Dying to self

In John 12:23-24, Jesus tells us what must happen if we are going to be all that we can be as a Christian. He says, "I want to convince you with my deepest feelings and conviction, that unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just one grain and stays one life alone. However, if it dies, it will produce many others and a rich harvest. Anyone who loves his life loses it. However, anyone who hates his life or his selfish wants in this world will preserve his life for eternity. If anyone follows me, he must be devoted and come into total agreement with my plans by following my example in living and dying if need be. Wherever I am, there will my servant be also and if any one pays homage and deep respect to Me, My Father will honor him.” In order to comprehend what Jesus was saying here, we need to not only understand the principle but also be co-operating with God in the process. It’s just like building a house. We need to understand the blue prints.

There has to come an end to some of our thinking and planning of our own ideas by giving up certain concepts we have believed and change. I hope we can agree that sin, which is unrighteous thinking and actions in its many forms, has to die or end, so we can walk in God’s ways with power. The church over the years has preached and taught the gospel on every conceivable topic of sin that is stated in all of its many forms in the bible. We have heard hundreds of messages on every type of behavioral habits contrary to God’s commands of healthy living. I could list all the different sins that the bible talks about from witchcraft, to lust, homosexuality and to strife, which most Christians don’t even believe is a sin. Scripture tells us where there is strife; there is every evil abomination at work. Strife is the main ingredient that grieves the Holy Spirit because; it hinders our spiritual ears from hearing His voice.

Now, I am talking about born again believers who are participating in these sinful conditions. Once sin has manifested itself in our behavior in any form, it then becomes a fruit or finished product that we participate in daily. An example of this would be an apple tree. If the root of the tree was sick and the apples that it produced were wormy, bitter and dwarfed, there would be no way of restoring health to these already grown sick apples. The real problem we would have to address is to heal the root of the tree so the next crop of apples will be healthy and strong. By applying this example to this being our sinful behavior as rotten fruit in our tree of life, there is no way to restore our sinful behavioral fruit. It’s already wormy and dwarfed. It’s ok’ to identify and point out the rotten fruit on our tree but only to the point of making us aware of our sickened soul condition.

The core of all sin in all of its cancerous forms continues to make our heartsick because, we have no passion in seeking God with all our heart, soul and strength. You cannot hang out with the Holy Spirit and not be changed and become healthy.

In John 14:16-17 and 15:26, Jesus was talking about the Holy Spirit. He said, "I will ask the Father and He will send you another Counselor, Strengthener or Helper that will stay within you forever." He is the Spirit of Truth. The world or the unsaved cannot see Him or know Him because they have not taken Him into their hearts. However, you know Him because; He lives with you constantly and lives in your heart. When the Holy Spirit comes to you who I will send to you from My Father, He will support you, by the living experiences you will be having with Him. He will confirm to you that, I am alive and He will be talking to you just as if I was there with you now.”

Heb.10:14-16 tells us that, “by Jesus offering Himself once on the cross. He has forever completely cleansed and perfected those who are set apart and we are seen as pure in His sight. The Holy Spirit is the one who adds and confirms this truth in our spirit. He reminds us daily that the agreement that God made with us was to attach Himself securely and permanently in us. He plants His laws in our hearts and impress’s them deeply on our minds and in our innermost thoughts and understandings.” 

God’s word as we meditate with the Holy Spirit, continually filters through our minds; and it is actually planted into our being and becomes a part of our make up. What is really revealing to me is that I have heard from far too many Christians when referring to the Holy Spirit as being an "IT" or some type of power or extension of God as one of His attributes. As we are growing in your We should be aware of the fact that, the Holy Spirit is a person in Himself and He is trying to do all He can to mature the body of Christ. We have done a fine job of grieving Him in our ignorance from completing the work that He was sent here to do on this planet. Unless we through honest assessment in our thinking see the real conditions that exist within our hearts.

We should know by now that only Jesus saves and if we know that then; we are forever saved. Once this has settled in our heart and mind, we can then go on and learn about the Holy Spirit and how He works in our hearts to continue the work that Jesus started. Only the anointing or the Spirit of God can break the strongholds of faulty concepts of God’s holding power of love that keeps us from apprehending all God has for us.

