Last Friday I wrote about teaching the Celebrate Recovery lesson on Daily Inventory the night before. This lesson is connected with Principle 7 which reads: “Reserve a daily time with God for self-examination, bible reading, and prayer in order to know God and His will for my life and to gain the power to follow His will.” This message has stayed with me throughout this past week primarily because God knows I haven’t mastered this third part of the principle: “gain the power to follow His will”. Maybe it is because I’m a man and men have to use their own power in order to “be a man”. Also, a man who surrenders has to give up his pride thinking “he’s weak and incapable”. Regardless of the reason/s, I know God is wanting me to learn to “gain the power to follow His will”. This means to be dependent on God’s Holy Spirit within me rather than trying to muscle through my struggles and fail over and over.

This principle also says that in order to gain this power I must know God and His will for my life. These past 6 months of learning to live life as a “new creation” has brought me into a level of trust and faith in God I’ve never had before. Learning to surrender to Him and lean only on His Holy Spirit for strength is huge. Even writing about it right now is huge. I’d much rather write about what I’ve learned, not what I need to learn.

This morning’s devotional scripture was from Luke 22:31-32 (from The Passion). In it I placed my own name as I read it out loud. It says (using my name instead of Peter) “Earnie, my dear friend, listen to what I’m about to tell you. Satan has demanded to come and sift you like wheat and test your faith. But I have prayed for you, Earnie, that you would stay faithful to me no matter what comes.” Isn’t this amazing?! Jesus is praying for you and me just as He did for Peter. His Holy Spirit will stand up against Satan if we will get out of His way by surrendering rather than attempting to fight using our own strength. BIG LESSON!