The Barriers That Separate Us From God

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Today, while reading my daily devotional Jesus Calling by Sarah Young, I was struck by the first two sentences.  God's voice seemed particularly clear and direct as my heart heard these words come forth:

"You can live as close to Me as you choose.  I set up not barriers between us; neither do I  tear down barriers that you erect."  (November 5, page 324) 

While reading the first few words my heart was shouting a big "Oh, yeah!"  But the jubilation only lasted a second.  My heart was pierced by the last part.  "Neither do I tear down the barriers that you erect."  Stopping myself from reading the rest of the devotion, I sat silently pondering those words.  God's direct approach this morning had caught me so completely off-guard, I knew that I could read no further until I had addressed His comment spoken so specifically to me.

"Neither do I tear down the barriers that you erect."  You see, I love the idea that you I can live in such close  proximity to God that I experience many intimate moments throughout the day.  And I also love the idea that I could never go so far wrong that God would build a brick wall between us.  God set in motion a plan of relationship with Him that involves me running boldly into His throne room, without hesitation or fear, so that I can jump into His lap and be encircled by His loving arms, and at any point during my day, frequently if desired.  But what I don't like about what He said is that if there are any walls that are put up between us, it will be of my doing.  And what's more, He will not be the one to tear them down.  If I build a wall, I will be the one to have to destroy it, if I want it down.  Even worse for me to hear, there seems to be the implication that I have erected and will erect these walls.

My convicted heart knew in that moment that there is still a wall of barrier between me and my Lord.  I have built this wall, brick upon sinful brick, as I walk in the disobedience of my own fleshly heart.  What stands between me and the Lord are my sins, and the only way those bricks of sin are coming down is if I surrender myself to the Spirit within me,  and I  begin to obey the commands of God's word.  In a nutshell, the wall will come down as I repent, turning completely and resolutely away from each individual sin that is a brick in my wall.

Once again, my Lord has brought me back to the same thing He has been addressing in my life for several months now.  It is the issue of the individual sins and idols that are still in my heart, and  they are  affecting my spiritual  life and walk with Jesus.  This has ramifications on my intimacy with Him, too.  The bottom line is this:  I can spend much time in the Word; I can learn all that it says to me by dissecting the words I study by defining them more correctly in the Greek and Hebrew; I can do endless cross-referencing that will support the concepts found in a single verse; I can sit in on multiple Bible classes and teachings each week.  But if I am not applying what I am learning, and if nothing really changes in my thoughts, words, and actions, then all my knowledge and understanding comes to nothing.

For years I have basked in the idea that "knowing" is a great blessing.  But the blessing only comes when we "do" what we say we "know."  Jesus told His disciples a powerful truth, just after He had washed their feet and challenged them to live spiritually higher and more intimately than they could completely understand.  These are the words He spoke to them, and to me today, "If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them."   I have coined a saying that is similar to what Scarlett O'Hara said in Gone With The Wind.  Here is my thought that seems to line up with what Jesus said to His disciples, "Knowin' and sayin' ain't doin'!"

In the end, my biblical knowledge on the topic of the importance removing sin and idols from my life, the verses I can quote about it, even teaching the Word's truth of it to others, will never equal the 'living it out' in my own life.  The wall I have created out of multiple bricks of sin and dependence on things other than God Himself must come down!  The difficulty of the task can never be my excuse to avoid tearing it down.  The state of the mortar that holds it together (whether hardened by years, partially solid, or still soft from its very recent application) is irrelevant.  The wall must come down if I want to experience life in the Holy of Holies.  My wall is the veil between the Inner Court Classroom on my spiritual journey and the intimate presence of God in the Holiest Place of All.   The wall, the veil in the Tabernacle, is my own flesh!

To turn away from the difficult work of rooting out all sins, idols, and wrong attitudes in my life through my surrender and repentance is to make a choice to live farther away from God than He desires.  It is a choice to live with my sin-wall between us.  Yes, my wall MUST come down!

Finishing Strong

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(Excerpt from Cheryl Gnagey's Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory, Chapter 12)

My dear readers, this will be the last post from my book.  I have enjoyed sharing its "highlights" with you, and I pray that the Lord has spoken to your heart regarding your own spiritual healing.  I will still be blogging, but on my daily reading instead of my book.  And then, at the first of the year, I just may return to posting from the book, to refresh all of our memories regarding this fantastic journey that we all are on as we seek the face of God.  I would love for you to continue to follow my blog, and post your comments too, because that is my very favorite part . . . having you share your journey with me!  Blessings to you all as you walk it out for Jesus!

"The burden to build the temple of my heart was never meant to rest on my shoulders.  But is will be brought to completion as I realize my daily sins, confess them, surrender to God, and obey whatever God tells me to do after that!  God's Spirit will complete the good work that the Father has begun in me!  Let this revelation minister to you and defeat the lie that is is up to you to change your own heart.  Be set free from striving to repair your  fragmented, and sin-ridden heart, as I have been in several areas of my life!  It is God alone who will restore your heart, the very Tabernacle of God!  Warren Wiersbe summed it up this way, speaking of how we might go about the rebuilding of our hearts:

Hudson Taylor had definite convictions about how God's work should be done.  We can make our best plans and try to carry them out in our own strength.  Or we can make careful plans and ask God to bless them.  'Yet another way of working is to begin with God:   to ask His plans and to offer ourselves to Him to carry out His purposes.'

My great desire is for you to be spiritually healed, healed from the division in your heart between flesh and Spirit that is evident in your thoughts, words, and actions,  and healed from your heart's brokenness caused by your sin.  This restoration of your heart is your spiritual healing; it is God uniting the chambers of your sinful heart.  And it is by your surrender to the Spirit that you will begin to discover victory in overcoming all forms of sin.  We wouldn't need evangelism teams sent into the world if Christians were walking in surrendered victory.  We would be living testimonies to them! 

