(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!
