God Will Settle For Nothing Less

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

"Everyone's heart is in some form of disrepair.  It is our individual responsibility to do the hard work of the Inner Court experience in order to show that we have our priorities right and that we desire to be obedient to God's call into His presence.  This pleases and glorifies God, just as when the Israeli remnant went to the mountain to gather wood for the rebuilding of the temple after they returned from their exile in Babylon.

Once we have realized our wrong priority of and disobedience in doing everything else but obeying God's command to rebuild and transform our hearts, we can finally begin to seek the Spirit so that we might be informed by Him of the gods, idols, and sins that are still in our hearts.  Ironically, it is these dark places in our hearts that reveal our most predominant affections.  They keep us from having right and godly priorities.  For example, the sin of loving to watch television, and therefore investing too much time sitting in front of it, will often be the very reason that we are not spending much time with God, or that we are not accomplishing the ministry He has given us to do.

God is a patient God.  He did not require us to 'get perfectly clean' before we could be His child.  Jesus' sacrifice was enough for us to join His family as we declared our need of and belief and trust in Him.  However, He is now patiently waiting for us to come before Him with each flesh affection that separates us from intimacy with Him.  What He has graciously and patiently let remain in us may now be the very idol or sin that He requires us to give up for Him today.   Yes, God is a patient God, but He will not be patient forever when it comes to our sin.  God would cease to be God if He continually winked at our unholy sin and love of the other gods that we have place before Him.  His desire is for our sin to be chopped out of us at  the root, leaving nothing left to grow back.  He wants to be the only God that we worship, serve, and bow down to.  He will settle for nothing less."

What are your heart affections that are keeping God in some other seat rather than first?  Have you not already spent enough time bowing at their thrones in your heart?  God is not winking at your sin; He wants these sins to be crucified in your flesh.  He wants to be your ALL IN ALL.  To crucify your flesh is  surrender.  Your sacrifice of gods allows you to walk in obedience to the one true God.  This is walking in the Spirit.  Shall we continue asking God to settle for the idolatry found in our heart and lives?

Discovering The Sin Within Your Heart

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

"Theory must always give way to practical application, otherwise all of our 'head knowledge' becomes wasted and worthless grey matter.  Can we turn our focus for just a moment to the Inner Court of our heart transformation?  I would like us to magnify that court right now so that we are not looking at the beginning or end of our spiritual journey, but just at the present, the here and now.

It is in the Inner Court where God allows us to see just how dark and sinful our hearts really are, and can be.  This court is a place of illumination.  Once in the Inner Court, once we have taken a good 'look around' at what is really hidden there, we often find that the sins, the gods, and the idols we find inside of us are so many that they are overwhelming to us.  We know that we are to be busy building our hearts into a proper and pure home for the Lord by sweeping out all that He would not enjoy.  Just like the Israelites of Haggai's day (that we looked at in Chapter 6 of Spiritual Healing), we know that we are to 'rebuilt' our sin-scarred hearts, which is the temple, the Tabernacle of the Holy Spirit. But again, just like the Israelites, we typically respond just as they did, don't we?  We put satisfying the desires of our own flesh ahead of the priority of cleaning out those very flesh-sins found in our hearts.

We follow after our own priorities, and we leave our sin-filled hearts in disrepair, desolate, and open to destruction while we continue living flesh-ruled lives.  Our breaches, fractures, and sins remain.  Our walk with the Lord and our very lives do not even remotely resemble the life of Christ!  We continually go our merry way, prioritizing everything else in life except our walk with Jesus and a desire to achieve a holy and pure lifestyle.  Following in the footsteps of the Israelites, our wrong priorities lead us straight to the obvious consequences, and some of them will be severe.  Our ministry for the Lord becomes fruitless, barren, and even non-existent.  In the end, when we do not concentrate on obediently living the commandments and repenting of our sins and idols, our lives reveal that our hearts have not been transformed.  Such transformation only takes place when we have been walking intimately with the Savior."

Tomorrow I will be continuing in this vain, by sharing a quote from Joanna Weaver's Having A Mary Heart In A Martha World.  Her personal testimony might help you more clearly see what you are doing that is keeping you from that very intimacy.