In Zechariah 4: 1-6, we have a story of an encounter that Zechariah the Prophet had with an angel of the Lord. It says that, the angel woke him up in the middle of the night and asked him what kind of a dream he was having in his sleep. He said he saw a lamp stand of gold filled with oil on the top and seven pipes and two olive trees. The angel asked him what do you believe this means. He said, "I don’t know." The angel said, “This endless supply of oil that you see is the word of the Lord saying, "Not by your might and power, but by My Spirit" (Of whom the oil is a symbol.) The Holy Spirit represents the oil that we are talking about here. It is not my purpose to be unkind and point fingers. The Lord in His patience and love gave me time to realize the futility in my own life of doing my own thing. This happened because of my zeal to walk in obedience to His perfect will.

All the towers of Babel going up; all the meetings and cavalcade of stars walking across the stages at our meetings and all the patting on the backs of our great ministries and giftings, and numbering how many were saved last week and all the emotional screaming and sweating and the manipulation of giving to get God’s favor. I could go on and on. If we are going to really be a part of kingdom living, we cannot shout, pray, or dance the word into our hearts.

It is the Holy Spirits anointing which should be governing our emotions. What is it going to take for us to be delivered from the flesh controlled business of preaching a gospel of self, without the Holy Spirit being able to plant healthy seeds into our hearts so we can start to grow up to be young men and women in the Lord.

Growth starts with our own seeking and working out our own salvation with a reverential fear of the Lord. It’s not what takes place only at our church services, but what we do during the week in the market places of life. Is our worship and energies as vibrant daily, as it is in the church building? Remember Jesus doesn’t live in a building made with hands. He lives in our hearts and we are the temple of the Holy Spirit.

In Matthew 5:6, Jesus said, " blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they will be filled." This word blessed means that in our hearts and make up there is a great desire or passion for seeking after God. We need to understand that it’s even the Holy Spirit that has to give us this desire. It also states that we need to be pursuing righteousness. Unless we understand the meaning of righteousness and are walking in this kind of a relationship with the Lord, there is no way of ever having the will power or strength to be able to give up our life and focus on God’s purposes and accomplish his perfect will for us.

Only seeking God with this passion will give us the power to give up our fleshly desires and wants to submit to His ways and ideas of true worship and obedience to His commands. This really is not as difficult as some say that it is. It’s a matter of us allowing the Holy Spirit to show us how to trust and surrender to Him. This statement is so vital because, you have to have an attitude of becoming vulnerable and recognize that our strength in God is in us acknowledging our weaknesses. Our flesh cries out to us daily and says to us, "I want some credit!" "Look what I have done!" “If you do some more good deeds and get peoples attention you will be promoted and be accepted by everybody." Once we learn to be comfortable in our weakened condition and realize how much help we really need to walk in the spirit, surrendering to the Holy Spirit becomes easier to do. We have to allow the Holy Spirit to live BIG in us.

Phil. 2:13 says," not in our own strength for it is God who is all the while effectually at work in us energizing and creating in us the power and desire both to will and to work for His good pleasure and satisfaction and delight." It is us spending time in His Company that gives us a true vision or knowledge of His ways. Scripture tells us that, “for a lack of vision and knowledge His people are perishing.” God’s hidden mysteries have to be dug up as in a gold mine. It takes discipline and commitment. Thank God, he gives us the strength to seek Him because of the great love He shows us and the commitment that He made to us by Jesus dying an ugly and horrible death being nailed to a tree. He can’t give His deep counsel to people that don’t sit at His feet and learn about Him. He can’t expose Himself, as He wants to with a casual acquaintance.

God’s ways have to be shared with people who have the desire and capability to explore the depths of His thinking. When we focus in on our relationship with the Holy Spirit, He expands our consciousness of our hearts condition, where the issues of life are acted on and we are able to absorb the depths of God’s thoughts and fulfill His desires. This is a supernatural miracle that takes place within us.

Walking in the spirit is a world in it self. You cannot see it with your natural eye. You have to see it with your spirit in co-operation with the Holy Spirit who is living on the inside of us. Only born again believers have the Holy Spirit living on the inside of them. He is the one that shows us all truth.

There is a progression of understanding and plan that God has for us to grow up to understand His ways. The Christian life is not some hit and miss hobby, we have on the side to play with on occasions. When we purse our righteous position, it becomes a natural comfortable action like us breathing oxygen to stay physically alive. Righteousness has an endless revelation of its meaning. It is not like a doctrine that once you understand it, you have it. Righteousness is the living personality of God that wants to interact with us daily and that is how it is kept alive and active in our being. It is a constant reminder by Him that we are always totally accepted by Him no matter what happens in our lives. It’s the power we need to know that nothing will ever separate us from His love and holding power.

