Forgotten God

 

I am reading Forgotten God by Francis Chan

Such a good book and part of why I can say that is because I know he 'walks the walk' and doesnt just 'talk the talk' (that photo above is of my daughter...she walks the walk too)

Here is a bit from the book that has really challenged me this week.

‘My hope is that instead of searching for ‘Gods will for my life’ each of us would learn to seek hard after ‘the Spirits leading in my life today.’ May we learn to pray for an open heart, to surrender to the Spirits leading with that friend, child, spouse, circumstance, or decision in our lives right now.

To say that we are not called to figure out “God’s will for my life” does not mean God doesn’t have purposes and plans for each of our lives or that He doesn’t care what we do with our lives. He does. In both the Old and New testaments He tells us that this is true. The key is that He never promises to revel these purposes all at once, in advance.

We do know that we are called to keep in step with the Holy Spirit. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians we read “But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh...If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit.”
 Gal 5:16, 25

The phrases keeping in step with the Spirit and walking with the Spirit are mostly likely familiar, but do they affect your life in a practical and meaningful way? Like I said earlier, I think dwelling on Gods plan for the future often excuses us from faithful and sacrificial living now. It tends to create a safe zone of sorts, where we can sit around and have “spiritual” conversations about what God “might” have planned for our lives. Thinking, questioning and talking can take the place of letting the Spirit affect our immediate actions in radical ways. God wants to see His children stake everything on His power and presence in their lives.

Nowhere in scripture do I see a “balanced life with a little bit of God added in” as an ideal for us to emulate. Yet when I look at our churches, this is exactly what I see: a lot of people have added Jesus to their lives. People who have, in a sense, asked Him to join them on their journey, to follow them wherever they feel they should go, rather than following Him as we are commanded. The God of the universe is not something we can just add to our lives and keep on as we did before. The Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is not someone we can just all on when we want a little extra power in our lives. Jesus Christ did not die in order to follow us. He died and rose again so that we could forget everything else and follow Him to the cross, to true life.’