I was reading Oswald Chambers Devotion book today and I truly enjoyed it. Sadly, after 7 years of calling myself a Christian, I was amongst those Oswald referred to as the early stage of Christianity. Until God took me into the wilderness, He opened my spiritual eyes to see further upon my acceptance of the path He forged for me. Until then, my love for Him and my Christian life was at the same level of the limit of my natural capacity. If you are reading this and you understand the difference in a practical way, between the limit of your own natural capacity and the true supernatural Christian life we have in Christ, then I know you have joy mix with gratitude in your heart for having been led by Him to a supernatural life in Him.
The disciples felt asleep in Mathew 26:36-41 simply because, while they loved Christ, they could not identify with the supernatural life, supernatural training and the pain that takes us from the place where they could identify with Him. A place where you truly live in the soul what it means to identify with Him in a supernatural way. One of the beauties of the Christian life is that we can live the daily Christian paradox where the supernatural life becomes the natural life to us. When we learn to live in Christ and Christ lives His life in us and through us daily, before we know it, His supernatural life becomes totally natural to us.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that all those things that my church rejected me for, did not matter one bit to God. All those things that I learned to view others through, such as morality vs immorality and the dos and donts list we hang onto so hard within the Church, God could care less. Through the dos and donts list, I used to see myself as a spiritually messy person and my pastor was a saint. My spirituality was anchored in morality, degradation, uprightness and so on. That is what I knew and what I was being taught. At first, I gave the Spirit a hard time and felt that I should hold onto what I knew and appreciated about my Christianity. Through God’s grace and constrained I continued the path and I found out, unless we learn first to identify with Him through practical experiences of this life we do not understand our identification in Christ. Sadly, we do not even know that we do not understand. How can we when all we know is the natural life?
While all these things I was taught to practice through my Church were good, but as God opened my eyes, I could see that we tend to put the cart before the horses. Hence why the self has to go first, to make room for Himself in us. When room has been made for Him to take over our lives as our Lord not just our savior, then we find the pieces fall into place naturally as He deals with imparted righteousness in our lives. It was somewhat funny when I realized that He was not dismissing our degrading state, uprightness, immorality and what have you. He was dealing with things in the proper manner “HIS WAY.”