When you
read Oswald Chambers's devotion for January 19 what you find is that God never
changes. God still works in our lives the same way today. I know I use the word
wilderness a lot in most of my posts. Some people do not like it and feels the
wilderness is only for some of us. Who am I to try and convince them they are
wrong and perhaps they will realize it when it is too late?
In Genesis
15, after the lavish promises where Abraham trusted God to the point where God
was pleased because of his faith in Him, it is significant to see what happen
to Abraham in verse 12.
After that God
remained silent and did not appear to Abraham for over a decade. Unlike us,
Abraham had no Bible and was not swamped with Biblical materials. Some people
interpret verse 12 as if it was just an isolated incident. But, it was not. Nor
that it is something we should dismiss in our walk with God. Abraham was going
to be tested, grow in his faith, die to self, and learned obedience to the one
and only God.
Abraham went
from being a coward to slowly becoming the father of faith. Abraham went
through a wilderness time of his own, where he had to learn to get to know God
at a much deeper level where he could become totally devoted to Him. While He
made a lot of mistakes along the way, but he kept growing according to God’s
standards. We see that in him because he did not hesitate a second to give up Isaac
the son that he cherished more than anything in the world. In him, there was no
more double mindedness like he showed before. There was no compromising, and
nothing else in his life was competing with the life he had in Him.
You say what
does this have to do with spiritual plateau?
It has
everything to do with our spiritual plateau. When we have been Christian for so
many years and yet, we do not know what it means inwardly to live wholeheartedly
for Him. We have no idea how sweet it tastes, to reach the place where you know
you truly belong to Him, because He has
set you apart for Himself. I am going to clarify this further by saying, belonging
to God, being set apart for His service are not the things we say just because
they are in the Bible, but rather something you become inwardly. It is not
elusive or assumed. All of us Christians, as we keep moving forward with Him,
we apprehend those things. Furthermore, these things that we are suppose to
apprehend, are not activities for Him or just desires in the heart anymore. No,
we go beyond that, and like Paul not only we have been apprehended by Him, we
know that we keep apprehending the spiritual life inside, and we also know we
are ploughing “full steam ahead” toward the goal. IT IS THE REAL THING! –
Failing to
allow God to do His work in us through the wilderness process, a process where
He hides from us and the pain of the separation is utterly distressful to the
soul. Yet, you have to keep going, keep trusting, keep loving and living for
Him. Through the process we become, holy, we are sanctified and set apart for
Him as we lose the self.
We cannot
live with some sort of half commitment to Him and expect to get there. How do
we know we are not fully committed? Well, we know because we do not like the
idea of Him having full control and the unknown that it brings into our lives. So
we make the decision not to turn our will over to Him!
Anyone who
has ever been honest will tell you exactly that. I have someone very dear to me
who would say, “I don’t mind telling God that I surrender to Him, in fact I
say it to Him all the time, but when push comes to shove I chose my path.” Throughout the discussion he said to me,
every time God brings him to a place where he is forced to chose God’s path and
the more certain one that allow him to provide for his family, he always chose
to go with what he knows. This is someone on the outside who appears so well
put together that he is sought after by pastors to become a pastor. He is
involved in service, very well educated, eloquent, great knowledge of the
Bible, and so on, yet he is living a spiritual plateau because it has been two
decades now since he has been a Christian.
When we fail the full surrender process, two
things for sure take place. The first one is that we have to learn to live within
the limit of our spiritual plateau. We look like people who reached the highest
post they can reach in their jobs because of their bosses or their education
and skills would allow them to go. Yet, they cannot leave their jobs. So, they
learn to compensate. So when we reach
this kind of spiritual plateau, service to God becomes a crutch.
The second
thing you can be sure of is that through the spiritual plateau, you violate His
doctrines left right and center. Perhaps you do not agree with that. Once again
I would tell you if you knew God personally and understood His standards
according to the Holy Spirit’s teaching, you would agree.
What are
doctrines?
Doctrines
are simply the basic theology of the Christian faith according to God’s
teaching and standards. Through your
spiritual plateau, righteousness, holiness, and thing like obedience escape
you. I do not have to list more, but, living the Christian life in the
confinement of spiritual plateau, we violate three big doctrines right there. Not
only that in God’s eyes we are in no better place than someone who belongs to a
church where his or her denomination does not teach about certain doctrines. If
anything, God holds us more accountable to the fact that we are aware of His doctrines
yet, we chose to ignore them in our assumptions and disobedience to Him.
God does not
hold against us the fact that we belong to the wrong denomination, but He does
hold against us the fact that in our stubbornness and disobedience our pride
and ego stopped us from finding Him and enjoying intimacy with Him and He holds
against us the fact that we are not allowing the Holy Spirit to move freely in
our hearts to get us where we need to be with Him. We do not get to the
spiritual plateau by mistake. We get there through disobedience, an
unwillingness to be righteous in His sight. Unwillingness to find out about His
standards as we convince ourselves that what we have is good enough. The very
fact that we are not propelled to go forward to make His standards, ours, says
that we do not have a personal relationship with Him and we do not know Him. We have bought into the doctrine of cheap
grace and a lot of us have become accustomed to comparing ourselves to the next
Christian, instead of Him.
The remedy
to spiritual plateau is obedience to its fullest in total surrender. Once we do
that, the Holy Spirit brings the gift of holy repentance in our hearts, takes
away the callousness of our consciences and open our spiritual eyes to see.
Oswald
Chambers said: “Jealously
guard your relationship with God. Jesus prayed “that they may be one just as We
are one”-with nothing in between (John 17:22). Keep your whole life continually open
to Jesus Christ. Don’t pretend to be open with Him. Are you drawing your
life from any source other than God Himself? If you are depending on something else
as your source of freshness and strength, you will not realize when His
power is gone.
Being born
of the Spirit means much more than we usually think. It gives us a new
vision and keeps us absolutely fresh for everything through the
never-ending supply of the life of God.”
