Encounter His Love // Receive God's Gifts For Youഉദാഹരണം

The Way to Me

It is not as complicated as you think—this pursuit of Me. The world presses in though, telling you the opposite. Believing in the world’s values, valuing what it tells you is valuable, creates anxiety, a false fullness that is actually not fullness at all.

I do not deplete you; I fill you. I do not exhaust you; I energize you. I do not disappoint you; I refresh and restore you.

Who you are with Me is the real you—the beautiful one I want you to discover and claim.

To claim the real you requires the shedding of all you have believed that is false. The difficult part is discerning what is false from what is true. When you have lived most, if not all, of your life believing what the world has convinced you to believe, your heart is not conditioned to believe truth. It is only conditioned to believe lies. And lies wear down your heart. They deplete your mind. They bury the truth so it seems impossible to find.

This is where I come in.

This is where I rewrite truth in your heart. This is where I ask you if you want to spend time with Me—teaching you how to wake up to truth, teaching you how to wake up and discern falsehood.

This feels like a mountain to climb, but it is not. This feels daunting, impossible, but it isn’t. I make everything possible. I rescue you, heal you, give you new life, if you want me to.

Study my word. It is life that penetrates your heart. Spend time with My Son. He knows the way. Break the old patterns of living to receive a brand new way to experience life with Me.

You are invited to inhabit a space with Me that you have never inhabited before. When you are there, it will feel both brand new and familiar. It is your home with Me, your heart with Me. It is where you belong, where I long for you to be.

Come home. This place—of light and freedom and power and love—is for you. It is all for you.

Exercise:

Though we cannot see him, the true ruler of this world is an enemy hell-bent on our destruction. In First John chapter five, the Apostle John wrote, “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.” Jesus rules us—you and me—His followers, and He’ll rule the world to come. But, for now, right now, Satan holds sway on earth. That’s why anger, greed, and materialism characterize our culture. As John Eldredge is famous for saying, we live in a world at war. We live in the fog of war—a fog of confusion—a fog meant to press in and fill all the spaces in our mind, and in our hearts, and in our calendars.

So . . . we are busy. We are tired. We’re overwhelmed with information and demands.

We could choose to pull away completely, like the Desert Fathers did in the third century—away from culture, away from civilization, away from the battle. But that’s not a realistic option for you or me or most any of us. And that’s not what we’re called to. Though he says we’re not of this world, Jesus, speaking directly to His Father in Heaven, in John chapter seventeen, prays “I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.”

We are meant to be here—in the world, but not of the world. We’re meant to be in this fight. And it’s imperative that we resist—resist the enemy and resist culture. The Apostle Paul wrote in Romans chapter twelve, we must resist being conformed to this world.

And it is around that word, conform, that the battle rages.

To conform is to comply with, to accept, to go along with something. And that’s exactly what the enemy, through the culture of the world, tries to get us to do. The messages of our culture are intended to thwart and harass and tempt and hurt God’s children—so that we get lost in the fog of war and live confused, in bondage, not in freedom—focused on self-promotion and self-protection.

Make no mistake, “we are living in evil times”—just as Paul wrote in Ephesians chapter five.

So, what do we do? Well, we connect with God. We find time to connect with Him. That is how we prepare for battle. That is how we fight.

And listen, I know, with how busy you are, this can sound like a lot to take. But remember what we heard Holy Spirit say, ”This feels like a mountain to climb, but it is not. This feels daunting, impossible, but it isn’t. I make everything possible. I rescue you, heal you, give you new life, if you want me to. Study My word. It is life that penetrates your heart. Spend time with My Son. He knows the way. Break the old patterns of living to receive a brand new way to experience life with Me.”

Study His word. Spend time with Jesus. Break the old patterns of living. Our God gives us what we need each day—weapons to fight the war. With our God at our side, with the power of Christ within us, we are neither powerless, nor ill-equipped; we have everything, everything we need.

So, what’s something practical we can do right now, to take advantage of this day, to resist the enemy, to resist the culture of this world, and to spend time with Jesus?

Well, let’s do something radical—let’s do something that makes no sense according to the culture of this world. While it’s just not realistic to pull away completely, like the Desert Fathers did, we can pull away for a few moments. Maybe just one.

Let’s do it. I invite you for just a moment to do . . . nothing . . . nothing but be quiet and be with God. Just be here with God in the silence.

It can be tough, I know. We’re conditioned to fill our minds and every moment with work and information and entertainment and distraction. We are not used to letting our minds relax and letting our souls rest. But we need to. God built us to rest and be restored—so that we can return to the battle when needed, and so that we can fight well, when we do.

So, I invite you to begin doing this when you can. Build a new pattern. Try to find a minute here and there . . . and do nothing but be still and be in God’s presence. And if you don’t find many at first, that’s okay. We’re going to return to this idea of solitude and silence more than once.

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