1) God’s ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts (1) In fact we are told not to be wise in our own eyes (2) as we will not understand His ways and His thoughts.
We are too earthbound to see what God the Father is doing. This involves trusting Him in all situations knowing that He has everything under control and nothing is too hard or difficult for Him (3).
We soon learn and discover that all our best motives and intentions are defiled and unclean in God’s eyes, as somewhere the root of “self” comes in! All that can ever come to God is in Christ alone and not in us. All our best intentions are filthy rags in God’s sight (4). This is one of the first things in getting to know Him.
2) We will discover that it is absolutely impossible to reach God’s standard ourselves. God has shown us that we are to conform to Christ but we come up against the hopelessness of ever being able to reach God’s standard ourselves.
We can try service, reading, self discipline, self denial, self effort etc, but none of these will satisfy or be an answer to His requirements.
3) The Holy Spirit can now begin the work of conformity to the image of God’s Son in us. He clears the ground for bringing in the fullness of Christ. Things begin to change in us, the believers, in an inward way, and we begin to see that Christ Jesus is now manifested in a growing way in us.
There may be a long way to go, but we cannot fail to see that the foundation is laid, the commencement has been made. There is a difference, and the difference is not that we are necessarily changed people so much, as that He is now within us transcending what we were by nature.
It is not that we become so much better, but it is that He, within, becomes so much more real as a power. So it is like Paul exclaimed, “Not I, but Christ!” (5)
4) We need to be responsive to the Holy Spirit and let nothing resist or refuse His working in us. We must be ready and perfectly open for the consequences of the Holy Spirit putting His finger upon anything in our life that needs to be dealt with and adjusted.
Christ is truth and we must let go of religious traditions and man-made precepts. We live not by what we are but by Him who abides in us. He alone is truth, and we have to learn how to live and depend on Him within us. Feelings are contrary to the life of Christ within.
(1) Isaiah 55:8,9 (2) Proverbs 3:7 (3) Proverbs 3:5,6; Genesis 18:14; Jeremiah 32:17 (4) Isaiah 64:6 (5) Galatians 2:20
Post published in: Faith