God is in the business of reducing us to the bare-bone minimum so He can build us up again from scratch. He clears off all our beloved, self-serving construction and then builds us up again on a new Foundation: Christ.Getting to a spiritual ground zero is difficult. Unforeseen hardship is a dependable feature of God’s life-consuming mercy and grace. From the time we open ourselves up to Christ, He immediately goes to work, breaking down every thing we built apart from His approval. All of this is a painful process.

Though it doesn’t feel like anything good at the time, it is a divine mercy when God tears down any misconception that would lead us to assume too much about ourselves. His effective method for bringing us back to the page that He wants us on is spiritual devastation.

God is the great, spiritual Surgeon, who will do whatever it takes to spare His people. Oftentimes His grace works like a surgeon’s knife, which hurts for a while and might even cost us a limb. Repentance, for example, is a painful ordeal, but its end product is heavenly, unfading joy.

It is eternally more beneficial for God to demolish us for a while, if it’s according to His will, so He can build us back up again by His Spirit. In this way we will learn, despite ourselves, to trust in Christ’s heavenly design rather than any manly invention.

Humble repentance is often the same thing as unlearning. As we forget everything we think we know, God will bring us back to the beginning, or to whatever crossroads it was where we turned off from loving the Truth.

When we give up our right to even understand God in Christ, then He will bring us back from our fleshly highs down to solid, spiritual level. He will build us up from a humble, dusty place so that we accept His Divinity through faith and not through any virtue of our own.

As for us, if we have never relinquished our right to be in charge of our lives and yet still consider ourselves Spirit-led, then we have an unimaginable amount of unlearning to do.

Have we been building with gold, silver and precious stone, or with some lame imitation? Do we desire to be useful to God? Then let’s listen and not assume anything. No matter what happens, we have encouragement in the fact that God is faithful.

I realize that the general populace, whether churched or un-churched, will not think about anything, much less do anything, unless they perceive some compelling motivation. We westerners will not rise up from our comfortable places and take care of business with God unless we are compelled by a greater Power than ourselves.

One potentially good attribute we westerners carry around with us is our abhorrence for wasting time on something that seems impossible. If we find out that something is not worth doing, we will quickly move on to something more worthwhile.

Anyone who is convinced that something is a waste of time will, and should, phase that thing out of their life. If someone sincerely believes that God’s kingdom is a waste of time then God will phase that person out Himself.

But there is Life, there is movement and there is inspiration in Christ.

Christ sent the Holy Spirit as a flame over the heads of those people that made up His earliest church. These days, if He sent His Spirit again, He would have to come as a Red Hot Fire, lit directly underneath our rear-ends. God may sometimes resemble a comforting cushion to His people in this world, but for our sakes I hope He is more like a pincushion. I hope and pray for our sakes that God’s Spirit more closely resembles a sharp point that prods us into spiritual action than a soft pillow that lulls us to sleep.

So what do we really think about God’s kingdom? If we think it’s a waste of time, then why not just admit it? If living by faith in Christ is a truly pointless endeavor, then we have nothing to lose by saying so. Besides, if God is God, then He already knows what’s on our minds, so we’re not going to pull a fast on one Him by professing a nonexistent faith.

So, if we are not deceiving God, who then is left for us to deceive? Ourselves? We might as well follow through with what we really believe and stop torturing ourselves by trying to put our faith in God and the world at the same time.

However, if we have tasted God’s grace, if we have caught a glimpse of His glory, then let’s put our hope and trust in Christ alone. He will do what it takes to save every last piece of us, if we are His and if He is God.

by Patrick Roberts. Find additional resources at www.BooksByPatrick.com

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