Really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not in them but through them.
~John Ruskin (1819-1900)
The apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith!” And the Lord said, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you. “Will any one of you who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come at once and recline at table’? Will he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, and dress properly, and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterward you will eat and drink’? Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’”
~ Jesus, King of The Universe, in Luke 17
We are, to put it bluntly beloved, invincible.
We are indeed filled with the fullness of the One who Is all and in all. The idea that the One who goes before us will fail becomes – for the true believer – something to giggle about. We, to a man, have seen G_d come through on His promises in an ever-increasing torrent. The stones of remembrance that used to be little stacks of rocks we collected, now pave the narrow – but very solid – road He is leading us down.
We pray, and the fabric of the universe is re-shaped.
We stand, and evil gives way.
We give, and it pours back into our laps in hilarious heaps.
We die to ourselves, and find instead the beautiful identity we had always been looking for.
We obey, and the gates of hell cannot stand against us.
We yield, and His power and direction grows and gives purpose to our actions.
We Love, and the resistance begins to melt in the hearts of stone around us.
We wait on Him, and joy-born strength pours into our being.
We are comforted, and we can pour that same comfort now onto others.
However we do, in all of this, find a strange dynamic. Most people (even those who call themselves believers) look at us as though we have lost our minds. We are – in their eyes – fools to think that His Spirit is really working in us and through us in such a Dynamic way.
They are right. We are fools.
We have given up our rights to absolutely everything and bet that the invisible Kingdom of Heaven – and its King (and absolutely everything about Him) – is absolutely real. We have even given up any right to try to convince other people this Truth is true, or to get them to change their minds about anything.
There is a curious, but understandable, attachment in the human being to the things which can be seen and tasted and felt. These things do indeed seem more real than the spiritual and eternal going on around us. However, to the man who is a new creation in Christ, we have tasted and seen and felt things that have nothing to do with bio-chemical machinery. We have, in our inner man, actually experienced the Truth.
And we have found that the truth is not some-thing to be discovered. No, rather the Truth is a Person. The Truth is Jesus Christ. And this same Person has come to dwell fully and most richly within us. We no longer need to look anywhere else for verification of the things we are beginning to see. So, as we pray and stand and obey and love and yield, we have come to realize that the amazing things happening really have nothing to do with us. They are, in fact, G_d working His goodness through us.
Can we see it? We are a major problem for evil. For evil operates through fleshly desires and the needs of a man who believes those desires and needs still must be met. But a man who simply believes that all the things G_d is, are already at work within Him, has no need. And it is this needless man who can move even further into the hottest parts of the spiritual battle going on around us and simply march forward in the victory which has already been won by the One in whom he believes.
So, we really just have one job in this whole thing. (Oh yeah, along the way, we are going to Give G_d a whole bunch of fame, kick evil in the teeth, Love a whole bunch of people into the Kingdom, and have a ton of fun doing it.) But we have just one job to do.
Believe Him for what He has already done. Believe Him for what He is doing. Believe Him for what He is most surely going to do.
Tonight is your night beloved. Believe.
