GOING AND FLOWING

I'm thinking of this mainly on a spiritual level. Primarily about how we so often manage to create a dam in our capacity to truly accept given spiritual truths. No matter how many different ways in the scripture God tells us about our lack of goodness, to many still get obsessed with thinking you have to stop sinning to get God's approval.

It isn't that God enjoys having us sin or that we should totally surrender to all our pure lusts, but we just don't seem able to embrace the reality of grace. Essentially, it is God's favor to us that we can't earn. He loves us and gives us through faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior the promise of forgiveness.

But he doesn't do it with the stipulation that we in addition to that also agree to stop sinning. Again I didn't say it meant that we will suddenly think forgiveness mean sinning doesn't matter either. It is just the focus is suppose to be trust and not sin.

Still, the mind too often goes through the mental exercise of trying to make doing good deeds as the reason for being a Christian. It is a subtle thing often that people don't even think about. But what happens is the person when talking about being a believer will immediately focus on all the things they did that might be considered as "good" deeds.

It is in reality just a way of saying "see, I'm going to heaven because I'm a good person since I do all these good things." It also is a way of trying to expect that these good deeds somehow make up for the bad things we do. And as a result the one thing that never does get going in our spiritual lives in the flow of true light.

By that I mean that God is seeking us to trust him. He declares he prefers obedience to sacrifice. And obedience is the element that desires to listen to his spirit and do what he wants. It is an act for which you don't expect reward. Instead you are just trusting him and responded with the real spiritual type of going where we do what he desires.

Along the way his spirit will flow through us. This always affects us in terms of our behavior. Not in ways that allows us something to boast about. But in ways that will draw us closer to him.

So next time when contemplating the nature of one's relationship with Christ, if the thought comes in about thinking in terms of "good deeds" does it also come with memories of a sin you think it will offset. Often one follows the other. We remember a sin and then our mind will flash to some good deed and say "ah I sin, but I did do this good."

And in it we do nothing to truly improve the spirituality that should be going in our lives. We have just created a dam of "control" where we think we can get God to forgot our wrong by what we did right. God is never impressed with that approach, no matter how we manage to curb our sense of guilt in the process. When letting ourselves get going in the arena of obedience what honestly will flow will be his spirit as he intends.