In turn, as this conviction within us grows stronger, we can begin to believe and act upon what He says and have all that He provided for us. It is so vital that we do not allow ourselves to become dormant in our understanding of this because, it gives us the commitment and the power to overcome the thoughts of the enemy. He constantly tries to make us believe through our afflictions and hardships of life that, God stopped loving us or we have been discarded by Him because of something that we did or didn’t do. The Devils only intent is to put a wall of skepticism between God and His Children. Our understanding and deep-rooted conviction of our righteousness in Christ is what overcomes the Devils devices that are trying to operate in our thoughts and consciousness.

The spiritual world that we need to walk in to have a relationship with God has to be taught and communicated over time and patience. A Sunday service of preaching a message is meaningless and stolen quickly by the Devil if there is no follow up ministry within the body of Christ of disciplining God’s children. Just as a physical army stays in readiness for battle, so the body of Christ with all its many parts has to have fellowship.

The Book of Acts says that they went daily house-to-house studying the scripture and ate together including the Lords supper. The fellowship and the needs of the body of Christ are many. Pastors cannot do all the work of all the nurturing. The Apostle and the Prophets call to the body are badly needed. These two gifts to the church are foundation building type ministries. Unless we begin to honor these men and women in their gift as coming in the name of the Lord, I cannot see how God’s complete work can become accomplished. The people that I am talking about are God called, not denomination called. All fellowship groups wherever God is a part of the building plan must have Apostles and Prophets functioning in their mists. It’s obvious to see this, if you look at the New Testament pattern that God uses to build His church.

You cannot help but see a pattern within the New Testament Church of how the born again believers were continually being misled to fall in to this over active concept that, we need to help God out in saving ourselves. I believe that many of us have been lulled into an understanding that there is no way that, God could love us so much as to just let us get to know and enjoy His company and He will take care of my needs.

Now, it’s bad enough that the Devils sole purpose is to make us doubt God in any form. However, we shouldn’t help him out by teaching within our church’s conditional love themes of laws and regulations. When we do this, it compounds the problem and the body of Christ is crippled even more. This is a whole topic in itself. It actually goes against the interpretation of righteousness and puts doubt in the mind of the believer.

An example of this principle is found in Gal. 5: 4-9 among other places. Paul the Apostle wrote to the Galatians to set them straight. He said, "If you seek to be right with God through the Law, your efforts are futile. You have severed yourself from a vital living relationship with the Holy Spirit and have fallen away from knowing that God’s love is given with out you trying to earn it." For when we do not live by laws, we have the strength and enjoy living in righteousness and we let the Holy Spirit work within us. When we live by dos and don’ts, we cannot be energized by the Holy Spirit and follow Christ with the passionate love that the Holy Spirit has put in us.

He goes on to say, you were running the race as an heir and Son of God nobly. Who has hindered and stopped you from believing the truth as the Holy Spirit has been revealing it to you. This is an evil persuasion and not from the Holy Spirit who wants you to live in great freedom to explore your relationship with Him. It only takes a little slight inclination to error, or a few false teachers to pervert the truth and lead the whole church astray.”

There is no ending as I said to talking about righteousness because, our relationship with Jesus and He revealing Himself to us has no end. It only ends when we begin to think that we can help God out in delivering ourselves from our carnal thinking and our own oppressive faults. We have to have a clear understanding that Jesus alone is our righteousness. righteousness. If we are really growing in righteousness, the testimony of our experiences with Him just bubble out in our daily activities with family and friends. This kind of life style guards our heart and mind from contaminating thoughts that cause us to be unsure of our eternal connection with Him.

I hope you have come to realize that you really do not have the power within your own strength to die to self. Stop trying so hard to be good. Learn to be pliable and ask God to show you how to give up and surrender to the Holy Spirit. This may seem too easy to many of you. I understand. Once I didn’t understand at all. So many of us have been brainwashed into becoming good little doer’s and helpers. If we are going to walk in righteousness, our works have to be extensions of the Holy Spirit works through us. through us. John the Baptist said it best when he saw and understood that his way of functioning in the kingdom was coming to an end. He said, "Jesus must increase, but I must decrease. He must grow more prominent, and I must grow less."