To the end of yourself, have you arrived?
Have you come to the end of yourself yet? This is what struck me this afternoon as I gave the Lord some time to talk with me. I was reading Golden Grain again after the scripture passage He gave me:
“For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”
Colossians 3:3 NASB
This verse struck me again, as it always does, with a great sense of gratitude and relief. How grateful I am that the nasty, fearful, drug-crazed hippie is dead. My flesh still yearns, occasionally, for that deluded sense of freedom, knowledge, and power. But, now I can see how dangerous that was and how narrowly I escaped, by the grace of God.
John (Follette) was teaching about the Bride of the Messiah:
Where will the Bride—the overcomers—be in this picture? She will be identified with a slain Bridegroom, and the Bride will know something of being slain. The Bride of Christ will know the slain life, and she will go home as a slain Bride in union with the Bridegroom. She comes from the desert, leaning. As long as there is an ounce of flesh, she will stand in her own strength. God has to reduce and deplete her, and bring her to complete exhaustion of self-effort.
So, the question to me is, “Have you come to the end of yourself?”
Sad to say, in many ways the answer is, “well, maybe not” or worse…depending upon how badly I’m acting in that particular moment of time. I still run off assuming I can handle it this time. After a while I’m drawn up short, realizing I’m in trouble again wandering in the temptations of my mind to figure things out.
Why do I so often forget how much damage I do when I’m not walking in the Spirit? After all these years, how can I possibly be so stupid? I know better. Yet I still fall into that morass of soulish imaginings and self sufficiency.
To write anything helpful and uplifting, the Holy Spirit is essential
As Jesus told us in John 15, “without me you can do nothing”. Have you arrived into the Truth of that yet? If He’s called you to write, how often are you foolish enough to attempt to create without His anointing? Let’s pray together that we can turn to Him more for the power He promised.