Jennie Allen

THE WORLD’S MESSAGE IS SIMPLE: YOU ARE ENOUGH. ALL ON YOUR OWN, you are enough. But that mantra fails us—either because, deep down, we know we aren’t enough or because our self-esteem inflates us to the point that we charge through life independent of God and people. Either outcome leaves us lonely and disappointed. Self-esteem is not the answer. So why are we working so hard to do life, to make a difference, and to be great all on our own? Scripture describes Jesus as the light shining into the darkness and becoming the light of men.1 When I think about light, I realize that every single light humans have ever built requires energy or some force to light it. Flashlights, car lights, lamps—they all pull energy from some other source that can become drained or depleted. Then I think of the light God creates. Fire, the sun, the stars all burning with great force—all the light He creates needs nothing to exist. It needs no other energy source. It just is. When we find ourselves striving so hard to make a difference, to be enough, and to be important, it’s as though we’re trying to produce light on our own. And guess what happens when people try to produce anything in their own strength? We get tired. We experience a drain of energy, just like every man-made light that has ever been created. So what if instead of trying to create light, we simply received light? That sounds so much more fun to me—and so much easier. We make lousy lights because we were built to enjoy and reflect light, not to produce it. The vision of God for our lives is that we would receive His light and then give light to the world. In Matthew 5:14, Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.” Most of the time the New Testament refers to Jesus as being the Light, but when His Spirit lives in us, we are the light of the world. We receive who Jesus is and then give that away. The degree to which you believe and embrace your identity as a Spirit-filled child of God will be the degree to which His light shines through you. You are God’s and He is yours. He is in you and through you and with you. That is your identity. And when you choose to embrace it, it changes everything. If you embraced your true identity, you wouldn’t just be able to rest from striving to do impossible things; you would be able to sit in awe of this fierce, crazy, awesome, and uncontainable Light that is fully accessible to you. With Jesus as your light source, you can stop spinning, and simply reflect the light He gives. MEDITATE The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:5) REWIRE THE SPIRAL I can rest from striving, and God can still move through me. PRAYER God, I want to know what it is to enjoy and reflect Your light, rather than trying so hard to create my own. Please shine on and through me today. Amen.”   To grab your copy of Jennie Allen’s devotional, Stop the Spiral, click here. Excerpted from Stop the Spiral Devotional by Jennie Allen. Copyright © 2024 by Jennie Allen. Published by WaterBrook, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC. Used by permission.

This is an excerpt from Jennie Allen’s book, Untangle Your Emotions.  Have you ever sat down with someone for coffee or lunch and that person started sharing what was really going on in their life, maybe even getting teary about it? How do you feel in that moment? Sure, there might be a moment or two of awkwardness, but beneath the uncertainty of what to say or do, what is it that you feel? I bet you feel compassion. Affection. Grateful, even, that they shared their life with you. You feel connected to them, even if you don’t know them all that well. That’s what emotions are meant to do: connect us to what is most important. And to who is most important. Our emotions have a purpose, and that purpose is to connect us to God and one another. Everything that God has placed inside us is for the purpose of drawing us near to Him, to trust Him. Take away the childlike fear and we lose our childlike inclination to pull close and ask Him for help. Take away excitement at an incredible meal and we lose our awe and wonder at the gifts of God. Take away hope and we never look to heaven. Take away peace and we never rest in God. The truth that sets us free begins with the truth that we are sad or hurting and desperately and urgently need help. There is no hope for health, joy, peace, and salvation apart from Jesus, the One who is all and has done all for us. He died on the cross for our sins. He was raised to new life again. He offers us grace and forgiveness and an eternity spent with Him. That’s it. That’s the gospel. The Bible is clear that the truth of that sets us free:  Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free…. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” (John 8:31-32) Certainly, Jesus is speaking of Himself in this verse: the truth of who He is as the means and the way of salvation. The ultimate freedom we need is to be freed from the eternal consequences of our sin. And right now, that is available to you if you trust Jesus as the only means for salvation. But it doesn’t stop there. The Bible is filled with stories of people who worked out that hope and truth and freedom with their emotions, with how they felt. Paul hated Christians, was murdering them, until Christ met him and rescued him. That extreme emotion turned to impassioned grace and fervor to reach the world with the hope of Jesus. (1 Corinthians 2:9-11) King David poured out his guts throughout the book of Psalms. The songs of lament are the most emotive, raw, messy parts of the Bible. He’s mad at God. He’s sad with God. He has given up and lost all hope, and then, in his honesty with God and himself and others who are listening, he comes back to all that he knows to be good and true of God. The beauty of David and the Psalms is the permission to feel it all. David had full confidence that God could handle all his emotions, even the ones that caused him to doubt that God is good and that God still loves him. He sees injustice go unpunished and he’s ticked! He feels safe enough with God to wrestle it all out! Do you? THE TRUTH? It is freeing. It’s freeing when we tell the truth! But we can’t get that done without admitting how we feel, without confessing what our lived experience is. We can confess sin. We can share our pain. We can confide our fears. We can cry through gut-wrenching grief. We get to express what we’re thinking as long as we express what we’re feeling too. Tell God and trusted loved ones all these things so that you can finally live fully free, connected to one another by the rope of emotion. If, as you’re reading these words, you’re feeling paralyzed by sadness, anger, grief, or disappointment, I want you to know something: Given everything we are presented with in this lovely world of ours, its amazing to me that you don’t feel more than what you’re feeling right now. That’s the first thing I would say, were we seated across from each other, face-to-face. We know that emotions are all-encompassing. They make you ecstatic when you see your kids succeed on their own and take their first steps. They make you feel sick to your stomach when you’re nervous and scared. They make you feel your chest get tight when you’re reminded that the future is beyond your control. They make you anxious when you fall in love and aren’t sure the other person feels the same way. They make you cry when you see pain and suffering and can’t fix it in your life or in the world. Something about emotions is connected to our thoughts, but equally true is that they’re also different somehow. Maybe you feel like you are staring at an ocean of emotions, wondering how you could ever get across. It’s too big. All the hope and grief, joy and anxiety, unshakable memories both good and painful. How on earth do you cross? And then closing in behind you is life, the constant reality of the people needing to eat, the assignments that are due, the places you need to be. How am I supposed to deal with this ocean? Do I even want to do this right now? I’m here to remind you that you are not standing on that shore alone. The same God who accompanied the Israelites as they stared at the water in front of them, knowing the Egyptians were closing in from behind, and the same God who split the sea— He split the sea! —that God is near. He’s right there beside you. He can do a miracle here.     Adapted from Untangle Your Emotions: Naming What You Feel and Knowing What to Do About It. Copyright © 2024 by Jennie Allen. Published by WaterBrook, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC. To grab your copy of Jennie Allen’s Untangle Your Emotions, click here.

Jennie Allen reminds us that there is healing in confession through connecting with people, connecting with God, and saying it out loud instead of hiding behind a wall of shame. Through Christ, we have been empowered to throw off the weight and sin that entangles us so that we can run the race that God has for us.