There is something missing in many a heart these days. Something very valuable. Valuable because it will outlast everything else in our experience. I am not so sure I truly understand it or have a complete handle on it. But I want to. It is real faith. I am not talking about a hard party line or a religious mode of thinking. We have a lot of that. And this merely produces a system of religious humanism where God is absent. One day God will reject it all with a single word:
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’
A religious system can be shaken. And then people flee from it because they have not been rooted and grounded in the love that comes from intimacy with God. People who are shaken easily do not have true spiritual discernment. They have not stood in the flow of heaven’s grace so the flood from the enemy moves them away from the greatness of God’s salvation and his substance for their lives. The precious promises have not become living treasures in the rooms of their souls. So, when the order of their lives is violated, and the God of the universe does not conform to their expectations, they reject him and his words.
I have met people who will refuse to read the Old Testament because it is too bloody. It is too real. They want an idealism or a fairy tale. They want an escape from reality and not a divine system to truly perceive reality. True Christian faith is not an idealism to hold up against reality. It is not a rationalism that we sustain as a coping mechanism. Real Christian faith is God talking to men and women and showing us his ways, thoughts, and values. It is God piercing through the appearance of things and the veil covering our minds and hearts, with a surer word from his mouth.
When God speaks to our lives, and we honor him, there is a major connection made. This faith comes by hearing the living God speak to our hearts. The anointing of God brings us the reality of eternity and takes the ball from our hands. God fully persuades, we cannot convince ourselves. There is a mystery of godliness where our human capacity is converted and transformed. We do not have the full scope of what is needed. The Holy Spirit needs our willingness but there is a work to be done that only he can do.
When Isaiah came to God and saw him high and lifted up, he also saw his own inabilities. He saw his own impurity. God did not say to him to deny his ungodliness and worldly lusts. He showed him an altar where a sacrifice had already been made. He sent an angel to apply the previously offered sacrifice to Isaiah’s life and mouth. This action was not in accordance with the religious system at the time, under the law, they brought their own sacrifices, had them slaughtered, and offered. But when Isaiah met God in faith, something personal was communicated. Isaiah went away not in the self-satisfaction of his own efforts and work, but rather in the reverence that comes when God does a work of cleansing and converting in a life:
And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”
True faith takes hold of the God who works in us to will and to do his will and purposes. It gives him the freedom to work in our lives. It is honest and open to the work of God’s grace as he teaches us to see ungodliness and worldly lust removed and to see him enable us to walk and live as he would have us to walk and live.
It is not a system of thinking to hide behind and enable us to avoid God’s hand on our lives:
1 Corinthians 15:34 (ESV)
Wake up from your drunken stupor, as is right, and do not go on sinning. For some have no knowledge of God (or no true spiritual perception). I say this to your shame.
and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge (not all knowledge, but rather the awareness that comes through our perceptive abilities apart from God), that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (or true spiritual perception).
Lord Jesus, pierce through this mindset that establishes our hearts in natural thinking. We hunger to go on into the things that surpass our abilities to perceive. Beyond what our eye can see, what our ears can hear, what our own minds can conjure up. We long to connect with you and have our souls filled with all the fullness of God. Amen!!!
