Saturday, April 25, 2015

Assurance through inability.

Assurance is practiced when we have described Gods kingdom so that we believe that God is in control. We gain assurance by pronouncing His covenants then petitioning Him according to His faithfulness , kindness, long suffering and salvation. We also approach Him with our human frailties and the sorrow we carry because of our propensity to experience the effects of the curse. It is easy for us to imagine that our assurance is described by how much we focus on Christ. Its very deceptive to approach God on what we are experiencing in the present and never address what is bothering us. Its easy for us to teach that focusing on Christ must be done with a lot of care. But to focus on Christ and get our focus off ourselves we must really believe that we are saved into a kingdom in which Gods law has established our boundaries and our safety. Focusing on Christ is going beyond the word to the Person. We must learn that God has established His righteousness so that He might show forth His glory and in this we need no other motivation for growing in the christian experience.

But we also go down side roads because we focus on ourselves being unable to do good. The truth is that even if we become proficient in describing His kingdom that dwells in our hearts and appealing to Him because we really believe that we live in this kingdom that its easy for us to make inability  our act to gain acceptance.  We are easily led astray by thinking and feeling that we are worse then He thinks we are. We really believe that if we could talk ourselves down that He would show pity to us and be more available to us. But at some point inability must be expressed in the lack of care we have for the things of this world. The only way that we will really accept total inability is when we experience the powerlessness of human achievements by tasting and seeing the works of God as if God came to us in a battle and pulled us out at the most dangerous time. Focusing on Christ is living in a kind of mysterious disposition in which the weight of the care of this world does not influence our experience in His kingdom. When the kingdom that is within us comes in unity with the kingdom that God has established through His covenants, laws, decrees, and promises then we have Christ in us the hope of glory.

We glory in our weakness , we do not shy away from it.  Our weakness is the gift of God to dull the pain. We can settle back into our secret meditations in any circumstance and seek to rest in Christ as if we have left the room. The truth is that rest is like a soldier who is entering a city at night and must go past the guard without awakening him. If the soldier makes one loud move then he puts his life in danger. And this is what true biblical rest is. We can be the agents of someones fear and sorrow by speaking with the wrong motives. If we are not at rest then we will wake the guards up in others. Inability is being able to touch the other persons experience. 

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