When our faith or trust in God is challenged, God reminds Annie and me that the trial will serve to strengthen our faith in Him. Amazing. What a different and victorious way to look at trials. Keeping our eyes on the outcome is such a resting and glorious way to live.
16 This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust (pressure or desire) of the flesh. 17 For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.
Galatians 5:16-17 KJV
As we know, the flesh and the Spirit are opposed to each other – are they ever. The flesh will try to keep us weighed down and defeated by living in the world’s ways and the Spirit will keep encouraging us to live free by applying His ways (His Word) to our lives.
Living according to the desires and dictates of the flesh will keep us from the victory in Jesus God has for our lives. We must learn to silence our flesh and to listen to the Spirit in order to renew our minds to the Word of God. This is the only way we will learn to live free in Jesus.
We had a really difficult time trusting in and finding out how wonderful God was when we were living by the flesh (not trusting God and how that harmed us) one day and then living by the Spirit (doing God’s Word and witnessing it working) the next. It was a sea saw existence at best. Only when Annie and I decided to try to live by the Spirit all the time did we begin to see breakthroughs in our Christian lives. Sure, we had asked Jesus into our lives and to save us from an eternity in Hell apart from God, but we did not begin to live in spiritual victory in our daily lives until we applied God’s Word to our every circumstance. Do we still get knocked down spiritually from time to time? Yes, but God was so loving and faithful to remind us that He will always have a new insight and victory for us if we’ll keep our eyes off the spiritual attack or failure and remember that He has something new for us to enjoy in Jesus if we’ll keep marching through any trials. What an important blessing knowing that is.
So come on, let’s go. ☺☺
Thanking and praising God in all things,
Mark
Note: While we may not agree with everything a particular church or Christian group teaches or believes, there are times when we can be blessed by something outside the realm of our current understanding of God.