God’s love honors us. To honor is to assign value and preciousness as prescribed by the Beholder. Honor isn’t based on what we do or even the contents we carry internally. Honor is imputed to us by the God that both created us and redeemed us. God’s honor means the price and value of our life is high. For God to honor us is the highest position we will ever carry in this world. Kings and queens; presidents and diplomats are honored by the standards of this world; we are honored by the King of Kings and Lord and Lords. There simply is no greater privilege.
When we enter into healing, we can easily misinterpret God’s intents if we don’t understand honor drives the essence of everything He does. Through honor, God meets us where we are at and loves us without conditions. Before commanding we change or barging into our world to tell us what’s wrong; He tenderly injects Himself in our pain and perspective. It’s vital we know that God does this first, lest we can mistake His actions as a rejection of who we are at the moment.
God doesn’t speak down to us as though we are wretched, or dirty or defective. He loves us in the broken places and sees our value far surpassing the adjustment that needs to be made. Through honor, God allows us to feel, to hurt, to have needs, and to be where we are. In essence, He doesn’t ask us to come up to His level. He drops down and sits in the pits of our life situations with us.
Most of us will enter seasons in our life when we don’t want someone to fix us; we want someone to hear our heart. This is very much a human need, and God knows that need more than anyone. The challenge that arises is that in our pit we typically surround ourselves with faulty messaging and toxic mindsets that will destroy our inner world. The injuries we carry at a heart level can create filters that wrongly judge the situation and circumstances. We can have misplaced intimacy and misguided insights into relational principles. Thus, should God leave us where we are without offering us a redemptive tool, it wouldn’t be love at all. He will challenge us to make the choice to heal in the midst of our awareness of what’s wrong – but not because He won’t accept us and love us exactly how we are. But because He calls us to more. He calls us to freedom and wholeness in Him. He calls us into a relationship with people that allow us to give and receive love as He intended.
He loves us too much to enable us to stay in the pit and create that as our own “normal”. But the ability to leave the pit will always, always be activated through the choices we make. People will try to fix us in the pit; but only God owns the tools of redemption. And because God honors us; He lets us make a choice. We can stay in the pit if we choose.