Tags
discerning the spirits, exhortation, experience, fire, following Jesus, God's love, T.A. Sparks, the dark night of the soul, the dark night of the spirit, the fear of God
Well, our God is full of surprises. Almost only vegetating, captured in the dark night of the Spirit for a seemingly endless time, I had become used to only see my countless weaknesses, my failures, and my utter inability to bring forth anything which is good in God’s sight. Although I never felt condemned by what I saw inside me, I really longed to get rid of that old self which hindered me to do what God and I (!) really wanted to do (cf. Romans 7). Furthermore, satanic attacks day and night made sleep an almost impossible thing to do. My frail health and the conviction that I was in a worse spiritual condition as I had been before I would come to know Jesus in 1995 made me hate my old life. Somehow it dawned on me that there is no REAL life apart from being allowed to live in God’s permanent peaceful presence. Everything else is hell! Whatever I tried to get back to Him, it did not work any longer. My prayers resembled helpless cries for help and left me empty as if I had been talking with a dead wall instead of with the living God. It really felt as if God had abandoned me in a dark and frightening cellar, left without the hope to ever return to Him whom I once knew and loved. I recalled dimly that I had experienced several times of spiritual highs in the past that made me share the fear of God and Christ’s authority in me. However, I still had to deal with so many triggers because of deep wounds and fears inside my soul so that God had to take me through that “acid cure” where all that which is not of Him must eventually die.