Submitting to the Divine

I have been talking so much about what the Lord has been working in my life lately regarding the sanctification (purifying) of my soul (takin' out the trash lol). But I really wanted to talk about the first and most important step in walking with the Spirit, and it isn't fasting, or praying or reading the Bible or any of that, and I am going to use my husband's amazing weeklong journey to do that.

My man is a packrat, God love him. I have to secretly give stuff away to Goodwill or we would have a house that looks like "The Messiest House In America." But because of how he grew up, he learned to stomp down his fears, and frustrations and even "non-acceptable" emotions. To compensate, he learned to live a quite hedonistic lifestyle, substituting pleasure for happiness. Now, he gave up the heinous forms of that years ago, but the underlying causes were still there and still are today. Through his strong-will he gave up the worst, but he could do nothing about the pain that drove him to it. Until now.

A week ago he started on a four day fast, which is unusual for him, but his heart was mostly in the right place. After two dreams, he realised that the Lord was calling him to confront his inner man through the workings of the Spirit -- he just didn't know why. He thought it would provide that long-awaited job. But the Lord always has something better in mind.

So the fast came and went and he got very sullen, because he saw no immediate results. I was shocked.

"How long has it been since you have yelled at the kids?"

He was taken aback.

"It has been days and not a peep out of you and the whole house has been peaceful. That is huge, you are looking for results that satisfy your cravings and are completely overlooking the miraculous things that are happening," and I recounted a few other big changes.

Well, he was shocked. He had been approaching fasting and prayer as a quick fix to get what he wanted, instead of looking at it from God's point of view. You see, he had never really understood the important Kingdom principle.

"Seek first the Kingdom of God and then all these things shall be added unto you (our worldly needs)."

So this morning he comes to me and tells me that God has shown him something very important about himself, and I helped show him how to submit to the process.

You see, when God shows us something He want to remove we can either (1) ignore it, make excuses for it, etc... (2) say, "MINE, MINE" or (3) admit we want to keep it but that are willing to give it up and that we really need Him to do it for us. The first two quench the Holy Spirit and will often stop us dead in our tracks, ESPECIALLY when we justify our own flesh and hide from the ugliness of it. And that is silly because, I mean, if that one thing is what is blocking the road and we refuse to let the Spirit remove it, then we are stuck idling -- and are we gonna shut down God and say, "I only do this because of X, so it isn't so bad." But if we let Him remove it, we can keep on going, simple as that.

But it is all about submission, submitting to the divine, to our God. It is about trusting Him enough (even though it may be a giant leap to do so) to realise that He never takes anything we need, He only takes that which harms us and others. Once we learn to do that, and if we are determined to stay the course, we will receive the goal of our faith, namely the salvation of our souls.
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