After I wrote yesterday, I reread the chapters in Absolute Surrender by Andrew Murray - that I had assigned for my class that night. I had read these chapters 3 or 4 times already but now they were new! God was speaking through them in a new way. Then I read Romans 7 and 8 - which was part of the Bible study I assigned - but I decided to read them in the Message this time.
Romans 7 - The Message
14-16 I can anticipate the response that is coming: “I know that all God’s commands are spiritual, but I’m not. Isn’t this also your experience?” Yes. I’m full of myself—after all, I’ve spent a long time in sin’s prison. What I don’t understand about myself is that I decide one way, but then I act another, doing things I absolutely despise. So if I can’t be trusted to figure out what is best for myself and then do it, it becomes obvious that God’s command is necessary.
17-20 But I need something more! For if I know the law but still can’t keep it, and if the power of sin within me keeps sabotaging my best intentions, I obviously need help! I realize that I don’t have what it takes. I can will it, but I can’t do it. I decide to do good, but I don’t really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don’t result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time.
21-23 It happens so regularly that it’s predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God’s commands, but it’s pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge.
This is where I was stuck yesterday. I knew that my flesh was evil - and that it can do nothing that God desires ... I even know the answer! I need the Holy Spirit to come and work in me... but He hasn't revealed to me yet what that looks like - what that means - and i couldn't figure out why - what was I missing!?
Then I read this part of Romans 8 in The Message:
5-8 Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.
Oh what an indictment! I knew as soon as I read this that I was staring continually at my flesh - why is it here?, when will God fix me?, why do I have to live with this? ... on and on - I was ruminating on my flesh - it was the worst case of rubber-necking of all time! See that train wreck, A - that is you - you are a mess! Keep looking at it - keep your focus there.
Oh how the enemy wants us to keep looking at our sin and flesh and fall into despair! Because then we forget the next part....
Romans 7: 24, 25
Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord.
In Absolute Surrender ...
You know the wonderful place that this text has in the wonderful epistle to the Romans. It stands here at the end of the seventh chapter as the gateway into the eighth. In the first sixteen verses of the eighth chapter the name of the Holy Spirit is found sixteen times; you have there the description and promise of the life that a child of God can live in the power of the Holy Spirit. This begins in the second verse: “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:12). From that Paul goes on to speak of the great privileges of the child of God, who is to be led by the Spirit of God.
What a contrast between - not knowing what do do at all in Romans 7 and being completely awakened to the Spirit in chapter 8! OK - so I know I need the Spirit - that is not the problem - the problem is that he has not come in power yet - and I am stuck waiting. And in the waiting I am not waiting in faith - I am going over again and again just how awful my flesh is.
But what I need to be doing is fixing my eyes on Jesus - the author and perfecter of my faith. But even this I can not do on my own... so I have cried out to God - come and do what only you can do!
Andrew Murray -
And now are you willing to give yourselves up to the Holy Spirit? You can do it now. A great deal may still be dark and dim, and beyond what we understand, and you may feel nothing; but come. God alone can effect the change. God alone, who gave us the Holy Spirit, can restore the Holy Spirit in power into our life. God alone can “strengthen us with might by his Spirit in the inner man.” And to every waiting heart that will make the sacrifice, and give up everything, and give time to cry and pray to God, the answer will come. The blessing is not far off. Our God delights to help us. He will enable us to perfect, not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, what was begun in the Spirit.
Begin in me this work! I want my eyes fixed on Jesus! I can not even do that. I have no vision - I have no idea what to even imagine - come and write on my heart a vision of your beauty, majesty, amazing glory! So that my heart can worship - and finally do what it was made to do!
Hebrews 1:2-3
God promised everything to the Son as an inheritance, and through the Son he created the universe. The Son radiates God’s own glory and expresses the very character of God, and he sustains everything by the mighty power of his command. When he had cleansed us from our sins, he sat down in the place of honor at the right hand of the majestic God in heaven.
Revelation 1: 10-18
It was the Lord’s Day, and I was worshiping in the Spirit. Suddenly, I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet blast. It said, “Write in a book everything you see, and send it to the seven churches in the cities of Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea.”
When I turned to see who was speaking to me, I saw seven gold lampstands. And standing in the middle of the lampstands was someone like the Son of Man. He was wearing a long robe with a gold sash across his chest. His head and his hair were white like wool, as white as snow. And his eyes were like flames of fire. His feet were like polished bronze refined in a furnace, and his voice thundered like mighty ocean waves. He held seven stars in his right hand, and a sharp two-edged sword came from his mouth. And his face was like the sun in all its brilliance.
When I saw him, I fell at his feet as if I were dead. But he laid his right hand on me and said, “Don’t be afraid! I am the First and the Last. I am the living one. I died, but look—I am alive forever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and the grave.
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