As a teenager, I received Jesus Christ as Savior. I was baptized in His name. The grace of God had intervened in my life for deliverance from sins. But many years passed after that event before I understood that Christ also had given me, within my human spirit, a deposit of His divine life. So, I unwittingly carried Him with me as I thought, said and did things that did not originate in Him and of which He could not approve. While I knew my behavior was not right, I didn’t realize that I was compelling His involvement in it.
Later I came to know more of God’s divine life, and more of what Christ had accomplished in His death, resurrection and ascension. During the in-between time I had lost many opportunities for spiritual growth. Despite that, the grace of God once again came to my rescue. I finally started on the path of transformation.
I continue, nevertheless, to struggle to synthesize life’s spiritual dimension and its visible outworking. Jesus lived according to the Father’s life. I am learning to live by Jesus’s life. Jesus himself spent the first thirty years of his life learning to live by the life of the Father. And, he had no opposition from a fallen nature, nor anything to unlearn. How did he come to know when it was time to labor to support his earthly family, and when it was time to separate himself in communion with his Heavenly Father, both being good and necessary?
For me the process of learning to allocate time to various good and necessary activities has been slow and difficult. One thing I have realized is that, while I formerly imposed my wishes on Christ, I now seek grace and guidance to conform to His desires. Whereas I carried Him where He would not have wanted to go, now I want Him to carry me where He would have me go.
To put it another way, I think about God’s presence accompanying the Children of Israel as they journeyed through the wilderness. He resided in the Tabernacle, located centrally within the camp. That corresponds to the residence of the Divine life at the center of our being. In addition, He provided a cloud by day, over their heads, to shield them from the desert sun, and by night it became a fire overhead. When the cloud lifted, they knew that it was time for them to move on. And as they traveled, the cloud went before them for their guidance.
I believe this means that our lives by day and night, and our coming and going, must entirely be under His authority. We must, furthermore, prayerfully consider of everything we wish to bring under that cloud into the camp: does this belong within the same space as His holy presence? The transforming work of God slowly frees us from patterns of thought and behavior that we have carried over from the old nature—this is true. Yet even among competing priorities, even if all of them are blessed, we look to the Holy Spirit to create order.
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