Taking A Look Back

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(Excerpt from Cheryl Gnagey's Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory, Chapter 11)

Taking a look back to where we have been in our journey from the Tabernacle Door into the Holy of Holies will always be profitable.  Seeing where you have been, and knowing where your are heading, is the key to living victoriously in the present!

"If we have been making spiritual adjustments during the previous chapters, then we are well into the journey of our lifetime.  This journey has taken us through Moses' Tabernacle, learning how it relates to our journey toward Christ-likeness and how to appropriate its applicable truths to our spiritual lives.  The Tabernacle, being likened to our hearts, the very place where God now resides, was a tool that we used, not only for discovering where we currently stand on this journey to whole-heartedness on this earth, but also for plotting the journey to our Heavenly home.

But the Tabernacle left us with some questions.  We discovered that we were at crossroads, needing to make a decision as to how we would live our lives.  Knowing where we are at [in the journey] leads us on to a choice as to which direction we will now travel.  The crossroads was an opportunity for us to clearly understand that we must consider our ways so that we might choose the correct spiritual paths for the rest of our lives.  But that chapter left us with yet another question--just how doe we continually choose the right path?

That question forced us to take a better look at our hearts, the Tabernacle of God.  If we were to consider our ways, it would be critical that we take a magnifying glass to what our 'ways' have actually been.  By filling in the cracked and damaged Heart Diagram with those things that keep us separated from intimacy with God, we soon discovered that our 'ways' have been bound up in gods, the sins that we bow down to and worship.  I doubt that your filled-in heart was a pretty picture.  I know that mine horrified me as I realized, with great clarity, just how sinful a place my heart was.  It saddened me, as I am sure yours did you, to see the gods that replaced Jesus on the throne of my heart.

But it was not going to be enough to just identify what was keeping us out of the Holy of Holies.  Something had to be done within our sinful hearts.  God definitely needed to be placed in the center of our hearts, replacing the sin and pridefulness, or we would surely fail in the journey.  Our attempts without God will always end up just exactly like our feeble attempts at New Year's resolutions!  As we returned to the Word, we discovered that God had a plan for us to dispossess the gods of our hearts by taking full vengeance on them.  They had to be dethroned!  It was the answer to yet another unspoken question.

What makes taking full vengeance on our sins and gods so difficult is that we are prone to disobey the commands of God, even when they are clearly spelled out for us.  We learned that there are spiritual consequences for not fully following all that God has commanded us to do.  The only way to be obedient is to understand and practice the discipline of surrender.  We learned that in surrendering to God, the power of the Holy Spirit is released from us, and that He is able to overcome sin and bring victory to our lives through that surrender.  This was what we learned from the Artesian Well.  Our life goal should be to live our lives surrendered to the Lord Jesus Christ!"

These 3 Diagrams, of the Tabernacle's spiritual journey, of a sin-filled Heart, and of the power and victory we can experience in the Artesian Well's release of the Spirit by surrender, are to be used for your on-going spiritual growth.  God is calling you to maturity in Christ!

The Spiritual Side of an Artesian Well -- Part 2

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(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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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!

The Spiritual Side of an Artesian Well

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 (Excerpt from Cheryl Gnagey's Spiritual Healing:  The Surrender That Brings Victory, Chapter 10)


Hello dear readers!  I am back from our Women's Retreat, and I want to share something with you that is a wonderful picture of what surrender can look like in your life.  This is a 2-part blog, so don't miss reading it tomorrow!

"Several years ago, God gave me a picture of part of His creation that reveals one of His spiritual principles so clearly.  I love it when He does that!  This natural world we live in will often paint us a picture of the spiritual realm of our lives.  The picture He painted for me was that of an artesian well.  Study for a moment the picture [accompanying this blog].  It should help you visualize the truth to follow.

You might be asking yourself this question:  'What is an artesian well?'  I asked myself the same question when it was presented in our home school curriculum in science.  In order to teach it, I had to know exactly what it was.  So I did a little research in the encyclopedia, but I found a form of this simple picture in a set of children's science reference books.  As I looked at the picture, the explanation, and a definition from Webster's Dictionary, it was not long before I sensed God speaking to my soul regarding the artesian well as a picture of our repentance, but even more as a picture of the power of surrender!

Let's get a good working understanding of an artesian well.  Like all wells, its water is reached by boring into the earth.  But by God's design, when the drilling reaches the water that is stored up in an artesian well, it sprays up like a fountain with great power because it is under great pressure beneath the ground.  Now that you know that, does the picture make a little more sense?

So, just how was the artesian well created?  It all begins with rain.  Rain hits the ground and saturates the surface land.  Usually an artesian well is formed  when the rain water reaches the layers of rock beneath the surface, the first layer being porous rock.  The water passes through the holes in the rock quickly and easily, moving downward as it seeks the lowest level by the path of least resistance.  It fills every hole it finds.  It continues its downward advance until it reaches the lowest level of rock.  There it is trapped between layers of impermeable rock, and there it is kept contained until heavy machinery is used to bore deeply through the walls of the impermeable rock.  Once the drill reaches the pressurized water, it spews forth, shooting upward with great power and force.  It resembles a geyser as it explodes upward.

Now here is where it gets fun!  Looking at the spiritual application we can glean from the artesian well, it can now minister to us as we begin to see how perfectly the artesian well is a picture of the power of surrender in our lives."

But I am not going to share that with you until tomorrow!  Check back than to get the full disclosure!