Only Through Experience - Henry and Richard Blackaby

Henry Blackaby and Richard Blackaby in,  "experiencing God"

John 17:25  O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me.

Scripture is filled with descriptions of God's character. You can read these accounts and believe them to be true about God. Yet God does not merely want you to read about Him, He wants you to know Him.

For the Greek, to know something meant you understood a concept in your mind. It was an academic process. In contrast, for a Hebrew person-like Jesus-knowing something entailed experiencing it. In fact, you could not truly say you knew something unless you had dealt with it personally. So, it is significant that, when Jesus spoke about knowing God, He was speaking as a Hebrew.

When Jesus said eternal life is knowing God-including God the Son, Jesus Christ-He did not mean that eternal life is knowing about God. He was not referring to someone who has read many books and attended numerous seminars about God. He was talking about a firsthand, experiential knowledge. We come to truly know God as we experience Him in and around our lives.

Many people have grown up attending church and hearing about God all their lives, but they do not have a personal, dynamic, growing relationship with God.  They never hear His voice. They have no idea what God's will is. They do not encounter His love firsthand. They have no sense of divine purpose for their lives. They may know a lot about God, but they don't really know Him.

Merely knowing about God will leave you unsatisfied. Truly knowing God comes only through experiencing as He reveals Himself to you through His word and as you relate to Him. Throughout the Bible we can see that God took the initiative to disclose Himself to people through their life events.

Taken from the book  "How Great Is Our God" by NavPress (Discipleship inside out)
Timeless daily readings on the Nature of God

Forgetting the Dung - J.I. Packer, in Knowing God

Excerpt from the devotion book: How Great Is Our God 

Whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. (Phil 3:7)

Not many of us, I think, would ever naturally say that we have known God. The words imply a definiteness and matter-of factness of experience to which most of us, if we are honest have to admit that we are still strangers. We claim, perhaps, to have a testimony, and can rattle off our conversion story with the best of them; we say that we know God – this, after all, is what evangelicals are expected to say, but would it occur to us to say, without hesitation, and with reference to particular events in our personal  history, that we have known God? I doubt it, for I suspect that with most of us our experience of God has never become so vivid as that.

Nor, I think, would many of us ever naturally say that in the light of the knowledge of God, which we have come to enjoy, past disappointments and present heartbreaks (as the world counts heartbreaks) don’t matter. For the plain fact is that the most of us they do matter.

But those who really know God never brood on might-have-beens; they never think of the things they have missed, only of that they have gained. “What things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ,” wrote Paul. “I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may know win Christ…. That I may know Him” (Philippians 3:7-10) When Paul says he counts the things he lost as “dung” he means not merely that he does not live with them constantly in his mind; what normal person spends his time nostalgically dreaming of manure? Yet, this, in effect, is what many of us do. It shows how little we have in the way of true knowledge of God.

Why We Lack Understanding - By Oswald Chambers

Why We Lack Understanding

04

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2014

He commanded them that they should tell no one the things they had seen, till the Son of Man had risen from the dead —Mark 9:9

As the disciples were commanded, you should also say nothing until the Son of Man has risen in you— until the life of the risen Christ so dominates you that you truly understand what He taught while here on earth. When you grow and develop the right condition inwardly, the words Jesus spoke become so clear that you are amazed you did not grasp them before. In fact, you were not able to understand them before because you had not yet developed the proper spiritual condition to deal with them.

Our Lord doesn’t hide these things from us, but we are not prepared to receive them until we are in the right condition in our spiritual life. Jesus said, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12). We must have a oneness with His risen life before we are prepared to bear any particular truth from Him. Do we really know anything about the indwelling of the risen life of Jesus? The evidence that we do is that His Word is becoming understandable to us. God cannot reveal anything to us if we don’t have His Spirit. And our own unyielding and headstrong opinions will effectively prevent God from revealing anything to us. But our insensible thinking will end immediately once His resurrection life has its way with us.

“. . . tell no one . . . .” But so many people do tell what they saw on the Mount of Transfiguration— their mountaintop experience. They have seen a vision and they testify to it, but there is no connection between what they say and how they live. Their lives don’t add up because the Son of Man has not yet risen in them. How long will it be before His resurrection life is formed and evident in you and in me?

courtesy of: http://utmost.org/

Don't Study the Counterfeit

John Eldridge could not have said it better. This is why you do not see me writing about Satan. Because as far as God is concerned, if we truly focus on Him, the rest is simple and really easy to deal with because you know who you are and Satan has no power over you. Every attempt, he makes on you is met with defeat and you just put him in his place as you go about God’s business.

