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December 21: Experience or Revelation
"We have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God." (1 Corinthians 2:12)
Reality is Redemption, not my experience of Redemption; but Redemption has no meaning for me until it speaks the language of my conscious life. When I am born again, the Spirit of God takes me right out of myself and my experiences, and identifies me with Jesus Christ. If I am left with my experiences, my experiences have not been produced by Redemption. The proof that they are produced by Redemption is that I am led out of myself all the time, I no longer pay any attention to my experiences as the ground of Reality, but only to the Reality which produced the experiences. My experiences are not worth anything unless they keep me at the Source, Jesus Christ.
If you try to dam up the Holy Spirit in you to produce subjective experiences, you will find that He will burst all bounds and take you back again to the historic Christ. Never nourish an experience which has not God as its Source and faith in God as its result. If you do, your experience is anti-Christian, no matter what visions you may have had. Is Jesus Christ Lord of your experiences? Or do you try to lord it over Him? Is any experience dearer to you than your Lord? He must be Lord over you, and you must not pay attention to any experience over which He is not Lord. There comes a time when God will make you impatient with your own experience--I do not care what I experience; I am sure of HIM.
Be ruthless with yourself if you are given to talking about the experiences you have had. Faith that is sure of itself is not faith; faith that is sure of God is the only faith there is.
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Faith is only as good as the object in which it is placed.
I used to evaluate, judge and measure everything in my life by what I THOUGHT I knew... including God. I didn't see that I was putting Him in a box in my life, limiting Him to the small little view I had of Him. In stead of letting God be first and aligning everything in my life up with Him, I was doing it the other way around. Result: I kept trying to fit square pegs into round holes. It can be done, but not without changing the peg itself--and that was counterproductive.
No wonder I was so confused. The faith I had was no good to me because I knew God, but was trusting more in myself than in Him. I was doing everything the wrong way around and trying to make God fit into my weird, sick and twisted little patterns, trying to make wrong decisions right after the fact. That faith didn't work because God was just a piece of it, not all of it. To be blunt: that faith really SUCKED.
Now everything to me is about Christ... I see God in everything. Which drives some people nuts, and they may hate it but they have no choice but to respect it. I know I hated it at first because I was required to surrender, to relinquish control. Looking back on it I see it was really dumb of me to try and maintain control of anything since I sucked so very badly at it! :)
The faith I have now is awesome. Amazing. Majestic. Mysterious. Mind-blowing, earth-shattering... because it is based on the REAL Jesus, the Christ crucified, and the RESURRECTION POWER that put a Savior on a cross to conquer sin and death and give me and anyone else who wants it a second chance. I am humbled and am constantly in awe by the Lord and all that He has done for me through that faith in HIM, who is exceedingly able to do more than I could ever ask or think.
I used to have a plethora of experience that I thought made me wise. Now I have a faith that God has built up in Him through the same experiences, only now they are revelations that change my life on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Every single experience I have every day always takes me back to "the historic Christ" and reassures me time and time again that God is worthy of my trust and loyalty. No experience that doesn't do this is given much time or attention by me anymore.
Thanks, Lord! YOU ROCK
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