I am being conformed to the image of Christ through God’s Grace. This Grace is the calling from God for me to follow His will not mine. His will for me was set before I was conceived. This Grace is brought about through the complexities and experiences of my life. The choices, events and circumstances of my life are all a part of the process of forming me to the likeness of Christ, His one and only Son He sent to us in the flesh so we could have a tangible teacher to show us the way to God our true Father. God provides this Grace and path to me for the sake of God’s Kingdom and the world around me. I experience God molding transforming me in the innate driveness inside me that is never content that I am always striving to be a better man and now that I have heard His call a holier man. What Jesus has taught me is both and accession but also a sense of losing myself or better put a dying to my own will (self actualization or self fulfillment). As I pick up my cross I learn to live not for myself but for the Father.
Interweaved through my life is the constant presence evil. A counter spiritual presence that wants to keep me from God’s love and will. I know deep within me there is something set against me trying to prevent my relationship with God. I understand I am living in a fallen world, one of intense evil and good. Good things happen and so do bad things. What I have come to experience is God makes good out of those times when I do succumb to evil and fall away from his Grace. For God understands the evil one is so adept to getting me to go the opposite direction from God’s love. I also know that God gave me a choice to choose His good or the devil’s fallen way. Choice is the foundation of Love. For God’s knows that Love is not something born out of any kind of force or coercion. I must understand there are two realms to the world in which my soul and body reside. One is the world of what I can see that is tangible this where my body resides. The other realm is that of my spirit. This spiritual realm is much like the physical world in that it has an order and a process to it. The major difference is that the physical world is bound by time where as the spiritual world is timeless. Both worlds invade each other or better put they are intertwined. God uses both realms in order to conform me to be in His image (don’t be conformed to the things of this world).
One of the biggest dangers that evil uses against me is to make me believe is the absence of a spiritual world. This lie is the foundation of the fallen world or as we call it culture to a great extent. For evil teaches me only to believe what I can physically see and what my human rational mind can validated. This is where God’s calling comes into place in my life. He nudges me and if need be He invades my life with His presence to bring me a reminder that I was created in His image to be more than I being. These nudges and invasions if not paid attention to go unheeded by me sometimes for years and years. I can recall now so many nudges and invasions by God in my past. I just did not know how to listen or understand what God was saying to me. Most of the time they came in the form of irritations; broken relationships, failures, and more often just sadness and depression feelings of something is not right with my heart. It is for me that looming thought “I am not where I am supposed to be.” As if I want to say out loud “Mike stop go the other direction.” This is to me is what repent means. I am learning to respond to God’s call more often. As I let God into my daily life He begins to purge those things in my life that have gotten in the way of knowing Him. I see life differently now. I have begun to have a deep personal relationship with Him. He has grown to be my best friend, my confidant, and my ultimate power. I love Him more than life or anything in it.
Now that I am listening God is always purging me of my old ways. He is now my General my true Father. I do nothing without Him. I have a passion to follow Jesus and to learn how He lived how he brought the Kingdom to Earth. So I see life differently and do things differently. I am trying to become of servant to the world just like Jesus did by giving up my wants and needs so I can serve others with my skills, talents, wisdom and most importantly with the love in my heart. This pouring out of myself often empties me. I become worn out, burned out on life and religion. I must therefore go back to the well of the Lord to fill up. The only way I find to fill up is to spend time with God; to BE with God to seek is His company and to speak with Him, to let Him put things upon my heart. As I spend time with Him, He pours into me his Grace and love. It fills my heart and soul so that I can again pour out to others in my life. This pouring out illuminates me, it shows me the Kingdom and I experience in my heart God’s true love for me. I feel on purpose, alive like I have never felt before. I now have the eyes, ears, and heart to experience how I was made to be; a Kingdom builder!
Being with God requires activities that put me in a place to recognize and receive his Grace which means the way he communicates to me. These activities are contained in my survival kit which consists of fasting, a letting go of or dying a little, removal of things in my life so that I can focus without distraction on God. I am learning to silence the world around, so that I hear His still small voice, that heaviness on my heart. I seek solitude to find Him then I sit back and notice what He is doing in and around me. My priorities are to remain in Him, loving all God’s children, and bearing witness to God’s goodness to all that will listen and watch in me.
In order to stop the onslaught of evil in my life I must be disciplined and I must take up the battle against evil. I need to train, practice, and go to war in order to maintain my relationship with God. He has provided me the spiritual disciplines as weapons and tools to keep his Kingdom in my life. It is this regular practice and training that always me to win the war and to work out my salvation for the good of God. I ask God my Father for the heart, soul, mind and strength to do His will. Lord I am yours do what you will with me. Save me from evil. Let me see the Kingdom. Take me from here to be with you.