As the matter of fact, I know enough to say that there is no such thing as Christian being possessed by the devil because if you are possessed by the Holy Spirit, there is no room for the devil to come in and kick the Holy Spirit out.  Yes, we can be in bondage in certain areas in our lives, but if we are truly His, it is a matter of time as God deals with us through the process, to be freed. I learned enough from God to know Satan keeps us busy in casting him out that we have no idea we left the path and we have actually been so busy with him we neglected the true God. Another thing that we do is that we put all the blame on him for our sinful nature and stubbornness in following the true God. As long as Satan is to be blamed, then we are in the clear, all of the sudden, it is his fault not really ours.

By the way, when Eldridge says: “believing and agreeing with the truth” in the last paragraph, he does not mean the kind of belief that is only on the lips, but in our heart and walk with Him

 I am going to stop here, I would rather you read John Eldridge….

In order to recognize a lie, we need to know the truth. Experts in counterfeit money don’t spend their time studying counterfeits. They study the real currency. In the same way, to engage in the spiritual battle raging around us, we don’t shift our focus to lies or to the Devil. We focus on Jesus. We marinate in the truth of who God is and who he says we are. Then and only then we will be able to quickly recognize a lie. And though there are some areas of bondage in our lives where truth is not going to be enough to set us completely free, we will never get any freedom at all without it.

Remember when Jesus was in the wilderness and the Devil came to tempt him? Jesus didn’t reason with the Enemy. He didn’t engage with him in a dialogue; he simply refuted him with the truth. “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

So, Spiritual Warfare Level One: you have an Enemy. You are hated. Evil exists. Satan exists. Foul spirits exist. Peter writes, “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Pet. 5:8 NIV 2011). Devour, not tempt. Devour as in shred, maul, kill, destroy. James commands, “Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you” (James 4:7).

If we do not submit to God, the Devil will not flee. If we do not resist the Devil, he will not flee. There is no reason to fear or strive. But we do need to submit to God and resist the Devil. We enforce the freedom Jesus has won for us by believing and agreeing with the truth. This is a big, big part of “shake off your dust; rise up, sit enthroned, Jerusalem. Free yourself from the chains on your neck, Daughter Zion, now a captive” (Isa. 52:2 NIV 2011). Time to rise up, girl.

Courtesy of http://ransomedheart.com/

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Walking in the Spirit

I had people asked me “how do one walk in the Spirit?

Walking in the Spirit really does not need a formula. However, there needs to be an attitude of openness toward God. When the Spirit started teaching me to walk in the Spirit He made it clear that this openness toward Him is not open for negotiation. You cannot have a plan A and a plan B and be dead set on wanting Him to negotiate your terms with you.

More often than not, we do have plan A & B but we do not even realize that. There are times our contingency plans are more obvious to us. But sometimes they are not, while they might not be obvious to us, but they are obvious to Satan and he used them against us. If you take for instance someone who reads something from Chambers, Spurgeon, Tozer, Paul Washer, etc then, dismiss it while saying well, this guy is out of his mind and these things he is talking about, I do not need them to be saved.

Then the conclusion here is that you do not have the Holy Spirit in you to begin with to help you understand the truth of God. Or it could be you utter such words simply because in the depth of your heart you know what you read upset your plans. But because your plan B is more important to you than God’s plan A, you stick to your guns. With a mindset like that, you forfeit your walk in the Spirit. The spiritual darkness that is looming over your heart and soul comes from the fact that you know something but you have no intention of obeying God. No matter how beautiful or successful your life might look on the outside, no matter how hard you appear to work for God, well, none of it is being done in the Spirit and you are not walking in the Spirit. This is just one tiny example amongst all those examples that I could give you. But I hope you see where I am getting here.

A test that will never fail us as to whether or not we are walking in the Spirit is the depth of Christ being revealed to us. Understand that I am not talking about us exercising gifts we may or may not have.  Now, I am not saying that He cannot work this life in you because as I mentioned in my book, I have seen God working this Christian life through people, in spite of themselves. But, you are as useful to Him as Pharaoh was in His hand. The only difference between you and Pharaoh is that you have found more grace in His eyes. Openness to God keeps us surrendered to His will, teachable and obedient, hence, you are not perfect, you still have a long way to go but you are walking in the Spirit.

