I promised you we would get practical, and that’s what we’re doing today. Today, we will consider one practice that I believe will position us to more readily recognize and experience the presence of God in our actual lives. That practice is what I call “telling God the whole truth,” which is based off of an encounter recorded in Mark 5: 25-34, where a woman who had been suffering for twelve years experiences the healing power of Jesus and in response “tells Him the whole truth” about what she had been through.
In terms of our unplowed grounds, I think of these as the rocky areas—those places in our hearts that have grown hard because we have abandoned them. These are often areas of disappointments, hurts, failures or misunderstandings. They are places where we believe that it is too late for the Lord to move. They are often places where we feel like He’s failed us or where we feel like we failed Him. They are places of confusion.
Unsure what to do with them, we have left them untended.
We are a people prone to setting for “fine” when the offer of the Lord is to make us “well.” By revisiting some places in our hearts where we have inadvertently shut the Lord out and declined His offer of wholeness, we will invite Him to tend to us in these places long neglected.
In order to begin to share some of these practices with you in the most effective and efficient way, I’ve decided to add some audio files, so that I can share with you what would be more difficult to communicate in writing.
(If you’re viewing this online, you can simply click on or download the audio below. If this has come to your email, you’ll need to follow this link in order to listen — Listen to audio of Unplowed Ground: The Whole Truth.)
Ask the Lord to help you identify one or two rocks in your field that He desires to revisit with you. These might be memories, disappointments, specific failures, areas of confusion, anything that the Lord brings to mind and that you know you might need to talk to Him about.
Set aside time to tell Him the whole truth about that thing, and then do it — outloud or in writing or in whatever way allows you to be the most honest with Him.
After (and only after) you’ve poured out the whole truth to Him, ask the Lord what He has for you in that place.
