The Consequences of Fully Belonging to God in Christ

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church, discerning the spirits, exhortation, experience, God's love, Jesus Christ, joy, separation from the world, spiritual maturity, spiritual power, T.A. Sparks, worldly spirits

Attaining Maturity of Faith Together
(Picture credits http://samuelosaghae.com/html/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/reaching_out_924_345.jpg)

Has it ever occurred to you that God always separated a people for Himself and that it was never His intention that His people should be yoked with unbelievers (cf. 2 Cor 6:14)? I dare say, we should not even be yoked with Christians who remain stuck in this world and keep to this world’s mentality and pleasures, either. Also, I want to include tradition and religious rituals of any kind here that need to be stripped off if we want to obey God’s voice daily at any given moment. At first this separation from the world is made by the Holy Spirit’s power in our own hearts and minds. But sooner or later we might realize, a bit startled perhaps, that the line God drew between those who are His and those who are not His has become an unbridgeable gap. We might still hope that we could get along with those who believe in God in a way that is much different from ours. Furthermore, we might still be intent on loving those who keep attacking us because they do not understand the paths on which God leads us, however, we need to come to grips with the fact that a heart to heart communication apart from God’s Spirit is no longer possible with them unless we want to share their often ungodly ways.

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Rethinking Maturity, Time and Eternity

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age, being born again, Dorothy L. Sayers, ecstasy, encouragement, exhortation, experience, faith, feeding on Christ, God's love, maturity, mystics, psychology, spiritual maturity, the Kingdom of God, youth

Auferstehungskirche Fürth
(Photo by Susanne Schuberth)

I do hope that the excerpt by Dorothy L. Sayers below gives you some food for thought as to rethinking those concepts of youth and age our current culture proclaims, and which, in my view, have infiltrated the Church more than she is aware of. We read about “senior pastors” who are in their 40s (at most) and about training the next generation of church leaders, pastors, and elders, by simply teaching them tradition, theological theories, and doctrines. Indeed, the amount of books one has read does not make him spiritually mature. And the number of years we have believed in Jesus does not make us any more mature than a newborn child (speaking spiritually here). Actually, it is all about experiencing God in our own life and knowing that He can be trusted in every given situation. This kind of faith is nothing that can be taught and nothing we can soak in by reading about it only. Testimonies from others might point us in the right direction if they whet our appetite for experiencing God’s love and His kingdom first-hand. Yet they cannot provide the meat we only get when we leave the area of being fed by men and their different views of Christianity far behind. We need to feed on Christ who alone is our true food and drink.

Different (st)ages of spiritual growth

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Baptism in the Holy Spirit, being born again, following Jesus, God's love, John of the Cross, John Tauler, justification, sanctification, spiritual maturity, Taylor Marshall, the dark night of the soul, the dark night of the spirit, the new self, the old self

On a walk in the evening – Südstadtpark Fürth
(Photo by Susanne Schuberth)

It has been quite some time since I have wanted to deepen the issue of “The Dark Night of the Soul”, yet I did not know how to tackle that task which is anything but easy. Due to the fact that I can only write about what I know AND have already experienced, I have had to go through very deep and extremely painful valleys of dying to self recently so that I began to see more clearly what particularly the second part of the dark night is all about.