Today is your Inauguration Day!  I know the phrase is supposed to be New Year, New You…just indulge me for a moment.  New wine, new you.  We are a few weeks into the New Year and it’s off to a glorious start…Many of us have committed that this will be the year!  The year for change, the year for old habits to be broken, the year for completion in some unfinished areas of our lives.  I say yes, yes, yes to all of these things – but first things first.

Luke 5:37  “And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish.”

God’s mercy is new every morning and being formed in His image, we too have the creative oil inside to recreate and make new.  A few years ago, my kid sister Ashton, gave me one of the best gifts, the Urban Decay eyeshadow palette, Alice Through The Looking Glass.  If you know my love for make-up, you will understand why this gift is so great 😃  The best part of this palette however, isn’t the makeup at all, but the quote on the outside of the palette that is so inspirational.

“I know who i was when i got up this morning, but i must have changed several times since then.”

A couple of weeks ago during our 12:30pm Sunday service, God spoke something to me…”you are full from within.”  Full from within.  Immediately I asked him to divulge.  Explain this to me with clarity God.  Nearly instantaneously, He began to show me things that I had tucked away, repressed, made a space for and put them under lock and threw away the key…and He said to me again…you are full from within.  Why had I held onto these things?  Some of them were things I had long since forgiven…but I had never allowed Him to heal.

Let me break it down to you like this…several years ago my youngest daughter, Isabella, was sick for over a year and a half.  Every morning as soon as she would eat breakfast before school, her stomach would immediately begin to hurt.  She always became nauseous, felt like she had to throw up.  We prayed over her constantly, took her to doctor after doctor, allergists, specialists, literally exhausted our recourses.  I eliminated things from her diet, gluten-free, dairy free, and one day we finally got an answer.  A children’s specialist who took enough X-rays to uncover that she had impacted bowels.  What? Why would impacted bowels make you feel like you need to throw up?  Because you are FULL FROM WITHIN.  The doctors remedy for this?  12 capfuls of miralax for the next 7 days…you gotta be kidding me…have you ever taken just 1?  But that’s exactly what the doctor ordered.  She needed to empty herself.  No possible way for her to intake more food or digest properly what was incoming until there was release.  Sound familiar?

He can’t pour in until you pour out…
He can’t make an entrance until you open the door…
He is always ready to make an exchange!

Here I am crying out for new, praying for increase, fasting to create capacity in my life and all He wants is to be let in.  Floored.  Why is it that we feel bad to let God be Abba to us…why do we want to hold onto things instead of releasing them to Him?

Olympic divers.

We have become Olympic divers.  Diving into God and judging our splash.  We dive from great heights into Him and want everyone around us to have to get out a microscope to be able to see the splash.  Crazy…God delights in big messy splashes.  He loves the loud as you hit the water.  We need to be less Olympian like and more little-kid-belly-flopping into Him foolery.

So let this be your spiritual Inauguration Day…out with the old, and in with the new.  Jesus is so excited for you to shed your old wine skin as He stands there with a fresh bottle of wine ready for the pour.

Xo,

Steph