He never will. At best, he can be merely the scent of that for which God intends to fulfill in Himself.
In my twenties, full of unrealistic expectations and fairy-tale dreams, I took my grief to God. After long years of taking my grief to Nate in the form of a list of things to change, I surrendered. I asked God, instead of Nate, to fill me.
I like myself better when I am strong and productive and on time. I like myself better when I can help myself and help others and feel needed. And then when I couldn’t do those things, I started to see His heart: He likes me when I am weak. He moves most powerfully when I don’t have my strength. He is not impressed by my productivity or my meeting of others’ needs or my help. His currency is not my currency, and it took a boot cast, a propped-up ankle, and the same verses I had sung in songs for years but now seeped past my mind into my heart to see His mercy.
