(Excerpt from Cheryl Gnagey's Spiritual Healing: The Surrender That Brings Victory, Chapter 10)
Yesterday I blogged on the workings of an artesian well. Today, let's look at the amazing application we can take from it, and by it, discover the exciting experience we will have when we surrender our whole lives to God!
"Now here is where it gets fun! Looking at the spiritual application that we can glean from the artesian well, we can clearly see the unmistakeable similarities between it and our surrender. Let these points of comparison minister to you as you see the perfection of God's picture of the power of your surrender to Him.
- The Holy Spirit indwells us at the time of our salvation. He rains down on us from Heaven and comes into our very hearts, His Tabernacle. He took the path of least resistance, filling up the holes of our sin-ravaged lives, as He made His way down deep inside of our souls.
- Once inside of us, our fleshly, sinful pride traps Him, so that He resides deep within us, waiting to be released by our full surrender to His authority and control. We know His power is there inside of us, but we don't often see it exploding forth in our lives, and neither does anyone else. He remains hidden, and our pride keeps us from surrendering fully to His Lordship.
- When we decide to bring in the heavy equipment of repentance and surrender, a deep boring will take place within our hearts. This repentance and surrender will break through what has been our impermeable sin and pride. Once our repentance and brokenness go deep enough, the Holy Spirit is released in us, and out of us, like a powerful fountain. He will shoot upward to the Father, glorifying Him and granting us power and victory over our sin. Then others will also experience the power of our surrender as we begin to walk under the influence of the Spirit instead of our flesh and sin nature. They will see the 'new and greatly improved' us!
It is the rain in the diagram that is the Holy Spirit. In the Word, the Spirit is often spoken of as water of various kinds. The porous rock is the sin in our lives. It is all the holes in our sinful hearts that are obvious as we came to know the Lord. But then, as is often the case, the Holy Spirit becomes trapped inside of us by the impermeable rock of our fleshly pride and daily sin. The Holy Spirit is now rendered powerless and useless [just like the trapped rain water in the artesian well] because we refuse to allow Him to have full control of our lives. Do you see how our brokenness over sin, and the repentance and surrender that follows, is the drill that is necessary for the Spirit to come forth from us in power? Without our repentance and surrender to the Spirit, He lies trapped inside of us with nowhere to go. He is the power inside of us that we have been given to be all that God intended for us to be. When He is not allowed to explode out from us by our surrender, we live powerless lives that are without victory over sin. We live in the flesh instead of in the Spirit. In this state, we will surely die and stand before the Lord with regrets for not having become the person God desired and empowered us to be. And we will have little, if any impact, on a lost and dying world.
Awesome, isn't it? You have been equipped to walk in the power of the Spirit through your acts of being broken and repentant of your sin, and surrendered completely to God. These are the drills God uses to release the trapped Spirit from within you!
Can you now share this principle with others who might need to know how to set the Spirit inside of them free? What a great visual to use with those who ask you what has happened to you, and how it is that you have changed. You can now witness to them that it is the power of the Spirit in you, that has been released out of you by your surrender to the perfect will of God, that they are witnessing in you!"
Now, that is a testimony!
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