So over the course of the year God has revealed soo much to me about Him, His Gospel and His Grace....!! It has been mind blowing and wonderful.....do I say this to brag or to boast in myself...NOT AT ALL! I share this to revel in Him, and in the power of the Holy Spirit! You see for years I tried to "know" God more, actually I tried to know about God and I just wanted to know what I had to do...just tell me what to do God, was my mentality. Well, by His amazing grace, infinite knowledge and awesome power....he showed me a different way. HIs way...."knowing" Him through heart revelation by the power of the Spirit. Let me try and explain, we can't know about God with head knowledge, no amount of studying the Bible and memorizing can help us "know" God, it helps us know about God. I am not saying these things are a bad idea, by all means keep on doing them...But everything we truly know of God comes by revelation of the Holy Spirit. Here's a quote from the book I am currently reading that I think helps explain this better.
"The work of the Holy Spirit is to reveal to us the reality of the mysteries of God. These are in the unseen and eternal realm and as God's children they are our right to know, but only the Holy Spirit can tell us those realities.
Until the Holy Spirit tells us, God's unseen and eternal realities seem to be outside of us. So we set out to gain information about them , thinking that if we gain enough information, we can then produce the spiritual life, as if it were and outside thing - a thing - to be gained by kowledge. Of course, what we ended up with was not much spiritual life, but lots of information about it.
Unfortunately, there's no relationship between the amount of information we accumulate and the ability to live a spiritual a spiritual life. But there is a direct correlation between the amount of information we gain and our level of frustration. It's frustrating to know about something and not be able to know it or live it. It's frustrating to know something is there and not be able to lay hold of it. It always seems elusive, like the carrot dangling in front of you that you keep chasing but can never grab.
In the things of the Spirit, no amount of know-about gives you the ability to do. Our heart is for God, though, so the more we know about, the greater our desire is to do it, and the more we try to do it. But trying to live the Christian life through our own effort is like trying to put a cube into a spherical hole. It doesn't fit. The only One who can live the Christian life is Christ. Only His life fits the hole. But we still try to force it to work ourselves, and that becomes very, very frustrating.
We are meant to be frustrated when we are trying to produce something that we are incapable of producing. It's the goodness of God to let us be frustrated. If God were to interrupt our frustration before we were completely frustrated, we would think, "I've learned how to do it. I'm not frustrated anymore." But we wouldn't have learned anything. So He says, "Go right on with your program until you have exhausted the library of Christian literature on how to be spiritual. When you have exhausted all of that, when you have come to your end, you are ready to be taught by My Spirit." At that point, where else do you have to go?" (excerpt from "The rest of the Gospel, when the partial Gospel has worn you out." Dan Stone and David Gregory)
Well, that is exactly what happened to us...we tried and tried, sometimes didn't try at all and threw our hands up and wallowed a bit, then would muster up our strength to try to live the christian life,.... truly we felt that frustration...and eventually came to the end of our rope.....that's when the lightbulbs starting going off, that's when God's power through the Spirit broke into our spirits and hearts and made our eyes pop wide open to His Grace!!!
So I encourage you, to not try to have it all together, to be okay with failing and looking as messy as you really are.....it's a Great way to be...because then and only then will you have eyes to see and ears to hear the glorious things that He will reveal!!!!
Grace to you....
2 comments:
I pray that Father blesses your heart so much for posting this! I needed to be reminded that It's ok not to have it all together. I easily get caught up in the "treadmill of guilt" and sucked into the black hole of performance.
I (think) I'm actually at the point where I've heard and understood the "grace walk" and whatnot but as with everything else in my life, I have never been able to learn with book knowledge. Only hands on learning will do. And doing that requires that I mess up!
Books can, as Morpheus says in the Matrix "Show you the door". But as he says after that "You're the one who has to walk through it."
I realize it makes me and most other believers insecure and uncomfortable to not have it together or understand everything.
Absolutely! It is okay to be in a mess. This is something God is showing me these days. All my life I have been struggling with the spirit of perfectionism. Some times I walk/talk as if I know everything about His grace. Then later I find (the hard way) that I still have no clue. Yes, we need His revelation. Thats is the only way to know Him. Thanks for the post!
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