My last couple of mornings in God’s word
have been like a tapestry weaving before my eyes, bringing together threads of
truth in all their distinctively brilliant colors, and forming them into a
picture that declares loud and clear that God is working all things together
for good in the lives of those who love him and have been called according to
his good purposes in Jesus Christ.[1] Here’s a few of those threads that were prominently displayed
today.
In him was life, and the life was the light of men.[2]
Meditating on this verse, and seeing how it
is the gift of God in the gospel, that Jesus came to give us eternal life,[3] makes me hunger and thirst for the certain experience of feeling
like the light of life has shone into my heart and all the death and darkness
are eradicated so I can live in the newness of life.[4]
and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.[5]
Jesus’ life is the light of men, and that
is expressed into our hearts by the presence of the Holy Spirit. This verse
makes me hunger and thirst to know the hope that comes not just from believing
certain information, but from having the Holy Spirit dwelling within me, the
most personal expression of God’s love being poured into my heart. I want to have
the genuine feeling and experience that the Holy Spirit is presently within me,
crying out within me, “Abba! Father!”[6] so that I can know God in his love in the innermost places.
Which brings me to the way Paul taught us
to pray. In that very familiar prayer of Ephesians 3, it is very significant
that Paul begins with a focus on experiencing “the Spirit in your inner being,” and, “that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.”[7] With that in mind, knowing that we are already “rooted and grounded in love”,[8] what he asks for is that we “may
have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length
and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,
that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”[9]
What’s the point? That to whatever extend
our innermost being does not feel like it is filled with light and life, and
does not feel like the Holy Spirit is in there crying, “Abba! Father!” and does not feel like the Holy Spirit is pouring
the love of God into our hearts, and does not feel like the Holy Spirit is
filling our inner being and Jesus is dwelling in our hearts, we are called to
pray for what we lack of this experience (the blessing of hungering and
thirsting for the experience of righteousness we do not yet enjoy).
Paul’s prayer gives us the very words that
we know for certain are the will of God for the messed-up condition of our
inner beings. What happens when the people living in darkness have seen the
great light of Jesus’ life?[10] They cry out, “Jesus, Son of
David, have mercy on me!”[11]
A very important explanation of why
we so desperately need to spend time in God’s word is revealed like this: “So
faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”[12] As God draws us into his word, the breathed-out words of Christ,
our faith grows and matures through the hearing of his truth. It is for that
reason that brother John would write:
I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life. (1 John 5:13)
This is too wonderful for words, and I hope
that tapestry is weaving itself around your heart and mind, and that you see
how you are woven into the picture of God’s gracious activity for your
new-hearted freedom in Jesus’ life and light. God’s Book is written so that we
will believe in the name of Jesus Christ, and that through believing in him we
will KNOW that we have eternal life.
Since this is why the Book is written, and
because faith comes from hearing, and hearing from the words of this Book (the
words of God breathed-out by Jesus), the more we meditate on the words of life,
and pray for whatever we do not yet experience of life in Christ, the more we
will see ourselves walking in the light of life, and rejoicing in the hope of
the glory of God even in our suffering since God’s love has been poured into
our hearts through the Holy Spirit whom he has given us.
Let us not be despondent about the
poverty-of-spirit things God shows us we are missing in our relationship with him.
Let us rejoice in the Beatitudinal Valley that graciously shows us these things
in order to bring us to the genuine hunger and thirst for what we do not have
in our experience of Christ, joining together to pray the prayers given to us
in God’s word, so God can then do things in our lives because we have honored
him by coming to him in faith.
Jesus said, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they
may have life and have it abundantly.”[13] Jesus is the life that is the light of men. The world, the
flesh/sark, and the devil, all conspire to steal, kill, and destroy whatever we
could experience of the love and life and light of Jesus. Jesus came to give us
life abundantly.
Today, the tapestry of God’s glorious
revelation in his Book wove this together into my heart in ways I truly needed
to hear.
© 2017 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517,
Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted,
Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English
Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good
News Publishers.)
[1]
Romans 8:28-30
[2]
John 1:4
[3]
John 3:16; John 10:10
[4]
This is beautifully described in Ephesians 2:1-10. The hunger and thirst for
these things is founded in Jesus’ description of the Beatitudes in Matthew
5:1-12 in which the blessing of seeing our poverty of spirit leads to a hunger
and thirst for the righteousness we do not have, which God can then satisfy by
grace through faith (his grace being the reason we have hungered and thirsted
in the first place!).
[5]
Romans 5:5
[6]
Romans 8:15 (context: Romans 8:12-17; and Romans 8:1-39)
[7]
Ephesians 3:14-21 for the whole prayer; Ephesians 3:16-17 for the focus on the
Holy Spirit and Jesus living in the innermost places of our inner being.
[8]
Ephesians 3:17
[9]
Ephesians 3:18-19
[10]
Matthew 4:16
[11]
Mark 10:47
[12]
Romans 10:17
[13]
John 10:10
No comments:
Post a Comment