There is an aspect of The Holy Spirit I’m beginning to awaken to which is coming out of reading Galatians.  I’m wondering if the pastors I’ve had over the years were reading what I’m going to write, would question if I ever paid attention to any of their sermons.  I’ve known for years that Corinthians contains the Love chapter:  I Corinthians 13.  I always felt like that is what I’m to read when I need to be nicer to people and particularly to Kathy and my kids, grandkids.  Yes, it applies to friends too but being nice to most of them isn’t much of a struggle.  I do not mean to be trite as I write any of this.

Today in finishing up the book of Galatians, which is all about living the spirit-filled life, (the fruit of the Spirit) that I connect these two writings of Paul.  Paul is writing to the Corinthians telling them to live out of love with everyone around them.  Now Paul is telling the Galatians that in order to live life lovingly, we must do so with God’s Holy Spirit leading from within us.  Our flesh will turn every good intent back to us if we attempt to live life lovingly by flesh.  Now that I’m awakening so much more to The Holy Spirit’s presence within me, I can see the way I live by flesh and need to replace my actions with ones tempered by The Holy Spirit’s nudges.  Let me give an example.  Yesterday while I was with my daughter looking at a couple vehicles, all was ending well and Angie was going to do some checking on some items needing investigated from her insurance co., etc.  We were going to pick back up today when she and I are done with our work.  Later in the day she had been gone back to the dealership and had become greatly distressed.  Instead of addressing her distress in my flesh as I would typically do, I felt nudged to simply ask her to let this go for now.  We would tackle it when we weren’t wanting to attack someone.  The Holy Spirit had other work to do right now and our work wasn’t aligning with The Spirit’s work.  I also reminded her that when God shows us the right vehicle she will know the confirmation.

God is wanting me to learn to live by His Holy Spirit’s leading in my life and I am wanting to do so too.

Yes, the journey continues.  Yesterday I journaled about the 3 things I had been struggling to work through.  God had told me about my timing vs His circumstances and how He makes our timing fit into His eternal planning once circumstances are right.  I need to be patient and trust Him rather than fear outcomes that have not even occurred.  The one situation had been addressed by Saturday night.  The second one was dealt with yesterday and the third one I thought at first was being dealt with yesterday.  Then, things skidded to a halt and ended.  During the night last night I awoke several times very troubled.  I kept surrendering circumstances knowing the work to be done was God’s and not mine.  Trust is such a hard thing at these points for me.

This morning I was in the midst of journaling.  I had just written the question asking God and His Team what they wanted me to know from them this morning?  I had written as their first response, “Be still and know that I Am God.”  I was starting to write more when I could hear my cell phone ringing in the family room.  It was the one I had the troubles with last night.  In answering it and listening it seems God had been working all along.  Now that doesn’t surprise me really, but it just makes me tingle and smile.  God is so amazingly timely.  I’m being vague in details here because the people involved are closely connected to me.  They would see themselves if they read this.  I want them and all readers to know that God is to be trusted always and is so lovingly supportive of us.  Our fears so quickly set in when circumstances don’t come together as we wish.  Now that I can clearly see that my fears are the stark opposite of trust, I never want to act on them again.  I want to wait upon God so I can see what is behind the fear, address it, and return to trust.  Learning to trust, replacing fear with it, is my ultimate goal.

I have read the New Testament through so many times in my life that I’m not even sure–as though it matters.  When I was younger I did keep track thinking somehow I would have learned enough about God, Jesus and The Holy Spirit to warrant my redemption and living in heaven for eternity.  I didn’t really mean to be doing this to look like the Pharisees in the Old Testament, but that is exactly what I was doing.  Now that I am learning to depend on Spirit living I am seeing just how much of my life was lived by rules rather than by surrender and faith.

When this weekend started I had three things troubling me.  They were all connected to family members.  Yesterday morning I felt nudged to address the one and it is now resolved–not in a flesh way, but with God’s insights and everyone feeling God’s freedom.  This morning in my devotional time I was shown that today is the day to address another one of them.  I will do this at the right time today.  The third one will be done when the nudge and clarity comes.  As I was journaling about these three this morning God was bringing some insights forth.  First, I have always thought timing was measured by our earthly time.  God’s timing is always when circumstances are right with those involved.  These two would often clash when I used earthly time to determine readiness.  I didn’t give credible attention to the fact that earthly time is also in God’s Hands.  When circumstances are right, God ensures timing is also right.  This is a huge step in faith living for me.

