connection with a loving Father, a gentle Jesus, and the comforting Holy Spirit. Because of my need to get up every day and be a "good" Christian, I would pull up my bootstraps and keep marching. My salvation was such that I initially took deep drinks and appropriated Jesus to what I thought was all of me when it really wasn't. I was marching with a limp. My fierce needs to self-protect and be independent kept me from receiving minute by minute from the Spirit of God living inside of me.
I remember one incident when God encountered me at a time when I was battling with the deep inner turmoil and the tension of keeping the pain of past trauma at bay. In this vision, I was sitting in a dark room hiding, covered in shame and guilt when I saw light coming towards the door of the pitch black room. Jesus, the Light, knocked on the door and asked if He could come in. I hesitated, struggled, and eventually said yes. When He opened the door His light exposed that I was sitting in a well-tilled field, cleared and ready to receive the seed. In my mind’s eye I saw myself sitting in a trash heap of bad choices, hurt, lies, and other junk I had accumulated.
As the year's pass, I'm realizing that it's my daily choice to receive Him and let Him into my daily struggles and pain, to make the choice to share my heart and appropriate the power of Jesus death and resurrection to my past, present and future! When I’m living by the Spirit I will do that. My daily receiving from Jesus as my True Vine, my Living Water gives me life in abundance as His daughter! My need to receive from Him is as vital as my drinking 8 glasses of water every day. Without drinking it I will grow weak, my mind will become foggy, and forgetting who I am I will eventually die.
The following verses bring this to light. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.
So you have not received a spirit that makes you fearful slaves. Instead, you received God’s Spirit when he adopted you as his own children. Now we call him, “Abba, Father.” For his Spirit joins with our spirit to affirm that we are God’s children.
Romans 8:14-16, NLT
The receiving of God’s Spirit daily releases us into our identity as His son and daughter.
I love how in Galatians 4, Paul writes about Hagar and Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac, and shows the parallel of what it is to live by the law and live by the Spirit.
In my journey, God showed me how I was living my life like that. I would live by the law and then turn a switch and live by the Spirit. It lent towards my keeping the “bad” part of me imprisoned by the law, what I believed I deserved, and the “good” part of me living by the Spirit. I was continuing to punish my mistakes with the law, instead of walking in the Spirit and affording the power of it to remind me that I was set free! Instead of withholding the power of His death and resurrection to my "bad" I take the time to appropriate it.
In Galatians 5:1 Paul encourages us with these words:
So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law.
Galatians 5:1, NLT
Jesus was powerful in His living on earth because He was in constant receiving mode with the Father. It was this consistency that afforded His time with humanity a life free from sin and the law. It’s so exciting that we can do the same!
I’m committed to growing in the area of receiving, day by day, and often times