What Am I Supposed to Do?

I don't know about you, but for many decades my reflex as a Christian was to do for God rather than to let Him do for me. Oh, I'd give lip-service to the idea that "God does it all" but in practice I was constantly running ahead of God, in my own power trying to honor Him by being a holy person, doing all of the things He said to me in His word I should do. It was so frustrating, so exhausting, and always inevitably a failure. And despite all of my efforts, I was no closer to God, our fellowship was no richer, my experience of God no deeper. I was always obtaining more information about God, but my direct, personal knowledge of God never enlarged. One can only go on like this for so long and then, well, in my case, I threatened God with quitting the whole Christian life thing. Walking with Him had to be more than just maintaining fidelity to a set of religious propositions and a constant, bitter struggle against myself. I wanted to know God in the way He told me in His word I could; I wanted the "abundant life," (John 10:10; Ephesians 3:20) the life of peace and rest (Matthew 11:28-30), the life of love and joy (Romans 5:5; 1 John 4:16-19; Galatians 5:22-23, etc.) walking with Him was supposed to be.

The problem wasn't God, though. He had told me quite plainly in His word how to walk well with Him, how to enjoy Him daily in the abundant life given to me in Jesus Christ. I had this idea, though, that living the Christian life was 98% percent Self-effort and 2% divine power. My thinking was that when I ran out of my own "gas" living God's way, He'd step in and shore me up, providing to me what I lacked to be a godly person. Mostly, though, I just had to dig deep, strain my hardest, struggle fiercely against myself, and try to be who God wanted me to be. I couldn't let go of this perspective - even when it had failed repeatedly. I just had to try harder, I thought, learn more, make this way work. The abundant life in Christ was just around the corner! I needed only to keep plugging away, never giving up, keeping the faith, pray more, read my Bible more. Blah, blah, blah. Ugh.

Sound familiar?

Don't get me wrong: prayer and study of God's word are vital to a rich experience of Him; standing firm, unmoved in our faith in God, is crucial to Christian living; enduring in the midst of trial and temptation is necessary. The how of doing so I had all wrong. My motives for living to God's glory were badly confused and the mechanics of my relationship to God were profoundly awry.

I've written in a number of threads in the Discipleship subforum about submission to God, walking by faith in the truth of God's word, and about the crucified life, all of which are key elements of enjoying God deeply and daily. But another way of thinking about how to walk with God properly that I've found helpful is to think in terms of the "three R's":

Receive.
Remain.
Reflect.

Recieve.

When I was saved, born-again spiritually, I could do nothing to spiritually-regenerate myself, to make myself born-again. Being "dead in trespasses and sins," bound under the power of the World, the Flesh and the devil (Ephesians 2:1-3), all I could do was receive, by faith, the work of God on my behalf that He accomplished through Christ's atonement for my sin on the cross. I couldn't earn my salvation (Ephesians 2:8-9; 2 Timothy 1:9; Titus 3:8), I couldn't cleanse myself from the stain of my sin, I couldn't live up to the standard of holy perfection God required. And God wasn't asking me to. All He needed from me was a willingness to receive from Him the life of Christ in exchange for my Self-centered, sin-fouled life.

Nothing's changed: Though I am a born-again child of God, I am still on the receiving end of things in my relationship with God. He works in me both the desire and ability to do His will (Philippians 2:13). I can only work out what I have first received from God. By faith, I receive from God, from the Holy Spirit more precisely, all that God wants to see in evidence in my life. What does this mean, exactly, to how I walk with God?

Well, for one, it means that God does not want me intruding into what He is doing in me with my own effort, trying to do for Him what He intends He should for me. Like begets like: My self-effort can only produce more of self, of me. If I want to be godly, I must allow God to make me so. And when I do, when I receive God's work, past and present, the result is a natural, powerful and profound transformation of me.

