12/22/2017
Are you struggling with whether you will give yourself to Jesus, and fully believe in God? Have you been reasoning and reading scripture without moving an inch closer to believing? If so, then quit listening to your own intellect, and still yourself... then open your ears to the still small voice of God that calls you to “Come.” Hearing God isn’t a matter of intellectual reasoning on your part; it is being inexplicably drawn by the Lord.
“And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him and said, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"”
1 Kings 19:13 ESV
To surrender our own intellect and will in order to believe in something purely out of faith is contrary to our worldly human nature. Faith in something unproven flies in the face of our own academic and intellectual pride; it demands that we give ourselves over to something other than our own will to understand... it requires us to lean on our will to believe. Yet this is exactly what Jesus tells us we must do...
“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. It is written in the Prophets, 'And they will all be taught by God.' Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me—”
John 6:44-45 ESV
So, for our faith to ignite, we must listen as God draws us to Jesus and himself. In this moment of self-induced vulnerability we remove our clothes of intellectual reason and trust in God that we are clothed completely in Him and have no need for our own physical clothing any longer. This is incredibly hard for people who are ruled by intellectual reason alone, but for those who lean on their own spirituality it is amazingly fulfilling and wonderful.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.”
Proverbs 3:5-6 ESV
What I find interesting is how many new Christians will set aside their reasoning, and answer the call of God only to begin, almost immediately, to pick their own will up once more in an attempt to justify in scientific reasoning their call of faith. This is akin to seeing air, and only leads to discontent or the abandonment of faith. On the other hand, it is perfectly natural to take what has happened as fact, and then base future reasoning on it. Oswald Chambers speaks to such understanding of conversion when he writes these words:
“Every man is made to reach out beyond his grasp. It is God who draws me, and my relationship to Him in the first place is a personal one, not an intellectual one. I am introduced into the relationship by the miracle of God and my own will to believe, then I begin to get an intelligent appreciation and understanding of the wonder of the transaction.” - Oswald Chambers
We can never doubt that we are clothed by God... else we face our nakedness once more. When we doubt our faith we will return to a worldly nudity, as our belief ceases to clothe us, and our reliance of the physical is reinstated. Sadly, this happens quite often as the world overrules a believer’s spirituality. This is the work of he who rules the world, and is part of his counter attack against our faith in God. It is the the dark one using our conditioned intellectual dependence to argue against the existence of air; it is the intellect that, from childhood, we have been trained to value above all else, placing itself first in our lives once more.
“Remain in me, and I will remain in you. For a branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine, and you cannot be fruitful unless you remain in me.”
John 15:4 NLT
Keep safely in Jesus Christ, and don’t reason yourself out of faithfulness. Give yourself over to God’s still small voice and then hold to the wonders of your belief. The spiritual things we cannot see are just as real as those we touch each day in the physical world. Answer God’s call to faith.
Prayer:
Father I thank you for calling me to believe. I thank you for my ability to abandon my own intellectual will, that is founded solely in the world, and for expanding me into the spiritual realm that surrounds me. I thank you for your Son Jesus Christ that you have lead me into relationship with, and the lessons He teaches me in faith. Holy Father, I hold tight to my belief in you, and resist my own intellectual vanity that seeks to draw me away; replacing my faith with worldly reasoning. Keep me Jesus, and lead me down this treacherous path between godly spirituality and my desire to see myself solely through the eyes of the world. Strengthen me Lord as I hold to you and place my own self-reliance behind me. In your hands I commit myself, and no reason on my part can overrule you. Blessed are you Lord Jesus, and mighty is our Father who rules both heaven and earth.
Rich Forbes