11 September 2024
What separates us from any activist individual or group is that we don't expect things to change. We aren't in it for the results. We are in it for God's glory. We have a mission for His glory; only He can change the human situation.
He is the only source of change within each of us, as well. We are not the captains of our individual destinies. You either serve the Lord or you serve Satan. The Devil is our master by default; the only way to escape that is to embrace the deliverance of Christ.
Because the Devil has held us in bondage, we are very much like the Nation of Israel coming out of Egyptian slavery. It took a long time to recondition their thinking and expectations to turn them into anything useful. The writer of Hebrews warns us not to be like the generation that died in the wilderness, but to embrace the new life.
It's a much harder life. It's not the easy fishing and melons grown in the Nile Valley; it's scrabbling for every bit of food in a wilderness that offers very little. That's how it works when you pull away from what this world provides as part of the bondage. You must decide that freedom and redemption are worth more than fleshly comfort.
John Providence said something critical in a recent comment: The Holy Spirit will not tell you something you aren't ready to hear. We could characterize this in different terms, saying that your heart already knows the truth, but your fleshly mind may not be ready to hear it. The key is you learning up front that you should ditch all your human expectations for sweet outcomes in this world. As early as possible, you must commit yourself to radical changes, life-altering demands and choices the world considers insane. In human reckoning, you should expect to die frustrated by a wealth of unfinished business.
Needless to say, your self-image is subject to total erasure. In practice, that is unlikely, but some of us start off serving the Lord from such an awful twisted background that we must be putty in His hands, simply because we cannot possibly know what He wants from us until He has us. You must surrender blindly and, for most people, that's traumatic.
On the other hand, He will take you places you cannot imagine exist. Acquainting you to the Unseen Realm can be a wild ride. The powers that exist in that realm are beyond human grasp. The Hebrew people were familiar with this realm, and seldom mentioned it because they took it for granted. Thus, they were already prepared to see miracles that we often simply cannot credit. Who really believes in the Reed Sea crossing today?
Just so, the miracles of power that He can perform inside your soul are often beyond imagining. We are so highly conditioned to think of this as spooky stuff that we actually fear it. We live in a world that rejects the testimony of Scripture, when what is recorded in that book is actually pretty tame compared to what God routinely does for His people under the Covenant.
We are that people. We need to start traveling to that Promised Land.
Comments
John the Fool
"We are not the captains of our individual destinies... It's a much harder life... You must surrender blindly and, for most people, that’s traumatic."
These are 'hard sayings' for the flesh to hear, that is probably why I did not hear them much at church or in Christian institutions of higher learning. Submitting my will to the Lord without reserve or qualification was (and often still is) difficult and frightening, as is forsaking the world and its wisdom, but God has always vindicated himself and his ways... he just never seems to do so exactly when and how I would want or expect, he seems to enjoy first disappointing or subverting my expectations before eventually surpassing them.
My marriage is a good example. The first dozen years were very difficult and unfulfilling in certain respects, but my wife and I were committed to loving each other with our actions and faithfulness with the help of the Lord and according to his Word no matter what. In time, something happened between us that words fail to describe. I can only say that I am much, much more in love with and attracted to my wife today than when we first married, which is inexplicable according to nature or worldly wisdom because she is 'post wall' and is not objectively as attractive as she was in her prime when she did not do it for me in that way.
I know enough men of faith who have the same thing I do with their wives to know that it is not as unlikely as TRP would make it appear because it does not and cannot account for the divine will/action. But I also know enough men of faith who have lost everything to know that nothing is guaranteed. We do not know what a day will bring. The only thing we can know is that the Lord works everything for the good of his children. That good is our faith, which is the greatest gift we can have in this life, but as the Bible and the spiritual masters say, faith must be tried in the furnace of suffering.
The flesh does not want to suffer, even after we have come to experience the unimaginable power of a faith that has already been tempered by suffering in the Lord's hands, but it is essential to keep reminding people that suffering is an unavoidable and necessary part of the deal, even though that message is not exactly fun to deliver or receive. Churchianity does not talk about it because suffering does not sell.
I thank God for all the suffering I have incurred in this life on my journey with him while also asking him to spare me any more, lol.
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