At the moment of my conversion, God redeemed me, justified me, and sanctified me by placing me "in Christ." (1 Corinthians 1:30) At the moment I was saved, I was "made new" spiritually, made a new creature in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17), crucified with him and thus freed from the old person I was, bound in sin, able now to live consistently out from under the domination of sin. (Romans 6:1-11; Galatians 2:20; Galatians 5:24; Colossians 3:3, etc.) All of this God has already done for me and it remains only for me, by faith, to believe it fully and truly accomplished and receive it as the truth of who I now am - regardless of what I feel or experience.

This is the "labor of faith" that "enters into rest." (Hebrews 3 & 4) The work of faith is the struggle to believe God in the absence of any concrete evidence in support of what I'm believing. Especially at first, a new, immature Christian will have no history with God, no evidence in their practical experience, of what has become true of them spiritually. They must walk entirely by faith with God, believing in their new, spiritual status, just as they have believed in the Gospel by which they were delivered into that status. And it is only as they do that the truth of their new identity in Christ, will begin to manifest in their living.
The Christian, then, is always a receiver, by faith working out only what God has first worked into them. The mark of this sort of living is the absence of torturous wrestling with oneself in order to be a holy person and, instead, the natural, restful, progressive and profound transformation, not merely of one's conduct, but of one's core desires and thinking. This living is characterized by joy, and peace, and victory, not strain, and frustration, and failure.

More to follow on the other two "R's."

In many instances in Scripture, the Christian is urged to "continue in" (Colossians 1:23), to "abide" (John 15:4-5), to "stand" unmoved (Ephesians 6:10-14), in the faith, in the promises of God to His children, in the spiritual truth not evident to our physical senses. All of these divine injunctions carry the idea of remaining in place, refusing to shift to another location, persisting in occupying, by unyielding faith, the ground of truth God has revealed to us in His word and the relationship we have with Him through Jesus Christ.

Perhaps more than any other "labour" the Christian faces as a child of God, this work of remaining, of being unmoved in one's faith in Christ, is the greatest, the most challenging, and the most important. It is not as overt, not as apparent to others, necessarily, as doing something in ministry, like, say, being on the Worship team at church, or leading a Bible study, preaching a sermon, or serving as a missionary, short or long-term, in some foreign locale. But remaining is vital to all of these thing, in God's economy, an essential prerequisite to properly serving in any of these capacities and, really, to one's entire walk with God.

God has accomplished many things for us as His children, imparting to us spiritual realities and benefits that are ours immediately upon adoption into His family. In Christ, we are made "new creatures" (2 Corinthians 2:17; 1 Corinthians 1:30); we are made "joint-heirs with Christ" (Romans 8:17); we are made "dead unto sin but alive unto God" (Romans 6:6-11); we have been taken out of the "domain of darkness and translated in the kingdom of Christ" (Colossians 1:13), and so on. Only as we know who we are in Christ, and, by faith, anchor our identity to these things, seeing ourselves as we truly are in Christ and living in accord with what we see, do we experience in daily living the transformative impact of these spiritual realities. And only as we remain steadfastly settled upon these realities, refusing to be moved from them, can they bring us into consistent, joyful fellowship with our Maker.

The believer who grows double-minded, attempting to be a child of God and a friend of the world, who doubts, and wonders about, and distrusts God, who drifts along in the currents of temptation, worldly philosophy and values, shaped by popular media in their thinking rather than by the Truth of God's word, cannot ever delight in the rest, peace and love of God, in the abundant life found in Him.

James 1:6-8
6 But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavers is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.
7 For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord.
8 A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.

James 4:4
4 You adulterers and adulteresses, know you not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.

Hebrews 11:6
6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he who comes to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them who diligently seek him.

So, the Christian receives from God a whole new spiritual life and then must remain, by faith, in what they have received, refusing to be other than who they have become in Jesus, standing fast in the truth of the spiritual Promised Land they have come to possess in him.

