Greetings!
In your spiritual life there are two parts: God’s giving and your receiving His gift. This is true in salvation and continues to be true as you live your new life. “Just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue
to live in him, rooted and built up in him” (Colossians 2:6–7). Your daily spiritual walk works by the same dynamic that brought you eternal salvation. God provides everything and you accept what He provides. God offers everything and you receive what He offers.
Everything that God requires of you, He has already provided for you. When God provided the ram as the substitute for Isaac (Genesis 22:13–14), He introduced Himself as the God Who Provides. What does He provide? He provides what He requires. He required a sacrifice and He provided the sacrifice. Remember Abraham’s words, “God will provide for Himself a lamb” (Genesis 22:8 NASB). Through the Son’s indwelling life, He has already made available everything necessary for living out your new life. “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness” (2 Peter 1:3).
Then comes part two — your part: receiving what He provides. You must make yourself available to all that He has provided. God is very clear about what makes your life available to His power. Obedience. Your obedience opens the way for God to pour His power through you. When you obey, you receive His power in your experience.
Luke tells us a story from the life of Christ in the 17th chapter of his gospel. Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem, and as He was going into a certain village, ten lepers met Him and called out to Him for mercy. “When he saw them, he said, ‘Go, show yourselves to the priests’” (Luke 17:14).
Put yourself in the lepers’ shoes. They didn’t know how this story would unfold. All they knew was that Jesus had told them to go show themselves to the priests. “And as they went, they were cleansed” (Luke 17:14). Their obedience to the present-tense voice of Jesus released the power and provision of God. The power of God was released through their obedience.
God made a promise to Joshua. He said, “I will give you every place where you set your foot” (Joshua 1:3). As Joshua moved forward, God’s power would meet him at every step. So it is with you and with me. As we move forward in response to God’s voice, as we live by faith, the power of God will be released in our lives.
God is building a steadfast, undivided heart. How do we receive a steadfast heart? Jesus told a parable that tells us how we make ourselves available to what God is offering. “Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash” (Matthew 7:24–27).
Both groups of people in this parable had exactly the same outward circumstances. The onslaughts of life’s storms are inevitable. They will come. You won’t have more storms and difficulties because you are a Christ follower, and you won’t have fewer. Will walking in obedience guarantee you easy circumstances? No, you will have troubles. When you allow the cross to do its work, you will find yourself in a steady place when the storms come. What does walking in obedience accomplish? You will face life’s challenges in an altar’d state. “He will have no fear of bad news; his heart is steadfast, trusting in the Lord” (Psalm 112:7).
Every act of obedience to the voice of the living and present Jesus steadies the heart. As a house is built brick upon brick, so a steadfast heart is built obedience upon obedience. With each act of obedience, in big things and small things, God is creating a steadfast heart — firmly fixed in place; immovable; not subject to change.
Anchored
Once your heart has been filled with His presence, it is anchored in Him. No longer are you “like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind” (James 1:6). You are steady. You have come to rest in Him. This is His goal in freeing you of your flesh. The flesh cannot put its full trust in God because the flesh’s whole way of operating is trust in self. Flesh is the natural enemy of the Spirit. Flesh is, by its nature, hostile to God and unable to submit to Him (Romans 8:6–8). Flesh cannot be rehabilitated or purified. It must be crucified. It must be cut off. The heart must be circumcised of flesh. “In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ” (Colossians 2:11).
In Psalm 112:7, the psalmist defines a steadfast heart as “trusting in the Lord.” Trust is all or nothing. You trust or you don’t trust. You are always trusting something. Every person has a focus for his or her faith.
Either he trusts in his flesh, or he trusts in the Lord. Every time we choose flesh instead of crucifixion we are actively placing our trust in ourselves. The Scripture describes the difference between the two.
“This is what the Lord says: ‘Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who depends on flesh for his strength and whose heart turns away from the Lord. He will be like a bush in the wastelands; he will not see prosperity when it comes. He will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives. But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit’” (Jeremiah 17:5–8).
The steadfast heart has settled its trust in God. A steadfast heart is a heart at rest. A steadfast heart is at home in Jesus and Jesus is at home in the steadfast heart. It is a place quiet confidence. Steady. Sure. Safe.
Do you see that the brokenness that God is bringing into your life has a purpose? He is emptying you of flesh in order to fill you with Himself. He is cleansing you of sin in order to make room for His glory. He is in the process of giving you a steadfast, undivided heart to replace your old, unsteady, unreliable heart. The process has some pain inherent in it, but when you recognize that the pain is a means to an end, it takes on a new meaning for you. Get the end firmly in view and focus there. I like the way Colossians 2:9 describes the goal: “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ.” In other words, Christ is full of God and you are full of Christ. Live that fullness. “I have set the Lord always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will rest secure” (Psalm 16:8–9).
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Jennifer Kennedy Dean 2019© | Legacy Writings
