a) The Spirit of God brought to us and inserted into our spirit the foundation for a new heavenly life, but what works against this new heavenly life, and that in every direction, is our old life and the whole hell. Our old mentality is in a continual conflict with our New mentality. The only way and condition how that New life in our spirit can grow is when death works in the old life and keeps destroying it. How can a believer find out whether this is taking place in him?
The more we come to the Lord with an open heart and have a fellowship with Him, the more we are becoming spiritually sensitive and also experience more agony when we do deeds in the realm of our old life. If we continue arguing as we always argued before, if we react to things as we always reacted before, if we are not able to pause or be quiet, to stop defending our image, stubbornly insist on our convictions, if we heckle others and do not let them even to answer what they are saying to us, etc., then we start, or should start to sense that we are yet in the realm of our old life or we, from time to time, or quite often fall into it. What is our reaction? Either we suppress these unpleasant feelings and a possible agony and try to forget these affairs, or, if we truly take it seriously with the Lord, we will try to “do something”. We will pay more attention in the future, change our attitudes and behavior, or with all our intelligence we will try to see and understand, what the Lord actually wants. Maybe we will even turn to Him with a plea to show us what we should do. And the Lord shows us nothing! In fact, He may leave us in our unpleasant feelings and agony even a longer time because it is precisely that agony, which our spirit and soul experience and literally need! Through it our spirit shall come to a spiritual knowledge and growth, to a spiritual change. That spiritual change will bring the change of our character and it shall bring an automatic change in our behavior, speaking, acting, pausing, not insisting, not persuading, not arguing, not anxious, not frustrated, not angry. The Lord is not achieving this by our simple prayer nor by any one-shot act nor yet by our honest effort to “pay more attention the next time” so we can make our behavior better. He can only achieve it through a process of dying of our old character through agony. Because… WE CANNOT CHANGE OURSELVES even by the most honest prayer or effort.
So, the answer of the Lord is – hold on, don’t lose your hope or faith, trust that I know what I am doing, how I am doing, why I am doing and when I will finish, you do not know it… and I, in fact, cannot explain it to you in mental words. The Lord may also allow that we would keep wallowing in the dung of our old man, that we would at times, or quite often, fall into our old man and become frustrated, disgusted, stand vis-à-vis hopelessness, even unbelief and mistrust toward the Lord, Who created us and saved us! We are able to become, at least temporarily, like “pagans”, which also do not believe and do not trust God! For each of us it may take a different length of time as well as the degree of agony before we come to ourselves. We “wake up” and begin to see clearly in our spirit, what kind of unbelievers and mistrustful we actually were, even fools towards our Creator and Savior! We then find out that, in fact, it is absolutely, downright and a hundred percent illogical and idiotic for us not to trust, not to believe and not to give ourselves into the hands of HIM, Who created us and saved us from evil and eternal death! True?
b) But after some needful time interval, the unbelief, mistrust, stubbornness, even that agony, afflictions and sorrows, chaos and lack of comprehension disappear without any of our actions or endeavors, and we somehow suddenly and unexpectedly find ourselves in a sphere of peace and rest. We may not be quite sure that we now see more than before. We certainly do not see what we wanted to see and do not understand what we wanted to understand in our head, yet, we are absolutely sure that the stress and agony passed away as we are now able to feel it and perceive it. We begin to perceive without any reasons that now we have something new in us, what was never there before and have more of it, a new understanding, fuller knowledge, not mental, technical knowledge, but a new knowledge and comprehension from the Lord and in our spirit. Our spirit grew up, it is stronger, larger, richer… and we do not know HOW. And we SOMEHOW got to know the Lord Jesus into a greater depth and beauty and holiness and righteousness of His Character, of His Mind and Heart… and we again do not know HOW!
Not to trust such a Divine Personality anytime in the future is now appearing to us not only as totally absurd and stupid, but absolutely impossible. Is this not a progress and a growth of our New Man and New Life? IT DEFINITELY IS. The personality of our spirit has grown. And we have not come to it by mental explanations or discussions or reading the Bible or even by our prayers that the Lord should liberate us from this agony. We have attained to it precisely by that agony of our unbelief, mistrust and stupidity, which the Lord allowed and designed by His Wisdom and Grace. Our fingers or our head did not play any role in this affair.
There are many believers who for many years were toiling as children of God before they finally arrived at some peace and rest, which resides in a simple trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. Their previous Christian life was for them a disappointment, a “roller-coaster” and they could not get to peace and satisfaction though they were redeemed for many years. Such believers always had to fight for something, though they might have not known for what, they were always burdened, dissatisfied, stressful, nervous, mistrusting, fearful, suspicious, unstable in all their flesh. They were not even sure whether their Christian life can be successful, whether their redemption was really true or just a delusion. Their souls could not find peace and satisfaction because they never knew the mystery where the true satisfaction really spring from. The spring of peace and satisfaction resides in our satisfaction with the Lord Jesus Christ, NOT in satisfaction with what we are, what we have achieved, what we have, how we see ourselves, our weaknesses, shortcomings, sinfulness or our “hopelessness”. Self-examination never leads us to a success and satisfaction; on the contrary, it leads us to greater problems.
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To be continued next week
brother Hanola
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