Are you completely dressed and ready for the day, or have you professed your belief in God and Jesus Christ, but not clothed yourself in those things they provide you that will protect you against the world? On top of that, are you ready to wrestle with the issues pertaining to God’s will for your life that require you to stand tall and be more than a weak and unthinking creature?
Do you read a simple devotional each morning? Is it one that speaks the truth to you in an interesting new way, or, heaven forbid, one that takes what is comfortable for you and bends God’s truth to fit it? Finding the right author who doesn’t caudal our humanity at the peril of our spirituality is the struggle... for both the author, who might be doing harm to God’s Word, and ourselves, as we accept a possibly false premise and feel comfortable in its fallacy.
Feeling the Peace of Christ is one of the most treasured and coveted aspects of the Christian faith; it is a reward for obedience and is our life’s harvest for believing and living our lives as disciples of Jesus. Do you have the Peace of Christ today? Do you understand the difference between the peace of the world and the Peace of Christ because they are quite different.
How do we pray in intercession? Do we give our own instruction to the person for whom we are praying, or do we place their suffering and other need before God as we ask His will be communicated to us, and done for them? One of the greatest snares in intercession is to allow our own sympathy to step between the person requesting prayer, and God. When this happens we are attempting to fill a void that only God is meant and qualified to fill. Our role as an intercessor is to pray for God’s will to be done, and not to lose heart as we do.
Are you an individual? Do you see your spiritual and physical selves as being unique and independent of one another? How about your personality? In fact, our physical being is what we are, and our spiritual self is who we are. So it is that as physical individuals we are referring to our bodies, and although they are alike in many ways, God has made them unique. Our personalities, on the other hand, are experienced more than seen, and are boundless in their nature such that only God can truly understand them. When Jesus speaks in John 17:22-23, which of these is he referring to?
Do we attempt to hide who we really are from God by covering ourselves in some fashion? Do we pretend to be spiritually in control when in fact we are anything but? Do we tuck our sins away within us where we feel they are safely hidden from God’s eyes? Who are we fooling except ourselves when we believe that God doesn’t know our deepest secrets and see us for who we are? He is God, and knows our every thought and sin, so we shouldn’t be reluctant to bare ourselves openly before him and seek His help in dealing with our nakedness and imperfections; He has known them all along... even those we have tried to hide away in the furthest recesses of our hearts.
We are creatures of both natural and spiritual construction. It is God’s desire that our natural selves be disciplined, and come under the authority of the spiritual, but that wild and unschooled nature is not a passive student in this transition. Have you gained control over your natural self? Are you waiting for God to make this choice for you? Well, He has His desire in the matter, but the choice remains yours.
Have we given up everything we are to Jesus Christ? It is easy to lay down the sinful, and evil things in our lives, but have we also laid down those we have always considered to be good? Abandoning those things to God that we naturally identify as being good and wholesome is the most profound test of our faith. Even though being able to leave behind those things that are sinful and contrary to God’s commandments and desire for us remains the foundation of our faithfulness and obedience.
We can’t enter into heaven and live an eternal life because we deserve it. That kind of thinking is based upon our own vanity and arrogance. Our salvation and everlasting life is sealed by covenant alone, and that covenant of grace comes only by our belief in God’s acceptance of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as our blood sacrifice and atonement for sin. Only through Jesus can we be redeemed, forgiven, perfected, and sanctified. Only through Him can we truly claim the covenant of God’s grace.
Are you feeling grief today as you kneel before God in prayer? Is your heart breaking within you over some sin that convicts you unrelentingly? I am not speaking about a superficial knowledge of having done something wrong, but rather the understanding of a sin that emanates from your very soul. Are you seeking repentance for wrongdoing that has brought you to godly grief?
Are you in a covenant relationship with God? Have you accepted the blood of Jesus Christ as affirmation of that covenant? Has God’s grace and forgiveness of sin through the sacrifice of Jesus become your blood offering that has signed and sealed this covenant? We see the cross and say “this is the covenant”, but it is only a sign. We see the rending of the temple curtain and say “this is the covenant”, but it is only a sign. We see the empty tomb and say “this is the covenant”, but it too is only a sign. The covenant is forgiveness, and the blood of Jesus is the offering that inaugurates it. Is the blood of Jesus upon you as God’s seal?
Do you have your body under control? Have you let yourself separate your spirituality of nature from the physical manifestation of that faith within your body itself? By this I am not asking if you treat yourself as a narcissist, but if you do those things that are godly and good with yourself, and treat your body as a temple of the Holy Spirit? Our spiritual and physical selves walk hand in hand with our faith, and it is by God’s will that we find the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit within our physical bodies.
Are you concerned because you are constantly at war within yourself? Does it bother you that there is a struggle going on inside you between good and evil, holy and unholy, or salvation and damnation? Well, take heart because although this conflict is the natural state of man, we have a champion who not only helps us realize the good within ourselves, but helps us to achieve it by defeating sin.
Do you depend on your own intellect to search out the wisdom of God? Do you study and ponder scripture to find truth there, or do you alternatively use your intellect to spoon feed yourself His Word, while your spirit communes with the Holy Ghost to seek and sift it for those things that are of God? When we depend upon our own wisdom it brings us very few of those wonderful revelations that we recognize as being the hidden treasures of the Lord , but when our spirit is engaged with the Holy Ghost, that treasure is revealed to us from His most glorious depths.
Are we approaching our faith through study and hard work to further perfect ourselves each day? Every evening during our prayers do we kneel before God and tell Him of our intellectual progress? If this is so, and it is our primary motivation, He will speak words similar to these back to us; “Yes, but when I walked in the garden this evening where were you?” or “As I have loved you, do you love me?” God wants our journey towards spiritual perfection to be a manifestation of our relationship with Him, and our liturgical and theological perfection in the classroom to be secondary to His ultimate goal which is loving us and seeing that we love Him too.