Distracted

"In God, it will always work out."

IN ORDER TO GROW UP, you have to lay some things down. In order to walk more fully in the Spirit, you must stop living according to your physical desires. Just say to Him, "I turn this desire over to you. Help me walk as you want me to walk."

This is not a piece about the good and bad of your likes and desires. Some things are perfectly fine, they are not a sin, but if they take up all your spare time and they occupy your thinking, they keep you from spiritual growth. Spiritual growth is more than knowing Scriptures and attending church. It is more than devout prayers or even time spent praying in tongues, God's heavenly language to you. Spiritual growth is you having more of a heart for God - Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit - than you have for other things. God can use other things. He has men and women gifted in art and music, in teaching and craftsmanship. He has people who are called into politics, into engineering, and into the military. But no occupation or entertainment should eclipse (take over) your hunger for God. Matthew 5:6 says we must hunger for righteousness.

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.” (Matthew 5:6)

Righteousness is where we stand in God's eyes when we accept salvation. Interestingly enough, the devil, called our adversary, is defined in the Greek word "adversary" as the anti-righteous one. We are righteous, and he isn’t. Righteousness is the authority of God. It is our rights as God's children. But as His children, in order to understand what it is and to operate under its authority correctly, we must grow up, and growth asks us to no longer respond childishly. What a toddler would do, a fifteen-year-old should not and a thirty-year-old shouldn't even think of in his reaction. Age in the Spirit isn't so clearly defined in years, but still, the analogy rings true.

“Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual, but as worldly—as infants in Christ.” (1 Corinthians 3:1)

Age in spiritual things often requires walking a little blind. Abraham sets our example. Abraham was called from his home in Ur of the Chaldees to travel to a land he'd never seen, where he knew no one. What men must have questioned, he did not refuse to do, and despite the risks, he obeyed and went anyway. After his son, Isaac was born, as a miracle of God to he and Sarah, God asked him to take Isaac to the top of the mountain, which, again, God would show him. There he was to offer him as a sacrifice. What a crazy thing! Who would even consider it? Yet Abraham not only went, but when they arrived, he told his servants that he AND Isaac would come down the mountain together. Hebrews 11:19 tells us he said, "If need be, God will raise him from the dead." And God did just that, sending a ram, as a substitute.

What I want you to know here is that God asks our complete trust. When we don't know what's directly ahead or how God will get us there, that place of not-knowing but obeying is growth. He wants our 100%. We usually want to give it, but with qualifications. We have one eye on the quick exit route, in case it doesn’t work out. In God, it will always work out. Maturity is our going anyway, even when it doesn’t make sense, and us not whining over our discomfort. Because the unfamiliar can be uncomfortable. But the rewards in our relationship with our loving Father are astronomical.

Too many people settle for less, content (they think) to merely pace the sidewalk outside the temple when God has prepared us to enter the Holy of Holies. We are the temple of an Almighty God, a generous God, God who does the impossible. But is our temple empty? Or do we really need to tend the flame on an altar that raised the dead? Is there a television, a movie screen, on the altar? Is there a ball game? A book series? And I have fiction series for sale. But they should never replace Jesus. Minister Benny Hinn said he got caught up watching TV, until the Spirit told him to stop. So he got rid of all his TVs and began deliberately reading the Word. He sees the difference in himself now.

We are being beckoned higher to God’s point-of-view, and it will surprise us when we get there, how much we have misunderstood, how much we have lacked vision. How much what we thought was God’s voice was instead our own. His character and nature will surprise us, the size of His mercy. For what we thought was judgment was forgiveness, what we thought was vengeance was patience. And all those little things we nitpick at that we think He’s counting, He isn’t. He just wants you … me … and laughs off the rest, immensely good-natured. We have designed heaven based on human standards and have humanized God to think and react like we do. But men’s gods have failures, and He simply doesn’t. It’s that He washes us clean in the blood of Jesus and beckons us to stand taller in spite of our being human that makes our hearts cling to Him in the first place. Without all those things to distract us this time, and instead, in our vision, only the light and glory of His beauty and grace.

“I give up everything this world has to offer so that I might be with Christ and be recreated in Christlike character—not from my own efforts or attempts to cure myself, not by observing some code, but by true re-creation of mind, heart and character that God accomplishes when we trust him. And this trust is established by the evidence of God’s supreme trustworthiness provided by Christ.” (Philippians 3:9, Remedy)


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Suzanne D. Williams, Author
www.suzannedwilliams.com
www.feelgoodromance.com