Spirituality

Have you ever felt like throwing up your arms and saying “I quit! I just can’t change! I thought when God came into my life things would get better, but they haven’t.” It doesn’t matter if you’re a new Christian or have been a Christian for a number of years, these feelings can creep in and set you up for confusion and frustration.

So where did things go wrong? Many times our expectations are wrong because we lack full knowledge of how things work in the spiritual realm. We don’t understand that our spirit has been renewed, but our soul (mind, will and emotions) and our body (our five senses) have not been renewed. It’s up to us to teach our soul and body to come into alignment with how God wants us to live.

Does God abandon us until we get our act together? No! He is with us every day, every hour. He provides us guidance through His instruction book, the Bible. When we become a Christian (believe that Jesus Christ is God’s only Son and He paid the price for our sins by His dieing on the cross and He was raised from the dead and ascended to heaven to live there forever) God sends His Holy Spirit to live inside us. Our human spirit literally becomes born again by the Holy Spirit taking residence inside us.

The Holy Spirit has all of God’s power and love. Therefore, we have all of God’s power inside us. This power will help us change – but we need to know what areas of our life God wants to change. We learn this by reading the Bible and taking action.

Through reading the Bible and praying we begin to transform our thinking and our beliefs. One major thing we learn is that God will not force Himself upon us. We are not puppets in God’s hand. We have freedom to make choices. If we see things God wants us to do (or not do) and we ignore that instruction, our situation will not change. This is when we get frustrated because we expect God to intervene in our circumstances and force change.

Another major principle to learn is that things take time to change. This applies not only to our personal character, but also our circumstances. While we can work on developing a godly character, because other people also have their choices to make, God must wait for them to make the right choices in order to set up a change in our circumstances. And while we’re waiting, God gives us His grace and peace to handle any situation we are going through.

Part of the process of change is planting spiritual seeds (the Word of God), nurturing them, and allowing time for them to come to full maturity. If we don’t plant seeds, we won’t have anything to harvest (change in ourselves). This is where we can get frustrated because we expect God to make things happen quicker than they are.

The power to change things in ourself and our circumstances comes from having God’s Word (Scriptures in the Bible) working in our life. These “seeds” get planted and rooted in our heart through our actions. Knowledge alone will not change us. We cannot hibernate in our room and only read the Bible. We must put action to our new knowledge.

Many have been taught to pray to God for things we already have inside us via the Holy Spirit. Thus, we don’t take action because we don’t think we have what we’ve asked for. For example, often we ask God for more love – but we already have all of God’s love inside us. What we need is to ask God to reveal His love; to have His love manifest in our life.

If you look through Scripture you will find that God usually asked a person to take some type of action in order to manifest God’s miracle (of healing). When a man stretched out his hand, he was healed (Luke 6:10); another was healed when he was told to get up (he was paralyzed) and take his bedding and go home (Matthew 9:6-7); another was healed of blindness when he went and washed in the Pool of Siloam (John 9:7). The same holds true for whatever we want to see manifested in our life. If we want love to flow, then we must take action to show love and when we do, God’s love shows up!

So when things aren’t happening in your life, ask yourself whether it is because you already have inside of you what you’re asking for, or if there is some action God wants you to take to manifest the answer to your prayer.

Copyright 2005 Kathryn Williamson

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