My hope in starting this blog is to help me communicate to my friends and maybe more too myself what I am experiencing and what God is doing in this newest phase of life. Vanessa and I have been in New Jersey for just over a month and have been on an adventure to move into New York City. We long to discover our talents and gifts, destroy the works of the devil, and to see God glorified in city and the lives of the people there. We want the name of God to be interconnected with the truth of his character. That the people we meet would forever know that God is good!
Below are some things I wrote back in November. I think they will give you insight into the call for more that God has placed on my heart since going off Young Life staff. Feel free to post comments and encouraging words are great. Also if you disagree or have questions about things I am posting I would love to see those posted as well.
Here I sit in McD's in Lynchburg, I am without a job for the time being and I am attempting to open up my mind to all the different places it would want to go. I have found since becoming unemployed that my thoughts began going places they never before had. It was as if I had placed certain restrictions on my brain but when the content that normally filled my mind bottomed out there was suddenly a void of thought room which needed to be filled. It was not until this point that I realized how asleep my mind had really been. I am supposed to have the mind of Christ, a mind that has the capacity to receive divine wisdom and revelation from God. A mind that is intensely focused and preservers even when the most intense stresses are placed upon it. But I found that my mind had been numbed and seemed afraid of being fully turned on. Some how my mind had convinced me not to use it so much. I often had a tendency to shut down my brain, as if somehow I am betting against my own minds ability to think.
I am writing this in hope to become a better steward of the mind God gave me. I hope to let my mind spill out on this page, and capture the truth the God has put in me. This tension I feel in my mind I can only help but attribute to the devil trying to keep my mind from fully functioning. If he can somehow get me and other believers to fight ourselves, and hold onto seeds of doubt and unbelief regarding the mind we have access to, then he has taken one of our greatest weapons. Not that he has the power to take away anything he can only take what our unbelief may forfeit to him.
I used to believe that I was in a struggle to believe in my heart the things that my mind knew already. However, I have new insights into this and found it is in fact opposite. Since the Spirit of God lives in me, I do in fact have access into all truth, and the truth comes from inside of me (John 14:17) not from my brain. All the things I want to beleive about God my Spirit knows to be true, but you see my mind is where the real battle is. I must take false thoughts captive and receive the truths of God which my spirit is constantly longing for because God's Spirit lives in me. I am learning to become more senstive to the Spirit and to let that change my thinking.
This speaks loudly to the true power that must be found in the renewed mind of a believer. For surely what man would attack a castle so violently unless there was something of great value inside. I must then believe that my mind is of tremendous value, and that when I allow God to renew it the results will be huge. I will not subscribe to this idea that such thoughts about the power of my mind are only arrogant pursuits. I honestly have heard enough of such silliness. To say that anything powerful God does in me is arrogance is to limit oneself from experiencing God in any powerful way at all. It is rejecting the move of God because of fear of your own arrogance. If God does a mighty work in me I must believe he has accompanied it with the humility to receive the thing he has given me. If not you would be right to think that such a gift would destroy. Truth be told, God is pretty darn responsible in the way he distributes his gifts and how he chooses to move.
Proverbs 25:2 Says It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.
I will not be afraid to search out the hidden treasures my Daddy has for me. And when I get them I will not hide my face in fear of my own pride and arrogance but I will dance and see how God is greatly glorified in me.
