“even as Christ loved the Church, and gave Himself up for it.” Ephesians 5:25b. He is preparing His Bride, the Church, to present, in glory, to His Father. Each one of us, individually, as we are hid in Christ, as we have that union relationship with Him, we become the Living Stones of His Church.
I say, He is preparing His Bride, how does He do that? I go back to the practical realities from my own life experiences. When Father revealed His Son IN me, the first thing He said to me was, “I am going to make you a nobody for Jesus!” He took away ALL my activities that I had believed, sincerely, were all for Him. Prayer meetings, Bible studies, child-evangelism, church, everything was taken away.
The Holy Spirit had to show me all the pride I had hidden in my heart, through who I thought I was, through all these “things” This pride had to be torn from my heart. I had to pour myself out before Him and allow Him to work in my life, for the very sake of His name and His testimony.
I had to lose my prestige, my position, my reputation, and become a nobody. You see, pride blinds, and therefore opens the doors wide for deception. We are deceived into believing that we can DO things to please the Father, but out of that death, came Life, His Life.
That which my Father had sown in the grave of His Son, rose in the power of His Life, no longer my own, for His glory and not mine, for His testimony and not mine (how I used to love giving testimonies of what I had achieved and done for the Lord). I came off the insecure shifting sands of my own feeble human efforts and into the stable rock of Christ.
In my place of busyness and activities, there were always people, lots of people, and always praise and encouragement for all my “work for the Lord”. When He became my very purpose, my very life, one of the deepest and greatest costs, was that of loneliness, the loneliness where no-one was able to appreciate what was going on in my life or what God was doing deep within that was so painful.
What a prize!
I could not share it, because I could not understand it myself, things that Father revealed to me that I knew no-one else would be able to understand. It was costly isolation, a separating to Him.
The end made it all worth-while. The awesomeness of knowing the Lord and hearing His voice. What joy!
I quote from T. Austin Sparks. “Any loneliness which may come to us in fellowship with Him now, will not issue in our having a company of our own, but something far greater; it will have helped in the securing for the Lamb that was slain, the reward for His suffering.”
I finish with the words of Paul, as he shared in Philippians 3:12-14 “Not that I have already attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of me. I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” What a prize!!
Post published in: Faith