11/13/2018
Have you sought after the blessing of Pentecost and yet it has eluded you? Have you prayed, wept, and pleaded for the Holy Spirit to reveal himself in you through tongues or other gifts... yet you feel unfulfilled? Or, maybe, you suddenly feel separated from the Spirit. When this happens it is not necessarily that you are unworthy, or no longer the child of God, but that the Lord has a lesson for you that can only come by a continued and determined seeking within yourself.
“Then Jesus told his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
Matthew 16:24-25 ESV
I am a Spirit filled man, and yet there have been times when I found it impossible to pray in the Spirit. I would pray fervently, and lift my hands to the Lord, and yet, the Holy Spirit seemed to be just beyond my reach. When experiencing this, I found myself searching and searching for the reason for my inability, and typically it would come down to a couple of items, the first was that I was praying outside the will of God, and the second was that I had placed myself before Him in some regard... I couldn’t reach the Holy Spirit because I was standing in my own way. I had placed a barrier of self between us. Perhaps I prayed for someone’s healing and felt a personal pride in it when God performed this miracle. Maybe I was doing God’s will in some other manner, and felt self-satisfaction in my efforts... not giving God the glory He deserved. Whatever the lesson... it was keeping me from experiencing that joy and relationship I desired with the Spirit.
The first can be remedied by asking our Father to reveal His will to you. This ultimately requires us to deny ourselves, and our own will, in the process. The second however, can be much more subtle, and might remain hidden from us for quite some time. Finding in yourself that place where your desires, your pride, your inward self, are standing between you and the Holy Spirit is much more difficult because you probably haven’t been taught the lesson of it yet. In such situations we feel like we have come to a fork in the road of our faith, and the Lord has taken one way while we have taken the other... we feel separated from the Spirit, and the desire to rejoin Him is overwhelming. At their base, both of these shortcomings in us come down to one common theme... self. Listen to Andrew Murray as he writes of this self-same situation.
“There are however, many who think they have come to the Lord with the source of their failure and have sincerely confessed it and put it away and yet the blessing does not come... there remains one great hindrance - the root from which all other hinderances come.
It is nothing other than self with its varied forms of self-seeking, self pleasing, self confidence, and self satisfaction.” - Andrew Murray
We are taught by society at an early age that it is good to have confidence in yourself. Young boys who play sports find that without it they can’t perform aggressively enough to succeed at them, or that to win in life they need a healthy dose of it, and young girls are taught that they need to exude it in self image, social skills, or other challenges in their lives, for them to be successful. Yet when we approach God that self-same confidence that served us so well in the world, can interfere with His ability to be first in our lives. Allowing God to take full control over us means giving up the reins to Him entirely.
There is a well known team building exercise that is conducted at retreats designed to bring workmates together. A person is asked to stand on a stool, cross their arms before them, close their eyes, and then to let themselves fall backwards without trying to catch themselves. To do this they must first overcome their natural fear, but they must also trust that their coworkers will catch them... and that they will not fall to the floor.
God asks us to fall back into His arms during many such spiritual exercises, and to do so we have to put away our nature... our self... and trust in Him completely. Interestingly enough this is a lesson that we find ourselves being taught over and over again. The circumstances might be different, but at its core the lesson is the same. The Bible not only shows us this by example, but tells us specifically; listen:
“For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”
Hebrews 5:12-14 ESV
Mature Spiritual food (the Holy Spirit), and constant practice (instruction)! The Spirit comes to us when we have dropped our self-defenses at last, and we don’t lose the blessing of the Spirit we have received during our walk of faith... it just becomes a reward or a motivation in overcoming our selves. Are you feeling the blessing of the Holy Spirit today? Maybe you are still seeking Him, or perhaps you feel separated from Him? Look to yourself in these situations, and find the wall that the Lord has led you to... then dismantle it.
Prayer:
Father, thank you for the gift and blessing of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Thank you for your Son Jesus Christ who told us that He most go so that your Spirit might come to us. Thank you for being with us always Merciful Father, and never abandoning us... even in the midst of the lessons we are being taught. You are with us always Father, despite our feeling like you have distanced yourself. Help us to understand as you teach us about our relationship with you, and show us the wall that our sense of self has constructed. Give us a hammer Lord, and teach us how to dismantle these things about ourselves that make up the spiritual division between us. I want to forever be in your presence, and to feel your Holy Spirit within me always. Great are you who teaches me to be comfortable in your Spirit. Holy, Holy, Holy, are you who asks me to fall back into your arms, and never lets me fall to the ground. All glory is yours Father, and may the humility I bring before you be sufficient for this day, and forevermore.
“But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”
2 Timothy 3:14-15 ESV
Rich Forbes