We can seek God and find him! God is knowable, touchable, hearable, see-able, with the mind, the hands, the ears, and eyes of the inner man.
~A.W. Tozer (1897-1963)
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of His glory He may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 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.
~ from Ephesians 3
Oh beloved, it is true. He has made us astoundingly new on the inside. There is now, within a believer – deeper than the complex soul we are – an inner man. And this man is now one with the One who made us new.
To know this, and reckon it true, is the most astounding source of freedom.
We are no longer alone in this horrible, wretched world.
We are free from time.
We are free from sin.
We are free to Love.
We are are eternal, now.
And this is all very good news.
But, it is news that the old man we were looks in on and tries to comprehend. And in seeing a truly free spirit within, the soul and its attendant flesh begin this natural (read fallen) process of trying to identify and categorize and control – and even contain this new Life within.
And this is bad news.
For, in defaulting back to our old methodologies of trying to understand everything that is going on with our minds, we do actually begin to bottle up the new life that is growing within us. We (mistakenly) think that this new inner man is simply an improvement to who we are, and so we try to integrate this new Life into our old life.
The very Spirit of G_d has different plans for us.
Can we see it? In looking inside ourselves and trying to get a handle on what G_d is growing with us and within us, we get the focus entirely wrong. See, we are a new creation in Him. And that new and ever-strengthened spiritual inner man is now at the headwaters of the rivers of Living water which now flow out from us.
And as those rivers of Living water flow, they are not Designed to accommodate or improve the old man. Rather, they are to wash away who we were and then begin to spill out in ever-increasing measure on others that they might develop a thirst for the same Source.
And so, dear friends, as we begin to grow spiritually, this growth should not, and cannot simply be a curiosity and interesting development. No, rather these changes should supplant our former sense of identity. Because we are a new creation, we find that this new creation is this amazingly beautiful person He is making even more amazing every day. And this person is so amazing, that we cannot ever go back to simply living as a body and soul.
We are a now a spiritual being, imbued with Power from on high. We are vessels out from which pour the Love of Christ to a world that desperately needs it. We are people living outwards from the center of our existence – now living the same way our G_d Lives for us.
Oh beloved, may we stop simply looking inward at our new selves, and allow the new creation we are to simply pour out as Designed.
