24 June 2023
The power of conviction is more than we can tell. It's one thing to be stricken in your conscience; it's an altogether different experience to come face to face with a holy God and know just how holy you aren't. Your conscience is at most the interface with your convictions. Learning to read your own convictions must start with getting used to your soul being slammed to the floor before God.
This is why humility is a trademark of anyone who has come into contact with the Holy Spirit. You never get used to the experience itself. You simply get used to wallowing in your very justified sorrow. You know you are really getting somewhere when it is your joy to discover yet another part of your sinful nature you had previously ignored.
In the field of psychology this was once referred to as cleaning out the basement. It's utterly impossible to do it all at once. It becomes a task that returns at intervals when the Lord calls on you to go down and poke around in some neglected corner you didn't realize was there. But if there is any hope of serving the Lord, it's utterly necessary to find out what's down there. It's where your individual motives and drives are hidden. You cannot harness to God's power what you deny exists.
It's often unpleasant to recognize, never mind embrace, what God did or didn't give you as your native self in order to serve Him. Most of us managed to pile up a great mass of dreams about what we hope to be in this world, only to have much of it shredded when we have dug around in our psychic basements to realize what's down there. It turns out that it's all great and wonderful gifts from our God, but hidden and guarded by demons.
Those demons want us to fear what God had made us to be, so it's all spooky and frightening -- at first, anyway. If you progress far enough, you begin to understand that it's all reclaiming your divine heritage, the vast treasure of God invested in your life. The flesh hates change, but our spirits recognize it as the loving embrace of our Lord.
I'd like to recommend a song, but it's really difficult to find on the Net. It's "Winds of Change" by the Imperials. It showed up on their 2002 CD album, I Was Made for This. In the second track, Armond Morales sings a bit in his higher range about how delighted he is that God is "charting his life" at this moment, a "refreshing breeze" blowing away the old comfort zone and exposing new blessings.
The first few times God works that way for you, it can be terrorizing. The song promotes a better understanding that what God wants for us is always sweeter than what we could dream up for ourselves. Rejoice; He's giving you new gifts!
I can empathize, as could many other believers with even a modicum of maturity, but nobody can walk through it for you. It's a very difficult time even for seasoned veterans of spiritual warfare. This is where you discover the true blessing of not taking yourself too seriously, of having a firm grip on the difference between your eternal self and your fleshly nature. The flesh is terrified of the soul's basement, but your eternal self longs to clean up the mess the flesh has made.
Comments
DarkMirror
Here's that Imperials song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXsPGaJskQM
Here's an interesting coincidence. Their cover of their latest release is also the icon I use on a forum I admin:
https://music.apple.com/us/album/john-evans-the-imperials-ep/1390325632
Catacomb Resident
Thanks. YouTube's search algorithm would never let me see the individual songs from that album. Also, John Evans' group is a different bunch of Imperials. But I would be surprised if you knew that.
DarkMirror
Ouch. Yes, different band. I didn't listen to any of that EPs music, so I didn't catch on. Spotify listed that release under the other Imperials. It does that with bands that have the same name sometimes.
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