The other thing God brought clarity to this morning was when I wrote in my journal,
“I surrender so You can take charge.”  As soon as I had that written I felt nudged to correct my thinking for God doesn’t remove our ability to have choice.  I then rewrote the sentence to read: “When I am fully surrendered to You, You have fullness of opportunity to complete Your purposes and ways using me.  This is what I want and choose.”  Spirit living is a big step into FAITH.  I want to stay here the rest of my earthly life.  Join me if you are sensing the same nudge.

The practice of living in spirit rather than in flesh is a genuine impact on our entire living process.  Having this past week just to myself at home with my grandson who is gone most of the time, I was able to see and learn some things about spiritual living.  Of course it is always easier to live a certain way when there is nothing challenging it.  When I picked up the three from the airport yesterday the change was instant.  Now there are others in our life.  Trying not to live in my flesh is not so easy when there is a car full of flesh and then a house of the same.  It is a lot like going to college to learn to teach and then go into a classroom to find that everything you thought you knew just doesn’t take care of 25-35 kids’ needs.  Flesh truly interferes with spirit.

As I was having my devotional time this morning I was reading the first two chapters of Galatians.  Paul is writing to the Christians in Galatia about his confronting Peter about trying to live to please the Jews while with the Gentiles.  Peter was attempting to please man instead of following what Christ had taught him.  I  found myself putting my own behaviors yesterday into that setting.  Paul was seeing Peter living in flesh rather than by God’s Spirit at that moment and he confronted Peter.  Yesterday I found myself overly tempted to live by flesh and respond with flesh.  I would almost instantly sense the difference but would not always respond as though I had.

This morning God was helping me sort through the fullness of spirit living.  The new creation God gave us when Christ was asked into our heart is the beginning of wholeness.  The impact of wholeness is only as complete as our willingness to let God complete His Good Work within us.  This is done by allowing The Holy Spirit to have full voice and me responding to His Voice as He would nudge me.  It seems to come in three different areas of my life:  my work life, my ministry life and my family life.  I’m going to be spending time consciously letting The Holy Spirit awaken me to living in the fullness of Him in me while I move in and out of these three areas.  I do want God to have complete control of me but this will only happen when I am willing to surrender fully, in all areas of my life.  This I want to do.

Welcome to Groundhog Day!  When I was a new principal literally 38 years ago I had a surprise party for the staff on this day.  The winter had been very gloomy so I had a baker create a sheet cake with a very cute groundhog on top.  We all laughed, had our party and went back to being gloomy.  The party didn’t change the weather, just gave us a moment of laughter in it.

I didn’t get yesterday’s blog written until noontime for reasons I stated in it.  What I wrote about in finding a boundary that had been destroyed from the abuse of my childhood still grips me.  It makes such good sense now that I’ve lived in the truth of it for 24 hours.  Hatred is not a sin.  It is an intense emotion that gives us all kinds of potential responses.  It is the response to hatred that can be sin.  Many years ago I was told in a learning environment that hatred is the counter of love.  Both are intense in what they generate within us.  One cannot hate unless they had once loved I was told.  I so wanted to love my dad but I deeply hated how he treated us (me).  I loved my brother but I hated what he did to me.  I loved the tenderness of God but I hated the fact He never stopped my brother or dad.  I loved dearly my mother but I hated that she never once checked up on me when she knew how much I’d been hurt.  Now that I’ve had time to process the boundary that hate creates I can easily see why I needed to know to not only hate the consequences of sin, but the sin itself.  I do feel hatred intensely.  It is a perfect boundary for not stepping into the sin I now hate.   This reality is also showing me that even though I want to know love intensely, I also fear it.  As a little kid we eagerly go to the people in our lives we are to love.  However, when that “eager going” brings us to the pain of abuse it causes love to be very tainted in our minds.  We start creating boundaries around what love is intended to be. and don’t even know we are doing so.

In my devotional time this morning as I was journaling, God pointed out that He wants me to let love become a natural part of my life.  As I wrote this I wanted to withdraw for in simply hearing this message in my head and writing it, I instantly got anxious.  However, the anxiety didn’t cause me to flee, just get tense.  I do want to know the freedom of love both in giving and receiving without the bondage of fear.  As the journey continues this is going to be an assignment I cannot even begin to imagine how it will play out.  I just told The Holy Spirit I wanted to take part in His Plan.  Now that I am comfortable with Him being within me I realize love has to be a great motivator and not a fear.  So, To God be all Glory.

