This Ain't Happening

And yet.. we still choose wrong at times. We sin, filled with the Spirit of God.

Christ promised the disciples that the Spirit was with them and would be in them.. and then at Pentecost the Spirit descended upon them, not as a dove but as tongues of fire.. either way, it was a filling of our spirit and our mind and our bodies.. it was the arrival of the Holy Spirit within us to help us discern right and wrong on a greater level. When we are walking in obedience and our conscience is clean for a moment before God.. we know that incredible peace with God.

But we are all human and have sin in our life at all times.. not that this is an excuse to sin.. rather it is the Spirit of God that brings each sin to our attention as we are able to bear it.. and he works with us to clean it up and to change. One sin at a time. We are commanded to be perfect.. knowing that we will never be perfect in this life.. but the true exhortation of that command is to SEEK to be perfect.. meaning clean up as the Spirit of God guides you to.

Sounds easy, but it is often a lengthy process to recover when you are devastated by someone elses sin against you or your sin against them. In such times, it often requires a great deal of love and mercy to bring healing to your spirit and your mind and your life. God's love is so patient in such matters.. ppl are not. God's love brings the right measure of discipline, always with love.. ppl do not. Not in my experience. But I have learned that it doesn't really matter how ppl or the church or anything or anyone handles me in such matters, whether they hurt me more or help me along.. what matters is God. Getting to him, hearing him, cleaning up to please him.. everyone else is gonna fail me.. everyone else is gonna abandon me.. everyone else has their own walk to figure out along the way.. and there is good and bad in that.. too much to sort out the right and the wrong of it really.. but that's not the focus. They have to work out their own salvation as Scripture declares... tho our lives remain connected and interdependent in ways as family.

My experience is my experience.. the God I know is the God I know. Ppl are important, but they are not the focus. They're gonna love you and then hate you in the next minute.. they are just as messed up and mixed up as I am and you are. They matter but they are not the LIGHT. Love them but don't follow them. Relate to them but don't idolize them as more than God made a man or woman to be. Christ is center. And no matter how much leaders and pastors and religious ppl and family/spouses demand your obedience and submission, you owe them nothing except what God declares..

otherwise, you have made them an idol in your heart.

The Spirit of God is in you as a believer, as one baptized by his Spirit.. he is in us to keep us from becoming comfortable with our sin. When we embrace sin and allow it to take up residence in our life as tho we are married to it.. we lose the peace of God because the Spirit of God says.. "this ain't hap'nin.. that thing has got to go!" And he begins to help us to understand why, to comprehend the threat of death involved, whatever it takes.. a nurturing mothers heart or a fathers discipline across our backside. It is a miserable thing to lose the peace of God in your spirit and your life. Thank God that he refuses to be silent and passive when we let that wolf or that lie or that evil thing into our heart. Thank God that when we have been devastated by someone's sin against us, weak and crippled and bleeding, that he is patient in nursing us back to health no matter how messy our walk might be. Thank God he pushes us (as we are able) to get back on our feet and to run despite the pain, so that we can become stronger and overcome that thing that hell threw at us by using ppl we love against us.

When you think about it.. the only thing we really must have in this life or the next is peace with God. Jesus came to give us that, sent the holy spirit to remind us what he said we needed to do to have it, and the rest is up to us. We are miserable when we lose it.. but God works all things to help us to find it again. We just gotta make up our minds that we want it.