With God - Part 2

As I have looked back over the past 32 weeks, I realize now how pivotal February was for me in what God was preparing me for in the weeks that followed.  Our church had a guest speaker by the name of John Morgan come share for the weekend.  I didn't know much about him prior to his coming other than he is a friend of our pastors, and was said to be a great teacher and prophet.  Also prior to his coming, God had sent me and my husband on a mini-adventure to go pray for a friend who was dying in the hospital three hours away.  I won't go into detail about that adventure now, but I will share that out of it we had an incredible experience with the Spirit of God, and He taught/showed us what the power of faith can do, and also what the power of unbelief can undo.  We also came out of the adventure so filled with joy and anticipation over what can come from obedience to the Holy Spirit, and how rich and fulfilling it is to go on adventures with God. 

So, it was in this mindset that I entered into the night with John Morgan.  His teaching was spot on, the presence of the Spirit was tangible, filling the room with the fruits that follow Him, and I was overwhelmed with anticipation and excitement over what God was going to do.  John invites anyone forward who would like a fresh touch from the Holy Spirit on their lives, and he encourages those who come to let go of any preconceived ideas or expectations of what they think He will do.  John said God was doing a new thing in His people, and we needed only to let go and receive whatever He wanted for us.  As John starts to pray over the crowd of people, I close my eyes and I start to feel this sensation of rushing water flow through my feet, like when you're on the shoreline and the waves come crashing in against you.  I remember thinking, "Yes, God I want all you have for me, I want to go deep!" The sensation of flowing water continues to rise, and my anticipation rises with it that I am going to be completely lost and in over my head with this new thing God was doing.  And then it just stopped, right at knee level and stayed there.  I remember thinking....HUH!?  Then, God told me, "This is the measure of what you have allowed for My Spirit to move in your life." With all the great anticipation I had built up, I was greatly humbled to see my current condition.

And understand, He wasn't condemning.  He didn't do it to "shame" me for my lack.  In it I felt Him showing me the truth in love.  It was just an honest evaluation of where I was in my relationship with Him.  A simple reflection of how far I was from my heart's desire of having more of Him in relation to how much of myself, of my life, of my time I actually surrendered to Him in the present season of my life.  You see it's not enough that I surrendered to God my everything in some past season of my life; it's about a present surrender, a continual surrender that cries, "Nothing now will fill me like You do, nothing is more important, nothing will satisfy the daily hunger that fills my soul, only You."  In all my effort to do great things for God, to build His Kingdom, to do good works, and love people, I was blindly neglecting my relationship with Him, and by all measures, I was merely standing on the shoreline when my heart wanted to go out into the deep waters of God.

 

The weeks following that night, God wanted to challenge my view of what it meant to go into the deep waters of God.  He told me to imagine all the oceans of the world and put them all together as a representation of Him.  The oceans take up 71% of Earth, and I'm sure if we wanted to include all the other major bodies of water inland, the percentage of water in relation to land is even greater.  To help give you a visual, here is a map with all the continents tucked in together...

 



Now, don't forget that sphere has a backside....and it's all water.  Now, find your country, and then try to find your city.  Then, imagine you in relative space to that city, and then try to compare you in relation to the ocean...and yeah, don't forget that sphere has a backside!  God reminded me that He is actually much bigger than that, but for the sake of the metaphor He was using, the measure would suffice for now.  So now that I have a somewhat accurate idea of how big God is in relation to me, with a desire to go deeper than knee-length at the shoreline, He asks me to picture what I think my "day to day" scenario of walking on the surface of the deep would figuratively look like, and what my "stormy days" would look like.

 

Not too shabby, right?  Probably not very realistic either.  But if we are being honest, most of us picture scenarios similar to this when it comes to our walk with God, and we have this expectation that following God's will for your life is going to be easy, smooth sailing. The song "Oceans" by Hillsong United comes to mind,

"You call me out upon the waters

The great unknown where feet may fail

And there I find You in the mystery

In oceans deep

My faith will stand"

I don't know about you, but I'm thinking of the pictures above when I sing that song.  God asks me, "Sooo, if I called you out upon the waters that looked like that, you would trust me in it and have faith to step out into the unknown?  Well, what if your day to day looked like this...

 

 

and your storms looked like this....


...would you still trust Me and step out with Me into the great unknown?  Would your faith still stand?  Or is it all conditional and dependent on what it looks like?"

For weeks I evaluated those questions with those pictures in mind.  What was my honest answer?  It is impossible to lie to God, because He already knows where I am at, the condition of my heart, and the thoughts I keep.  When I say what I think God wants to hear, or give half-truths to His questions, I'm really only lying to myself, or worse psyching myself up to remain in an insincere relationship with God.  You see, God is not looking for us to measure up to His standard in order to operate at His level, because we can't, and we never will.  That's why He sent Jesus to do it for us.  It's not about what I can do for God, it's about what God has already done for me.  In these reflections, I realized God was not asking me these questions so I could muster up enough courage to answer in the affirmative, but to help me become teachable to see the bigger picture.  His picture.

Whether in the calm or in the storm, the ocean itself is not moved.  A storm is simply a form of resistance coming against the surface of the ocean, but the ocean itself, as a whole, remains unaffected by atmospheric pressure, raging winds, and the like.  And if you think about it, the creatures living in the ocean are unaffected by what it is happening on the surface as well; there might be temperature changes and changes to the salinity of the water as a result of what it happening at the surface; but those who go deep into the depths, hidden in the safety of the deep, experience very little of the calamity going on in the "resistance" coming against the ocean.  They become as the ocean is....unmoved.

So, with all these reflections in mind, I tell God, "In this metaphor, it is impossible for me to breathe underwater, and therefore impossible for me to live going deep without having access to the surface to sustain my life."  I like to imagine God chuckled before explaining, "Exactly! That is precisely why I sent My Son to transform you into the image you were created to live by.  YOU do not do this in and of yourself, but in Me.  To go deep in Me does not require you to muster up enough faith, or know enough, or do enough; it simply requires a complete and continual surrender to Holy Spirit to do what He was sent to do." Acts 17:28, "for in Him we live and move and have our being." The work of Jesus made the way for the Spirit of God to live in us, giving us direct access to experience the deep things of God when we yield to Him.  1 Corinthians 2:10-12, "For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God."

In the months that have followed, I started to see just how much I have limited God in my life in order to maintain a sense of control and predictability, gaging my success or failure by what is happening on the surface, whether the view before me is calm or stormy, with the reminder of what it felt like to have the flow of the Spirit remain at the knees.  How very mundane, and limiting it would be to continue such an existence; after all, the calm never lasts long and the storms tend to get more ugly as the years go by.  I grow weary of living by what I see, limited by a circumstantial view of life when Life itself offers to give me unlimited access to freedom in every area of my life; a freedom that comes from surrender.  This summer, I asked God to help me do a spiritual detox of my heart to help me make a genuine, lasting surrender to Him.  It is often not pretty what things we store in our heart over the years of trying to maintain control, but it is absolutely beautiful what happens when we let go of it.  I have come to understand the reality of Proverbs 11:2, "When pride comes, then comes shame; but with the humble is wisdom."  With God, He teaches me to see as He sees, but I still need to be humble enough to receive it.  Through His honest evaluation and my humility to see it, His revelation comes; His revelation gives us freedom, not the condemnation we tend to fear, and in that freedom we are released to go as deep as our heart desires.