So today brings clearly into focus something I’ve needed to see all my life.  Last night at Celebrate Recovery our testimony was focused on reestablishing boundaries which were either broken for us or sometimes ones we’ve broken for our children because of co-dependency on our part.  Coupled with this, The Holy Spirit living in me has been awakening what I said yesterday about hating not only the effects of sin, but sin itself.  Satan’s deception has a way of allowing us to easily see the ugliness of sin’s effect on others and us, but it keeps us from seeing just how ugly the sin itself is.  The sin itself is something we use to salve the pain we hide, the hurts we don’t want anyone to know about and so on.

(By the way, this is the latest in the day blog writing I’ve ever done.  I had started this early this morning but had an important call and am just now getting back to it.  I needed to go to work for a few hours too.  The meaning is still very relevant to me so I’m going ahead and writing this now.)

Last night in the share group of Celebrate Recovery, I told the men how much I was learning to hate both the sin and the effects of it.  I needed to hate both and see them separate of one another.  Actually, in seeing them differently, I was then able to see how much I’d always hated the effects of the sin, but how much I sometimes craved the sin itself.  I craved it because it was the one thing that either salved the pain or it would replace it for a moment.  Of course, then I’d have the guilt and shame to deal with.  But even dealing with it I would find the sheer bitterness and raw hurt was pushed down at least for a while.  I write all of this because this morning as I was journaling to God He allowed me to see something I’ve not yet seen.  When I started yesterday saying out loud that I hate the sin called porn I found myself with a new boundary.  I hadn’t noticed this until I finally had the sin itself on the outside of me.  It didn’t own me if it were on the outside of me and I seeing it there never wanted it back in me again.  The boundary that had been shattered for me when I was very young is returning.  I’d never seen hate as a boundary, but I do know for a fact that I’ve never participated in many things in my life simply because I hated what I knew it would do to me or what I’d seen it do to others that I loved.  Now, all of a sudden, I knew to hate something I’d not understood fully until now.

So, now back to the first paragraph.  God and His Holy Spirit within me has shed Light on a something I can truly say I hate and never want it to try and own me again.  Praise the Lord!

Yes, the journey does continue.  Yesterday was an emotionally jolting day.  As I was having my devotions and wrestling with the idea of spirit living I had text one of our pastors to meet with him.  He has a much more solid background in this topic so I wanted to anchor some thinking with him.  We set lunch to do this.  I spent the morning doing things here I needed to get done and was headed out the door when my youngest daughter called.  She said she’d been given a letter to move out of her place of work by 3:00 pm yesterday and could I help?  This totally rearranged my afternoon, but she had work to do until 1:30 so that gave me time to still meet for lunch.  As we finished loading her furniture and business things from the room she started coughing and then could hardly breathe.  We got the things to her house, unloaded and she left for the doc.  After waiting 2.5 hrs and still not being seen him she went home.  She is going back today. She also got a call that her car from the wreck two weeks ago has been totaled.

I kept wondering what I could do differently to help make things better?  At quartet practice last night I asked the guys to pray for her.  I was then informed about two other very serious items to pray about for them which is severely impacting a couple people I know well.  As I was having my devotional time with God this morning I read about my need to be righteous conscience rather than sin conscience as I address myself and God.  As a new creation I have righteousness within me because of the Holy Spirit living in me.  It was amazing to see the difficult situations of yesterday from a righteous perspective rather than a sin one.  Human living is always impacted from sin.  God asks us to shift our focus to Him and see through His Spirit’s eyes.  Seeing sin and its impact on living is emotionally devastating.  However, when seeing all of this through righteousness, one sees a pathway from these traumas directly to God through the path Jesus Christ made for us (me).  God uses all things to His Glory if we will turn to Him.

Today my journey’s assignment is to stay focused on righteousness rather than sinfulness.  This assignment is mine as I see others and also as I see myself.  Join me if this fits for you too.

I believe the journey can hit the forward key now.  The halt that was hit a week or more ago has begun to complete its purpose.  Let me explain.  When the halt key was hit I was needing to face the reality of God’s Gift of The Holy Spirit living in me.  What I’ve known in my head had to become a reality.  I could not continue any longer on this journey of freedom without believing much more fully the truth of this Gift.  In this week+ I’ve come to realize this humbling truth.

I knew sin and its impact on me far longer than I knew God’s love for me.  So when I found God, accepted Christ into my life and received this precious Gift of The Holy Spirit, I had to earn their worth and live up to the image I had in my head.  Add to the sins done to me all of my own sins and I was never going to find worth even remotely good enough for housing this Gift.  I see the veil now that has kept me blinded all this time.