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!"

Removing The Yo-Yo From Your Spiritual Life

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(Excerpt from Cheryl Gnagey's Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory, Chapter 9)

"Believing that Jesus is Savior and King is enough in our moment of salvation, but it is not enough the moment we desire to live the abundant life promised by Christ.  We must choose to make Jesus the Lord of our lives and believe that He is in charge of our lives, making a conscious decision and effort to surrender to Him based on that belief.  The enemy loves to use the lie that salvation is enough for a transformed life.  Believing that lie is one of the main reasons that so many Christians stay in the Outer Court of the Tabernacle (living only in the knowledge of our salvation, baptism, and eternal life) for so many years, enjoying its ease and refusing to step into the Inner Court of surrender and the deepening knowledge of and relationship with Jesus Christ.

Have you experienced a full surrender to the will of God?  Are you seeking to continually surrender your flesh and your will to God every day?  Or are you like a child playing with a yo-yo when it comes to your sin--you throw it out and a moment later you pull it back into your life?  When will you finally, once and for all, cut the string?  What is your answer to God's call to surrender and heart transformation?  Andrew Murray understood surrender like this, and in a public address titled Absolute Surrender, he said, 'God is ready to assume full responsibility for the life wholly yielded to Him.  The condition fro obtaining God's full blessing is absolute surrender to Him.'

If you will heed His call, you are about to see what great power from the Spirit can be released from within you.  Interested?"

Over the next few days, I will help you discover the great power that lies within every child of God and how to see that power be used for God's glory.  In teaching you the concepts of releasing the trapped power inside of you, I hope to both challenge and inspire you to do what is required of you so that you will see the Holy Spirit explode out of you and touch a lost world!

How To Be Obedient, God's Way

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(Excerpt from Cheryl Gnagey's Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory, Chapter 9)

We are taught from a very young age that we not only can accomplish things, but it is better if you do it all by yourself.   This sounds like good instruction, but it does so because this has been ingrained in us since we began to hold our own bottles at feeding time.  But God's word does not teach that at all.  As a matter of fact, He tells us this in Zechariah 4:6 instead:

  

"Not by [your] might, nor by [your] power, but by MY SPIRIT, says the Lord of Hosts."

 "Here's the problem that most of us have when it comes to surrendering to God so that we might obey His every command.  We tend to try to do it in our own power.  In other words, we try to surrender the flesh--BY THE FLESH!  You have already heard that nothing good resides in your flesh, yet you are probably guilty of trying to surrender by your own fleshly power and strength anyway.  You have also likely discovered that surrender by way of the flesh is fruitless.  If you think that isn't true, then just think of one New Year's resolution in which you have succeeded for life!

It bears repeating.  We can only accomplish surrender to God in one way--God's way!  We must come to the place where we allow God to change our hearts and minds so that we understand that repentance--the intentional turning from sin--that flows from a heart that God is changing, is required of every God-seeking believer.  When we allow God to work in our hearts and minds we are set free to act upon the work He has already done within us--the heart-transforming act of placing the life of Christ in us by way of the Holy Spirit.  Because of this one action, we can fix our gaze on Him and turn away from our sin instead.  This is how we die to our flesh.

It is at the veil that divides the Inner Court from the Holy of Holies where the crucifixions of our flesh will take place.  When the veil of your heart that keeps you from fully surrendering to God is removed, then you will be enabled to become a fruit- bearer of the  greatest kind!  But if your walk lacks crucified flesh, then your flesh will remain in its state of decline, ruling over your thoughts, words, and deeds.  If you choose against the surrender that involves the crucifying of your sinful flesh, then you will become useless to God, and your 'religion' will be dead.  Remember, the flesh is death to you, but the Spirit is life."

We can do it, but not alone!  Our part is to surrender to the Spirit in us, and then He accomplishes obedience through us.  Any changes we make on our own can never be heart-transforming because our flesh is made of nothing good. Changing us is the work of the Spirit within us.  Only He can change your heart.