Thursday 23 January 2014

A GOOD PLACE TO START: DISSATISFACTION WITH THE WORLD

The best place that one can start in terms of being used by the Lord and useful for His work, is to have a beneficial dissatisfaction with the world. While His people are obviously in this world and need to live in it in a useful and practical way, we often go far beyond that, become entangled in it so that our desires are predominantly fleshly and so become enthralled with the world and dissatisfied, to some extent, with our God (which only ever leaves a frustration in our hearts). Our focus becomes whatever the world says we should be focused on and concerned with, and we lose our centre in God and our passion becomes whatever has to do with sense rather than what has to do with the Spirit; our goals become purely about our lives, and our concern for the Kingdom becomes secondary or evaporates completely. However, if we are getting to the place where we are becoming dissatisfied with the world, then we are becoming more fit for His service. If we have spent any time as a Christian in this life, trying to be satisfied with the world, it won't be long before this dissatisfaction arises and colours all which we once thought held the answer to the calling and hunger inside of us. The Spirit will never leave us satisfied in the world for long, as it is never any good for us, and if what once satisfied us yesterday, doesn't today, we know we are, by the grace of God, becoming more spiritual than we once were. The more this dissatisfaction with the world takes over, and the more we seek the Lord via all the means available to us and those prescribed in the Word, the more we are, essentially, setting the Lord and His will in front of us, and the more we are allowing the Holy Spirit to stir us up and to move within and through us, to work out that which He is working in us. This is the place God desires for us, for it is here and from here that we become more useful and more used by the Lord. 


Unfortunately, a lot of the time, we are only satisfied with the image of the Lord and ourselves, and so live according to a service of our God, plus the idolatry of our own thinking and our own wisdom (which is really no wisdom at all). We set the Lord before us, but we also set Him up in our image; believing that His ways are very much like ours, and His thoughts like our thoughts, but they are far from them. Only a regular immersion in truth will continually be renewing our thinking, and filtering out all that is fleshly wisdom- which often masquerades as spiritual wisdom according to what seems good to us (remember, fleshly wisdom is death, only spiritual wisdom gives life). The lies of the enemy and the fallen wisdom of the world is constantly around us and bombarding us through all of its means, and we will go along with it, willingly or no, if we are not putting ourselves in the way of truth, and gazing upon the Lord and His life through His Word, through prayer and through the support of those around us, and the gifts they operate in in order to strengthen us and keep the body of Christ healthy and not lame. But the wisdom of the world only brings death, and so will we constantly find dead ends in our hearts and emptiness in the place where our hunger for His calling is if we seek our ultimate satisfaction through the loves of the world. And thus will we always know if we are on the wrong track, via those very things we wrongly pursue  Many Christians are always looking for the next thing to answer that longing inside of them, and that is why. They justify their constant search under a spiritual guise, but really they are searching to satisfy their flesh in a spiritual way, and that will never work. Just like the loaves and fishes; the physical will always run out, while the spiritual principle and the life that supports it, will always remain in Christ. We must align ourselves with His desires, and then we'll find the dissatisfaction with the world that we should have, and the will of the Lord for exactly what He wants us to do with the gifts and calling He has given us. 

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