In the beginning, God…because matter cannot create itself. Matter is inanimate, void of life. God and nature are one. If you stroke the fur of a kitten or run your hands through the soil, you are touching God. He is the sum of all things created, seen and unseen. He made the borders of the earth, and divided the seasons. His existence is not subject to the limitations of the material universe. His power sustains all life. No place is closer to God than any other place. His spirit manifests itself through all time and eternity. Through our loving obedience to God, He will manifest His spirit in us and radiate His presence in our mind. Through prayer our awareness of increasing consciousness will be revealed the nearer our soul comes to Him. He does not reside in the physical part of the brain, but the electrostatic impulses of our thoughts. Hear, O Lord, when I cry with my voice! Have mercy also upon me, and answer me. When You said, “Seek My face,” My heart said to You, “Your face, Lord, I will seek.” (Psalms 27:7-8)
Sadly, many Christians today are spiritually bankrupt. The lack of personal investment has left many in a very sad state of affairs. We rush through, or even neglect, our devotions. We are so self-absorbed that our poor basic consumption has left us to conform the Word of God to our own experiences. Our reflection is not that of God, but of others that we emulate. We rest our relationship with God through another’s conception of the truth, and copy the way others live thinking this will close the ever widening gap between us and our Creator. Repentance, prayer, and a return to personal Bible study is the only thing that will break us out of the mold of the conceptual Christian. Our relationship with God can be increased with spiritual exercise or can be destroyed with irresponsibility. Our generation seems to be trending farther and farther away from God.
Our heavenly Father is a Being with feelings, emotions, and tastes. Before we are able to seek Him, He must first have sought us. He looks for us in the thoroughfare of our mind, our wills, and our emotions. He has granted us the ability to seek Him, but unfortunately our sins are a hindrance. As the deer pants for the water brooks, So pants my soul for You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? (Psalms 42:1-2) Now therefore, I pray, if I have found grace in Your sight, show me now Your way, that I may know You…(Psalms 42:1-2) Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith; that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:8-11)
Everything we read and hear talks about accepting Christ as our Savior. Little is mentioned about the lifelong search for fellowship, and contentment with our relationship is a deadly satanic trap. We reach out to God in simplicity. Quiet, restful thought meditating with our spiritual eyes and ears open. He waits patiently to be wanted, to be loved just like you and me. He is a secret treasure just waiting to be 
discovered. In Him all joy and happiness reside. Whatever we think we may lose by being obedient to His Word will be nothing compared to the purity of His love. Oh, God, we long to see Your glory! Please come and touch our hearts, and show us the wonders of Your creation. The human heart is rooted in self-consciousness. Our main character trait is the desire to possess or profit from our experiences. Many Christians today try to possess God, and mold Him into something we can control. When we are in need we use Him, and when we don’t need Him we set Him up on the shelf somewhere until He is needed again. Unfortunately this is not how it works, because God has to possess us in able to show us deeper spiritual knowledge. “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” (Matthew 16:24-25) Life and self are synonymous with the selfish way of our fallen nature. Those of us who follow Christ have removed all our possessive traits, and have surrendered our will, our emotions, and our possessions. We no longer have the desire to control things, and have escaped the oppression of the lust of the world. Even though we have surrendered all to Christ, we possess all things through Him.
God made us for Himself, and man’s position is to glorify God and bask in His righteousness. “You are worthy, O Lord, To receive glory and honor and power; For You created all things, and by Your will they exist and were created.” (Revelation 4:11) God’s plan for man was intimate fellowship with Him where we could talk, laugh, and share time with each other. All this went downhill when we rebelled against God. We hid ourselves from His presence because we were ashamed. “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!” (Luke 5:8) Through the message of Christ, God poured out His heart, longing for His redeemed children to return to Him, but so very few have responded. It hurts me now to talk about it, because I know how He feels.
Today it is not the veil of the Holy of Holies that separates us from the love of God, it is the veil of sin. It is the veil of self-consciousness that plagues our fallen nature. The unjudged sin lying within us is a cesspool of egotism and self-righteousness that brings us close to the vanity that caused the fall of Lucifer. The exhibitionist who promotes himself as the leader of the Christian right by a populous that follows the person instead of Christ: promoting oneself under the disguise of Christianity. This veil of sin can only be removed by the power of Jesus Christ crucified. We must bear down on our self-will by preparing ourselves for the ordeal of obedience to God that only our Savior can make possible. The veil of sin can only be removed by the living spiritual flesh of Christ on the cross. It is a necessary pain we must endure to die the death of sin, and to acknowledge our selfish desires. We must reject the call of the world, and abandon its lusts.
The average man’s faith is more of an interference from God than a reality. God is the conclusion of an existence we made many years ago, and He remains unknown to us personally. Mankind does not think of God as being knowable in the sense of a person. We go through life loving an idea and a morality, not a living being. The spiritual abilities of mankind are numb by his sinful nature and in all intended purposes are dead. Our faith is defective, because we read, but we don’t live. We hear, but we don’t listen. We speak, but we don’t communicate with God, and that which is real is to us an abstraction. The visible things of this world are our enemies, because they blind us from our eternal spiritual blessings. Without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. (Hebrews 11:6)
Quiet, please: God is speaking to you. He is earnestly trying to communicate His love for you through the medium of His Holy Word. He expresses His thoughts through an intrinsic conscious voice that is received through us by obedience, meditation, and prayer. We are to listen for the loving influence that exists from within our soul, emanating out to all His creation. The Bible is far more than mere words on paper. It is the very breath of God conveying His love and His will to our living spirit. “The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.” (John 6:63) By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth…For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast. (Psalms 33:6, 9) By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible. (Hebrews 11:3)
God lives in His spoken Word, causing the power of His speech to reflect the truth and righteousness of His being. The Bible is the living Word of God. No other book anywhere lived through the lives of forty-four men over a period of one thousand, five hundred years. The Word of God resounding in the heart of man brings forth light that enlightens the path of every man who comes into this world. There is no escaping the Power of the Word. It influences the heart of every person on earth. All of us who have sinned will be judged by the Word. Only hearing the Word will not make us just in the eyes of God.
