Love/Hate God

I am on my second time through a series of talks that I recently purchased from Clarissa Worley (visit her website at clar.cc) and it is life-changing. Then I opened My Utmost this morning and received confirmation of some of the things I heard last night. I am very excited about the insights and revelations of reality that Clarissa has to share. They are so refreshing and liberating and enlightening to many things that have confused me all of my life. I highly recommend her series to anyone serious about growing in grace and practical knowledge of how to genuinely live as a real Christian. One thing I heard last night as I was driving home that really startled me but that was confirmed this morning was the idea that we can never really love God ourselves. I know this can really raise hackles in the Christian community, but that's OK. I gave up long ago trying too hard to live in conformity to popular Christianity because I realized that most truth will not be found there. The Holy Spirit has to use the Word of God as a filter and guide me in evaluating things I receive from others to see how it fits and is consistent with previous truths that He has revealed to me. Sometimes God has to shake up even the things that constitute my filter and challenge my paradigms. Often it is more than sometimes, it is always up for reevaluation. My paradigms in spiritual things are not to be the standard of truth no matter how long I have believed them or how many proof texts have been used to support them. When the Holy Spirit reveals something to me, the more important element in the revelation is the spirit itself that permeates the message. When the spirit is consistent with what I have come to know as the sweet Spirit of Jesus, then the message can be very challenging, puzzling or even disconcerting for awhile. But if I am willing to be led by the Spirit of God instead of giving preeminence to my intellectual views of religious ideas and constructs, then new truths will soon begin to integrate perfectly with previous insights and the emerging picture of beauty and perfection becomes even more clear. Here is the reading for today from My Utmost. If the closest relationships of life clash with the claims of Jesus Christ, He says it must be instant obedience to Himself. Discipleship means personal, passionate devotion to a Person, our Lord Jesus Christ. There is a difference between devotion to a Person and devotion to principles or to a cause. Our Lord never proclaimed a cause; He proclaimed personal devotion to Himself. To be a disciple is to be a devoted love-slave of the Lord Jesus. Many of us who call ourselves Christians are not devoted to Jesus Christ. No man on earth has this passionate love to the Lord Jesus unless the Holy Ghost has imparted it to him. We may admire Him, we may respect Him and reverence Him, but we cannot love Him. The only Lover of the Lord Jesus is the Holy Ghost, and He sheds abroad the very love of God in our hearts. Whenever the Holy Ghost sees a chance of glorifying Jesus, He will take your heart, your nerves, your whole personality, and simply make you blaze and glow with devotion to Jesus Christ. The Christian life is stamped by “moral spontaneous originality,” consequently the disciple is open to the same charge that Jesus Christ was, viz., that of inconsistency. But Jesus Christ was always consistent to God, and the Christian must be consistent to the life of the Son of God in him, not consistent to hard and fast creeds. Men pour themselves into creeds, and God has to blast them out of their prejudices before they can become devoted to Jesus Christ. (MUHH 7/2) Last night Clarissa made the bold statement that inside we will always hate God. We cannot love God ourselves – that is the work of the Holy Spirit that lives within us. I thought this was a bit shocking and I am still mulling it over, but after reading the above statement from Oswald Chambers I believe God is trying to communicate something very important to me. I choose to keep listening with an open heart and see how this all fits with everything else in the Word. Clarissa based her statement on Romans 7 and 8 which I was studying a couple months ago before I returned to spend much more time in the previous chapters leading up to that. This “new” teaching does make a great deal of sense to explain the last verse of Romans 7, “So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.” I have not fully digested this new idea yet and am still mulling it over in my thinking. But since I am using this blog to simply report what is currently going on in my mind and heart instead of as a platform for convincing anyone of anything, I am sharing in real time here what I am learning before it makes complete sense. I do feel that it has the strong ring of truth to it and is being reinforced by the confirmation of the Holy Spirit's promptings inside of me. This fits perfectly with what I have been seeing in Ezek. 36 which Clarissa also reviewed in her teaching about this. The emphatic emphasis in the promises in the later part of that chapter all point to God doing the work in us and not anything we try to do. That is the burden of all the messages of Clarissa's teachings and I find them to be very full of hope and encouragement. I also know I need to review them a number of times to get them into my thinking since they are so opposite of what I am used to believing, as are many things I have been learning over the past few years. If it is true that I am not capable of really loving God, even though that is what I am commanded to do, then it makes perfect sense that He is going to have to provide some way of that happening inside of me apart from my own efforts. This has been one of my greatest struggles all of my life, an Achilles heel that continues to frustrate me to no end. I am supposed to do or feel something that I am incapable of producing myself. Many people who claim to be authorities in my life insist that I must do this if I am to be saved which only compounds my frustration as it has since I was old enough to begin understanding spiritual things. This is extremely exciting to me because I see potential here for a very major breakthrough in my relationships, not only with God but with everyone. But it is also something that has to take place in my heart and not in my head or it will be just another exercise in futility. God, I look to You to do Your thing in me today. Send Your Holy Spirit to fill me with unexpected love for You and for my family and those around me today. I give You permission to seize every opportunity today to use my heart as a launching pad to surprise others with the love that You produce in me using Your resources of love and grace. I cannot produce love myself, but I ask You and receive from You and rest in assurance of Your desires to use me this way. I look forward to being surprised by joy today.