After I learned to walk in the Spirit, God with His sense of humour took one of my pet peeves to show me how easy I can be separated from the oneness with Him and how important I keep focussing on Him and walk moment by moment to keep this oneness. My greatest pet peeve is people who pick their noses. I find it so gross and I cannot understand why not using tissues. Anyway, a lesson that I cannot forget no matter how much I want to, is that God showed me one day, after I experienced His awesome divine nature that could be compared to oxygen so pure that you know it is out of this world. It is so pure that you cannot imagine living without it and if we could see what we are missing, we would indeed make sure we walk moment by moment so that we do not spend one minute out of His nature.  

He showed me even if I have a sin so small that it could be the size of a tiny booger, He said to me, even though you could hold it between your fingers and re-enter your union with me, it would not be possible because this tiny booger however small cannot find a place in my nature. He said if I allow you to get in without the repentance and the cleansing of the blood, you would introduce dirt within me. For someone else this might not be important, but to me, I can't live without this visual, to remind me where I am at in my oneness with Him. I need to constantly ask myself, have I moved away from Him without even knowing it?

With that in mind, I leave you with a good description of the subject with pastor Philpott

This is just an excerpt from J. C. Philpott's sermon preached in 1862

"Who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." Romans 8:1

1. To walk, then, after the Spirit is to walk after and in a revealed Christ– not a Christ in the letter, but a Christ in the Spirit; not a Christ in the word only, but a Christ in the heart, formed there the hope of glory. The work of the Spirit is to reveal Christ, to glorify him, and make him precious to believing hearts; to apply his blood to the conscience, to discover his righteousness, and to shed abroad his love. To walk, then, after the Spirit is to follow his gracious discoveries of the Lord Jesus to the heart, and to realize them by a living experience of their sweetness and blessedness.

2. But again, the Spirit leads into all truth. This was the promise given by Christ to his disciples– "Howbeit when he the Spirit of truth has come, he will guide you into all truth." (John 16:13.) It is impossible for us to know the truth savingly and experimentally, except the blessed Spirit guides us, as it were, into the very bosom of it. Until then its beauty and blessedness, its liberating, sanctifying influence are hidden from our sight. But if I am guided by the Spirit into all truth, if he himself condescends to lead me into the truth as it is in Jesus, and enable me to walk in the truth as he leads me into it, then I may be said to walk after the Spirit.

3. But again, the Spirit is spoken of in the word of truth as an Intercessor, teaching us how to pray and what to pray for; no, he himself is represented as "interceding for us with groanings which cannot be uttered." If, then, I pray in the Spirit, I walk after the Spirit, for I walk in that path of prayer and supplication in which he is pleased to lead me. He has promised to help my infirmities; and therefore if I find my many infirmities helped by his grace and overcome by his power, then too I may be said to walk after the Spirit.

4. But the Spirit is also the author of faith, hope, and love, for these are fruits and graces which spring from his work upon the heart. If, then, I believe in Jesus with a spiritual faith, if I hope in him with a spiritual hope, and love him with a spiritual love, I walk after the Spirit; for the Spirit moves me both to will and to do those things; and as he leads I follow.

5. But the Spirit is also a Spirit of contrition, of brokenness, of humility, of godly sorrow for sin and honest confession of it. If, then, I am ever blessed with humility, contrition, repentance, and godly sorrow for sin, I walk after the Spirit.

6. But the Spirit is also the Comforter of God's people, for that is the name which our blessed Lord himself gave him. So that if he ever comforts your heart with his choice consolations, and you walk after his comfort, desiring to drink into it, and following after everything which may promote it, you follow in the steps in which the Comforter leads you.

7. But if we walk after the Spirit, we shall also be spiritually-minded, which is life and peace; our affections will be fixed upon heavenly realities where Jesus sits at the right hand of God; for all this is his special work, and nothing short of his power and influence can produce it. If then we are favored at any time with this spirituality of mind and these heavenly affections, it is a proof that we are walking after the Spirit.

8. But again, through the weakness of the flesh and the power of temptation, we often fall into a state of coldness, darkness, hardness, and even miserable carelessness in the things of God. Then the Spirit has to revive our drooping graces, bring us out of this miserable state of carnality and death, to lead us to the fountain once opened for all sin and uncleanness in the blood of the Lamb, to renew our hope, strengthen our faith, and impart to us fresh confidence. As we then walk in the light, life, and power of these gracious revivals, we walk after the Spirit.