We must also be doers of the Word so we show the Word of God is written in our hearts, and it bears witness to our conscience. One day God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to the Gospel. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. (Romans 1:20-21)
A worldwide voice has sounded in the hearts of all mankind troubling their soul for the sake of righteousness, evoking fear in all men. This voice is the unconfessed cause of a troubled conscience longing for immorality to leave their souls. However, our thought patterns are not those that follow after God, but those who sear their conscience with every type of evil to put away the voice of God. Every good thing comes from God. The popular songs of today came down from above, but were convoluted into evil. The ideas of men are given to them by their Creator, but are turned into satanic offerings. The same goes for genius: it is a blessing from God that man uses to manipulate others for the devices of evil. A Voice cries out to the souls of men, and few are listening.
Doubts blind us to the truth. The Bible is filled with promises that need to be believed and acted upon before its mysteries are revealed. When we place our faith in God, that faith opens the spiritual door to life. This provides every need for us and takes us anywhere in the Kingdom of God. Faith is not a once-received act, but a continuous study of the mind of God. We direct our attention toward Jesus, and even though we may be distracted by the world, we give our heart to Him so we will always return. We are hardly conscious of our faith. It is an asset of its own existence. Just like our eye sees everything around us but never sees itself. Faith places all of its attention on the object in front of it. When we place our faith in Christ, the things we have struggled to do on our own become routine and we experience change.
Our relationship with God is a wondrous relationship. We lift our inner eyes until we touch the all-seeing eye of God. Believing is seeing with our spiritual eyes so our relationship is constant. Neither time, place, or circumstances have any bearing on our communion with God. Unto You I lift up my eyes, O You Who dwell in the heavens. Behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their masters, as the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, until He has mercy on us. (Psalms 123:1-2) Jesus always looked to His heavenly Father in prayer. He would venture off by Himself for hours, keeping His inner eye toward the Father. Then Jesus answered and said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner. For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself does; and He will show Him greater works than these, that you may marvel. (John 5:19-20) This gaze is for each one of God’s children, not just pastors and elders. As we practice faith, our spiritual eyes allow us to look toward God continually and we become attuned to His being.
Obedience is the key to spiritual revelation. We struggle the most when we don’t accept the Lord as He is and try to make Him into someone He is not. We can’t take the knowledge of the Bible and use it without spiritual investment, for God is revealed through the spirit. We did not create God, He created us. “You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power; for You created all things, and by Your will they exist and were created.” (Revelation 4:11) Because of who God is and who we are, the only relationship we can obtain is as a son or daughter. He is our Lord and Master, and we must submit in total obedience to Him. We owe Him everything, and as we grow in Christ we find ourselves in disagreement with the ways of the world. Our views will change, our behavior will adjust, and a new power of mental, spiritual, and physical obedience will begin. Our faith is the proof of our choices we make throughout life.
We are either God’s servant, or a servant to sin. There is no middle ground, for you cannot worship God and the world at the same time. Jesus answered them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. (John 8:34) A man of God will praise God and will confess His Name to all he comes in contact with. How can you believe, who receive honor from one another, and do not seek the honor that comes from the only God? (John 5:44) How can we say we place our faith in Christ and still seek the approval of others? The ways of modern man confuse me. They dress alike, talk alike, and do the same things. You can look at a person’s dress and pretty much know the group of people they respond to. I personally wish to be an individual in and for Christ, so that others may see God in my actions, behavior, and character.
It is the meek who, one day shall inherit the earth. Today the rich, the strong, the proud have control, but this shall not be the case when Christ returns. They will be cut down, and control will be handed over to the poor, the meek, and the lowly of heart. Many think being humble makes one weak, but this is not the case. The humble man is not inferior, but through his faith his character is strong, and his behavior is right before the Lord. Pride, malice, and arrogance are the origins of all the pain and diseases that inflict us. It is the burden that bears down on us throughout life. When we seek the meekness of Christ, He grants us rest from our burdens. Through His rest we no longer have to protect our heart from every insult and slight from man. Our honor is secure in Christ, and it does not matter what others say about us. God’s opinion of us is all that is consequential. Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)
As long as there is sin, we are torn between two Adams. The first Adam brought about sin and death. The second Adam (Jesus Christ) brought the life-giving Spirit that reconciled our relationship with God. We are limited by our body of flesh and the weaknesses that come from the nature of man. This is why it is important for us to make every act of our lives contribute to the glory of God—the comfort of knowing that God has accepted our inner lives and will bless us in all that we do. We don’t take time away from our Father. All days are holy to us, for we worship the Father in spirit and in truth. Let us obey the calling God has placed in our heart, so that we live fully in the Spirit so that all our thoughts and every act of our life may be attuned to the worship of our heavenly Father.
Maturity In Christ 