 Now this is my prayer for each of you as you continue on in the process of having your heart, God's Tabernacle, spiritually healed:

I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what is the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe.  These are in accordance with the working of the strength of His might which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places . . . (Ephesians, 1:18-20)

Continue on, dear brothers and sisters!  Fix your eyes on the Holy of Holies while you walk through the chambers of the Tabernacle of your heart.   Keep moving, never stopping, until you reach the goal of the glorious presence of the Father in Heaven!  Run in such a way as to win the race!  (2 Corinthians 9: 24)

O God, unite all the pieces of our hearts now and restore them and transform us into the likeness of Your Son.   Teach us to fear Your name!  By this may You be glorified forever and ever, Amen!"

Choosing The Correct Path

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(Excerpt from Cheryl Gnagey's Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory, Chapter 12)

As I begin to wind down the message of Spiritual Healing in the next few blogs, much of it will seem familiar to you, at least I pray that it will.  The last chapter of the book is the culmination of the first eleven.  Each blog will have less information, but it is designed to be that way.  Prayerfully absorb the truth, look deeply within so that you can correctly assess your spiritual condition, and then choose the correct course of action that will lead you into the Holy of Holies.

"Are you in the same court [of the Tabernacle] as when you began to read this book [or these blogs on the book], or have you covered some ground on your way into the next court?  Which court is your current address?  Each of the courts can be reached by taking appropriate steps, and sometimes even leaps, in our spiritual lives.  The goal is always to reach the presence of God in the Holy of Holies.  But your arrival there will depend on these two things:

1. You!
2. And the choices you make!

If you never choose to die to yourself and your sinful ways, you will never walk boldly into the Holy of Holies here on earth, for no flesh can reside in His presence.  So to reach that goal, one must die to self.  Do you remember that the placement of everything in the Tabernacle lines up into a cross?  In order for Jesus to secure a way for us to travel through the Tabernacle into the presence of God, He had to sacrifice His life on a sinner's cross.  If we desire to bask in His presence, we must choose to do the same.  He died for our sinfulness, but our sin still is present in us to many varying degrees.  His intimate presence will only be gained when we die to the sin still found in us.  The Old Testament Tabernacle was a prophetic picture of Christ's death.  It was also a prophetic picture of what is required of us now; it shows us how we must die even as Christ had to die."

What will you do with this information?   Did you recognize this as truth and absorb it?  Did you assess your spiritual condition and the sin that still is apparent in your life?  Will you decide to do whatever it takes to die to your flesh and to your daily sin?  These choices are up to you.  Your choices will determine and reveal whether or not you are serious about moving forward in your walk.

Your Journey To Intimacy With God

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(Excerpt from Cheryl Gnagey's Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory, Chapter 12)

"Out of God's great desire for us to walk in a deep and intimate relationship with Him, one in which we begin to turn over our entire lives to His full control, He woos us by His Spirit to walk through the Door of Jesus.  We are saved through our belief in Jesus when we walk through that Jesus Door.  We then claim His sacrifice on the cross at the bronze altar as His act of sacrifice on our personal behalf, and we are baptized in the cleansing water found at the bronze laver, whereby we associate ourselves with Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection.  This is our Outer Court experience, but it is not the end of our journey.  It is not the goal.  It is not the place of the greatest intimacy.

As we continue to make our way through the Tabernacle, our journey takes us into the Inner Court.  It is that place where we begin to grow up in our faith.  It takes some believers (like me) many years to pass through that particular door because we are content with our Christian life in the Outer Court, just the way it is.  Others begin to grow right away, flourishing in the Holy Spirit, in the Word, and in pure worship to the Lord.  No matter into which category you happen to fall, the Inner Court is a place where you will become even more intimate with the Lord by way of walking in the Spirit, delving more deeply into the Word, and by learning to worship in both Spirit and the truth found in the Word.  Our growth will be evidenced by our greater fruit.  But this fruit is not limited to the ministry that God has given us to do.  We must also focus on the fruit that will grow inside of us, the very fruit of the Spirit, which is love, joy, peace, patience,kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.  The Inner Court will be the place in which we identify, confess, dispossess, and take full vengeance on those actions and attitudes that do not line up with the Word and the Spirit.  It is also the place where we will learn to follow the commands that are found in the Word.  The door into the Inner Court is a "cross-roads" in our journey to the Holy of Holies, one which will determine if we will take the easy road (and stay in the Outer Court) or adjust our course, choosing to take the narrower path.  If we choose that narrow path into the Inner Court, it is there that we will be aligned and adjusted in our hearts to the good and perfect will of God, and begin to obey His commands with our whole hearts.

A marvelous thing happens when we are consistently seeking to turn our whole lives over to the Lord Jesus Christ through our confession of sin and the surrender of our will to His.  Through deeper study, a closer walk with the Spirit, and worship from a much more pure heart, we discover moments of great intimacy with the Lord such as we have never before experienced.  These are indescribable times of joy that only flow from a heart that is chasing after the God who can restore it.  This is the experience of those who have chosen to pass through the veil, crucifying their own flesh and will, and step into the Holy of Holies.  This is spiritual healing and intimacy with Christ!   And ultimately, our earthly level of intimacy will grow exponentially when we see Him face to face in Heaven!

The Tabernacle is where we meet Jesus.  It is where we identify our lives with His.  It is the place where we give Him the rule of our broken lives, tarnished with sin.  It is whee our intimacy with Him grows.  The Tabernacle is a picture of the journey of a true believer, and it reveals the relationship that we are currently having with Jesus!"