Wholeness - Quest to be Holy

I have been teaching and writing on intimacy with God for some time now. Below is a portion of that work. My goal is to share some over looked aspects of life with God. Aspects that might help people awaken, be revived or renewed in their pursuit of God.

Overcome. You can do it. You can overcome everything you need to. God has provision and power waiting for you, to help you. Your journey will include wholeness and balance.

Wholeness and Balanced Growth[i]

God is good at what He does. He knows how to bring us into wholeness and health. Here is an example.

To awaken our calling He brings someone into our life (relationship) that is a challenge to us (Inner life). Over time this person motivates us to call on the Lord more and more. As we long for God to deal with them, God deals with us. Our response, we get more irritated and impatient with God’s lack of focus. “I’m not the problem here, why can’t God just help me?”

After even more time, we surrender to God. A surrender that places our ideas of what God should do on the altar of sacrifice. We give up in a Godly way. In this moment of humility great grace leaps upon us and a word of direction and calling awaken in our soul. We become amazed at God. His is magnified as we see our place in His kingdom with clarity. The person with whom we had issues has dropped from our vision. We simply cannot see them as we see more and more of the Lord.

The pathway to clarity traveled through relationships and our inner man issues. God brought greater balance into our lives through a process that would not look balanced. For God, balance looks like growth and maturity. Balance is Christ likeness and purity, it is holiness and wholeness.

Balance, for us all, is the fruit of a life with God.

"Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. "I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.
(Joh 15:4-5)

seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.
(2Pe 1:3-4)

Worship, prayer or contemplation are often seen as the main source or method for intimacy with God. There are good, but they are not the main way God leads us deeper into relationship with Him. The main pathway to maturity in God is LIFE. As 2 Peter 1:3-4 reveals, the combination of life and godliness are keys into a life walk with God.

Try to live a full life without godliness and you tip over. Try and be godly and separated from involvement of this world and others, and you tip over the other way. We need both a life and a Christ like nature. Incarnational living is a life that communes with God and others. This is extreme balance.

God is a God of extremes. God creates an ever expanding universe, He has no limit to His love, He is eternal. God is not balanced in the same way we think of balance. Balance comes as we have a stability in our walk with Him. The life God desires for you to have is balanced by God as you walk with Him.

Others can help you, they just can’s show you what balance looks like for you.

Like Jesus, you have a calling. The sacrifices you make, the years in hiddenness you wait, may not be anything like what God is calling others to do. But it is your call, your character, your walk. God weans us off comparison and envy as we commune with Him. God impacts the areas of our life and removes sin, brokenness and wounds and replaces them with purity, healing and wholeness. Sanctification balances our past sinfulness and brokenness.

Two examples in Scripture are Judas and Peter. Both men were called to be disciples. Both men waked personally with Jesus. Both men had issues with the way Jesus lived His life, they both had moments of conflict and confrontation. Both betrayed the Lord.

Our personal issues have an effect on our relationship with God and our wholeness. Judas and Peter had to deal with who they were as they walked with God. Neither man was made whole when they were called. Peter became whole as he kept following, kept going.

Don’t quit.

This is the great key to success in life with God. Don’t stop. Keep following. Follow when you are broken, when you are blind, when you want to stop, when you are confused and when you are in despair. Keep walking with God through the pit, the prison, the plague, the wilderness and through the floods of life.

What if….

·        God calls us to lead to deal with our insecurity

·        Gifts us to help others to confront our pride

·        Sends us a revival to heal bigotry and anger

·        Throws us into a pit or prison to help us be great

·        Allows us to suffer great rejection to empower mercy or love in us

I believe both Judas and Peter had passion. People with passion take action. If we are passionate about a life with God, passion drives us. We also have issues. We may have hopes and expectations for God that God does not have for us. We may try to get God to have the same anger issues we have. We may want God to accomplish the same goals we desire; in the same way we desire it.

God balances what we want, with who He is. Read the New Testament again. How many times did God lead His disciples in a new direction, into some unseen mission or adventure? Often the new adventure was accompanied by a new perspective, a new revelation or a new formation of the inner life. Healing and maturity equals transformation. Live your life with God and He will take you into new things, both internal and external.

Wholeness and balance are personal. First the Holy Spirit comes and helps us as He abides within us. God comes inseparably close to us. Then He lead us into all truth. Truth in our thought life, in our inner man, in our calling, in our gifting. In everything.

"I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.

(Joh 14:16-17)

"But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come.
(Joh 16:13)

Wholeness and balance are aspects of intimacy with God as we walk with Him in daily life. Life, is God’s tool to work on us and in us. The more we commune with God is daily life, in the moment by moments, the more we have fellowship with God. Communion is living. Living is abiding. Abiding is transforming.

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[i]  Joh_6:56, Joh_14:20, Joh_17:23; Rom_8:9-10; 2Co_13:5; Eph_3:17; Col_1:27