Living one day in the Spirit is worth more than a thousand lived in the flesh.
~ Richard Owen Roberts (1931- )
Oh, by the way beloved, if you felt the impulse to worship after reading that passage. Pass by this fool’s wandering below… and simply go bow in His glorious Presence… WOW! Jesus is awesome!
This writer used to “know all the answers.”
No longer.
He has taught me to put no confidence in my soulish intellect, or worse, in my broken and chemically damaged brain. Now, i yield to His truth. And, as seems normal in the economy of the kingdom, in letting go of my own powers of thinking – He has restored my mind and imbued it with His wisdom.
This yielding of my intellect and brain is part of what it means to walk in the Spirit.
In it’s fullness, this walk is an absolute abandoning of any confidence in our own self, and utter dependence on Him. It is not a quietism or emptying like some worldly approaches might suggest we should do with our brains. Rather, it is a full yielding to the waiting Holy Spirit, Whose glorious over-pressure will absolutely fill the believer who simply opens the door to their heart, gets out of the way and lets Him get to work.
How did the Apostle John get to where he was “in the Spirit?”
He got there through abject, brutal spiritual testing and circumstantial suffering – for a very long time. This beloved friend of Jesus was probably 90. He was living out on the rocks on the island of Patmos. He was exiled, cold, hungry, beaten, tired and totally out of worldly hope.
This is a very good place to be for a believer: the end of our self.
It is in a place like this that an exhausted soldier of the cross can calmly, but passionately look up into the eyes of another and say – unerringly that – Jesus is everything. And you know, the devil can’t mess with that. He is powerless towards a believer that believes the same things that God says.
This is walking in the Spirit. It is often much more messy than it sounds. Walking in Him is a place of profound peace and power and vision, but it is also usually occurring most profoundly in a place where circumstances threaten our very lives.
However, in the Spirit is the place to be. By His Grace, He smashed my life out of my Life over the years. He crushed me down to a bleeding, dying man in a hospital in the mountains of Arizona. And it was not too many months later, that i came to a same place that any other true believer must come: totally out of options. But, once in that place, He has brought me a life that is completely different than before. Some moments it is difficult to tell whether or not He still has me on the physical plane at all. Everything is so clear. G_d is fully in control beloved. All is well.
The paradox of Living a Life in the Spirit, is that it does not make us “so heavenly minded, that we are no earthly good.” Rather, it is the only mode of Living that allows for us to be victorious in the entire endeavor. Without Him, life is impossible. In Him – nothing is impossible.
So, are you running out of options? Perhaps this is a life going in the right direction after all. Tonight is your night beloved. Time to walk in a completely different Spirit.