Hebrews 4:1-3
1 Let us therefore fear, lest, a promise being left us of entering into his rest, any of you should seem to come short of it.
2 For unto us was the gospel preached, as well as unto them: but the word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it.
3 For we which have believed do enter into rest...

2 Peter 1:3-4
3 His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence,
4 by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.

Reflecting in our daily living the spiritual life we have received from God in Christ, in which we remain by faith day-by-day, is, perhaps, the most difficult of the three R's to settle into. Encountering, in the Bible, descriptions of what we are to be and do as Christians, without a second thought, we set about to "work out our salvation with fear and trembling," thinking we must do for God rather than that He should do for us. It's too passive to just wait around for God to move us to action, to fuel our holy living. He expects us to act, to do, to obey with all we've got. That's why the Bible is so filled with commands from God to us, isn't it?

Many run into the same problem with the Gospel. "Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us..." Paul wrote to Titus. (Titus 3:5) No one can earn their salvation; there is nothing anyone can do to be saved but to receive by faith what God has already done for us all through Christ. (Romans 10:9-13; Ephesians 2:8-9) To many, this is just too passive a circumstance; there must be more, they think, that one must do to contribute at least a little to their own salvation. But Scripture is clear that salvation is a gift, offered unearned and undeserved to the lost sinner, obtained by faith plus nothing else.

2 Timothy 1:9
9 who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began,

John 3:16
16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Romans 5:17
17 For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.

The life of a disciple of Christ does not cease to be one in which he must continue to receive from God throughout every day what he needs to live as God has called him to do. This is what Paul makes clear in his remarks to the Philippian believers. The Christian can only work out what God has first worked into them.

The power to live a holy life in rich, joyful fellowship with God is given to the believer in the Person of the Holy Spirit. In him, the disciple of Jesus has all they require to "work out their salvation." But all that the Spirit would give to each of us is found in himself; he is the peace, joy, love, and strength of God to every born-again believer. (Galatians 5:22-23; Romans 5:5; Ephesians 6:13; Romans 8:13, etc.) Many Christians think God doles out power in little packets to His children, giving them a bit of peace here, a bit of joy there, some contentment for a time on Tuesday and then some more on Thursday. This is NOT how it works. All that God would give us as His children - peace, joy, love, grace, hope, strength, and so on - is found in Him. So, then, when we pray for more of these things, what we are actually praying for, though many don't realize it, is for more of God.

We are filled with spiritual power, filled with joy, filled with peace, when we are filled with God. And this filling happens only as a result of our submission to God, to the will and way of the Holy Spirit. God does not force Himself upon any of us; we must choose His control of us. He waits upon our conscious, explicit submission to Him to fill us with Himself. (Micah 6:8; Romans 6:13-22; Romans 8:14; Romans 12:1; James 4:7; 1 Peter 5:6)

When we are filled with God, we work out what He has first worked in, not with torturous straining against our own desires, with laborious pushing down of ourselves, but with a natural, restful journey into holiness, carried along by the Spirit into sanctified living, our desires, and thoughts, and actions progressively transformed by His work, not ours. Like a branch in a tree, we simply receive the life-giving "sap" of the Spirit, and inevitably grow and produce "fruit," reflecting the life and power of God within us. A branch doesn't grip the tree with all of its strength, quivering with the effort of remaining a part of the tree. A branch doesn't force itself to produce leaves and fruit and to expand in size. No, it does all of these things as natural, inevitable by-products of a healthy connection to the tree. The branch is just an extension, really, of the tree, its existence entirely dependent, not upon itself, but upon the tree. (John 15:4-5)

This, then, is how the believer reflects the life of Christ in his/her living. Not with motionless passivity but with constant surrender to the Holy Spirit, to God, and then moving into the holy life of a born-again believer as the Spirit enables, bit by bit, step by step - not in grand leaps and bounds - becoming the hands and heart of Christ to all those around you.

2 Corinthians 3:18
18 And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

Bump.