I am thankful to God for allowing me to hear the Truth because the truth has truly set me free. I’ve always heard that scripture but didn’t really make a connection to it until God opened my eyes and let me see that something was missing in my life and in my salvation. As a logical thinker and a common sense person, I knew something was wrong with what I was being taught in Church and what I was being taught the scriptures meant or how I was interpreting the scriptures.
I was a seeker of God, and I knew that I needed to stand quiet before God in order to connect with Him spirit to spirit so that I could follow His lead. I called this ‘Standing Quiet Before God’. Over time I could see that there was something missing in the teachings of the Christian church if we were so focused on changing the outward (aka the vices) and ignoring or accepting the things of the heart because I knew that the bible says that God looks on the heart, but man looks on the outward appearance. It did not make sense to me that I still had the fruits of Satan’s nature when God said we shall be known by our fruits and if the fruits of God’s nature could not be obtained until we got to Heaven, what’s the point? Didn’t Jesus say that if a tree does not bear fruit, it should be cut down and cast into the fire? I was taught against ‘once saved; always saved’ but I knew that God said that no one can take us out of his hand once we believed. But time and time again I have seen Christian people fail and even myself from time to time over the years… and I and I’ve seen others go back into sin and it was usually the same vices that we were set free from when we first got saved but whenever a storm blew in, we were pulled back into the same sin. But if God delivered me from that vice, why was I pulled back into it? It didn’t make sense to me. I knew something was missing. I knew that sin was of the heart and not the vices.
I didn’t understand how I could be saved but still be a sinner with a flesh when the Bible clearly says that you won’t sin after you have believed. God circumcises our hearts; cuts away the flesh. It also says that light and darkness cannot dwell together nor have fellowship with each other so that told me that I could not be righteous and still sin in the same body at the same time or go back and forth between the two. Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven was within me so why am I looking for Jesus to come back in a cloud to rescue me from this dark world? If I’m in the world but not of the world, why do I care about the hell that’s going on around me? I’m supposed to be a light in a dark world for others to see and find their way to the light. Also, this notion that the sin in the world is grieving the Holy Spirit inside of me didn’t make sense either because ‘the world’ didn’t bother Jesus when he hung out with sinners. I realized that I was judging the world around me and I knew that if I judge anyone then God would judge me with the same measure. I also realized that Jesus had peace within, and he was not defined by the hell in the world around him nor was he bothered by it or grieved by it. So, I realized that if I was feeling anything about the hell around me, then that means that I have no peace within and if I have no peace within then the Kingdom of Heaven was not within me. How could I have Jesus in my heart and still have internal conflict of any kind?
So, in a nutshell, I’m thankful for God waking me up in 2017 and giving me perfect peace and helping me grow as I walk with Him. God has led me my entire life to this point and because I was always a seeker and an observer, I was able to see the light that God put out there for me to see and it led me to Him and to perfect peace and to the fruits of His spirit and now the hellish world is without while I have peace within and nothing or nobody can take me out of his hands.
Blogs by BG 