The Terror of the Parting

“When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac…When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood…Abraham looked up and there in the thicket he saw a ram…and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place The LORD Will Provide.” Gen. 22:3, 6, 9, 13-14.

A large part of my writing ministry is transparency. God always leads me to pen the good, the bad and the ugly. As I have written many times, over the course of my adult life I have been continuously wounded in spirit by an extended family member. I have built up bitterness of heart and resentment in the actions against me. It has always felt to be a barrier in my heart between me and my Father. My insistence for justice and consequences has gone unanswered by God and has become a rival in my heart to God’s fullness. It is time to lay my Isaac down!

Every one of us ‘gathers wood’ as we go through life. In our hearts we collect attitudes towards others that we stack as firewood for the future. We pile it on top of our right to entitlement giving flame to our passion in whatever the circumstance. It lays there stacked on top of each other eventually rotting and decaying when the offering should have been made to God long ago.

When we reach the place that God tells us to build an altar and lay something down, we cannot tarry or we will miss the blessings. No doubt I have missed many blessings because I just couldn’t light that match and wasn’t ready to let it go. I am ready for freedom and tired of cutting wood! The sacrifice and surrender of anything is about obedience, not about the object of the sacrifice. Whatever we give up God will replace it with a ‘ram in the bush.’ He won’t leave us empty but will provide on His mountain. A.W. Tozer writes a prayer in his book, The Pursuit of God, which I wish to share for anyone who has an Isaac for whom they wish to lay upon the altar of the LORD.

‘Father, I want to know Thee, but my cowardly heart fears to give up its toys. I cannot part with them without inward bleeding, and I do not try to hide from Thee the terror of the parting. I come trembling, but I do come. Please root from my heart all those things which I have cherished so long and which have become a very part of my living self, so that Thou mayest enter and dwell there without a rival. Then shalt Thou make the place of They feet glorious. Then shall my heart have no need of the sun to shine in it, for Thyself wilt be the light of it, and there shall be no night there. In Jesus’ name, Amen.’

…enter and dwell there without a rival.