Spiritual Ponderings

Today's selection in my morning devotional, Christ Triumphant is about the Holy Spirit. There are a number of things that caught my attention and exposed lies inside of me about this subject. First of all, I noticed quite explicitly that the gift of the Holy Spirit is all about honoring Jesus and nothing about coming as some sort of reward for believers who finally get their act together. And while it is very true that it was necessary for the believers who experienced Pentecost to wait, pray, humble themselves and put away their differences to be prepared to receive this gift, the gift was not given as a reward for doing those things. I know that might seem self-evident logically speaking, but deep inside I have always felt that to receive this gift we had to somehow achieve some elevated level of holiness before God would entrust us with this power. Which then brings up another subtle addiction that has infused itself into this issue, that of our obsession for power itsel...

I have been subtly taught all my life to try to produce fruits of righteousness through a combination of my own efforts and God's help. And even though many times I was instructed with words that seemed to contradict that outwardly, the implications of the lifestyle of Christianity modeled to me and the expectations placed on everyone claiming to be a Christian strongly enforced this view of fruit production. But it is becoming increasingly clear that this method of trying to produce fruit is rooted in the confusion produced by the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eating from this fruit induced the effect of producing a hallucination in the human race that deeply distorts our view of the pure principle of natural fruit production that God placed on this earth during creation. And until I return to the original way of having fruit produced in my life, I will remain deeply frustrated in my attempts to display the fruits described in the Bible that will be seen ...