Something that The Holy Spirit has been showing me these past several days is the fullness of recovery I hadn’t quite recognized.  He was showing me that I along with all others, quit sin because sin has a devastating effect on the relationships we have with others, with God and with ourselves.  If we are going to break the cycle of sin we have to also hate the sin itself and just its effect/s.  The sin/s that grip us and keep us in bondage have a purpose for us that go deeply within our emotional being.  Whatever the sin is, it is giving us a moment of gratification/escape/pleasure that human life robs.  The Holy Spirit has been showing me how I cannot just hate the effects of sin but I must hate the sin itself.  I’d never separated this out even though intellectually I’ve known this for a long time.  When I’m able to hate both sin and the effects of it, I have now seen the full separation of myself from the sin that owned me.  For so long I’ve seen myself as sin, both mine and my brother’s sin of sexual use of me.  It is then The Holy Spirit showed me He can live in me because Christ has fully cleansed this new creation–me–of its sin so The Holy Spirit can be Holy and live within me.

The Holy Spirit–God’s Spirit–Christ’s Gift is so remarkable.  If you’ve struggled with any of this as I have, I hope you will continue on this trek and find the truth of God’s Gift for yourself.  This bondage is never what God wanted for us.  He gave us His Son and His Holy Spirit to set us free from it.  Only now am I more fully recognizing the immensity and pureness of this most Holy and Precious Love God has for you and me.

There is a very important element of God that He is emphasizing right now for me.  It has to do with patience on His part, and along with that, it has to do with clarity of purpose.  I’ve said of late that I seem to be halted in my journey at this point.  It started with getting to know the Holy Spirit and journaling to Him.  However, there is so much more God is wanting me to know at this point.  What scripture tells me is that The Holy Spirit isn’t separate from me, He is within me and waiting for me to surrender totally to Him as I continue to awaken more fully to the fullness of His indwelling.

As I spoke to our congregation yesterday I found myself free to say what was needed.  Last night at church we had a men’s night.  I had a young man talk with me for 30+ minutes about his desire to join this work and to be trained.  He hates his past and God has granted him freedom from it.  He yearns to help others and God nudged him yesterday that this is how He is wanting him to help.  On the flip side of this, one of the young men in the step study I co-lead had relapsed this past week.  Our lesson title was Relapse.  He hates the sin but it is like a magnet to him if he gives the urge a glimmer of a chance.  I saw something last night that the Holy Spirit is making much more clear this morning–it is one thing to hate the consequences of sin, but it is another thing to hate the sin itself.  It isn’t until we ask for The Holy Spirit to help us hate the sin that we will quit coming back to it.  Too often we momentarily quit due to the consequences, but it is a whole different story when we finally begin to hate the sin itself.  This is when the full Light of Glory can shine within us.  It is then that The Holy Spirit is much freer to work within us.

II Corinthians 3:17 affirms that God wants us to have liberty and not legalism.  Liberty is sometimes defined as emancipation from bondage.  The bondage from a sin or from sinning itself doesn’t happen fully until we can hate the sin itself that has gripped us.  Join me in asking The Holy Spirit within us to teach us to hate this sin which so often wants us to return and keep us in the bondage of our old self.  We are learning to live as a new creation and this is exactly what The Holy Spirit within is waiting to do.

Today as my devotional time began I read that we are to pray in the Holy Spirit.  Note the word–in.  We pray to God and to Jesus but we are to pray in The Holy Spirit.  I’m sure I’ve read this before but it hadn’t hit until this morning.  As I’ve been halted on my journey so I can get to know The Holy Spirit I’m catching some important details about our relationship.  In order for me to pray in the Holy Spirit He has to be within me.  Also, to pray in Him, I need to be fully surrendered to Him obeying all He asks.  I know I’ve done this somewhat, but this morning I prayed for my grandkids, my kids and their spouse or companions.  I prayed for the presentation being made to the congregation about the new ministries for recovery I’m announcing.  The Holy Spirit will have me say what He wants said, I know.  He has also given me an abundant assurance that He has been working with some in our congregation that He wants joining this leadership training.  He will confirm for them that this is His and their time to step into a new area of serving.  They may not know it yet, but this serving is also healing.  When we take the steps of obedience The Holy Spirit nudges us to take our faith and trust grow.

Yesterday I was very concerned about this morning’s assignment.  Today, however, knowing The Holy Spirit in me will do the work, I am a humble servant gladly delivering a message of encouragement and next steps for some spiritually, very hungry people.  God is so amazing!