You may have read in the bible the countless miracles, signs, and wonders that Jesus Christ did for so many people. You may trust that God is willing to heal and deliver, but until you witness His healing and delivering power experientially, there may be some doubt in your mind regarding His willingness to do it for you. This is why it is so monumentally important that we know God for ourselves, and that we experience Him for ourselves. Through the person of the Holy Spirit, God wants us to have an encounter with Him that uniquely assures us individually of His overwhelming love. It’s a very personal encounter that He’s after, one that leaves us feeling as though we are saturated in His peace and covered in His presence.
A person can never be free by living or believing a lie. Only the truth makes us free. Jesus Christ told us this in John 8:32. God taught Adam and Eve His Word from the very beginning because His intention was for them to walk in truth. You and I could not measure the significance and importance of living by the truth of God’s Word, because the positive results of doing so are infinite. When we understand this, we can’t help but to be eternally thankful to God for giving us access to His divine and holy Word, the Bible.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we must admit that sometimes we veer off the path of His truth, or we have agendas that do not line up with it. God has equipped the universe with a way of letting us know when this is the case. The lives we have before us today are the sum total of how closely we have aligned ourselves with God’s Word and His destiny for our lives. This is often too much meat for most to chew, but it is truth through and through.
A person cannot rise above that which they have refused to learn or know. There is so much more knowledge available to us in God’s Word, but most of us will not seek it out. We know what we know, we camp-out in the familiar, and we are not interested in exploring beyond boundaries we deem acceptable. Jude 1:24 tells us that God is able to keep us from falling, yet we allow a fear of being deceived to keep us from powerful and Godly experiences; and from growing spiritually. We have forgotten that as God’s people, His plan is that we are separated entirely and completely from the thing that keeps us from embracing His love.
To embrace His love, we must be willing to follow the Holy Spirit’s lead. And yes, he may take us to the unfamiliar to comprehend truth on a higher level, but again, our willingness to go is paramount.
Jesus Christ told us in Luke 12:48(NLT), “When someone has been given much, much will be required in return; and when someone has been entrusted with much, even more will be required.” Many of us are afraid of knowledge for this very reason. If we know more, we will be held at a higher level of accountability and responsibility. This should not deter us, but motivate us to expand even more. Our territories will not be expanded and increased unless we, ourselves, are willing to do the same mentally and spiritually.
I’ve said this many times, each of us must be very careful observers of ourselves. We have to look at our lives honestly and be true about where we are. It is impossible to expand and rise up to new levels of growth and blessings without this kind of honest yet compassionate scrutiny. You’re not doing it to place yourself in condemnation. You’re doing it to face the truth; understanding that truth is the ladder that will transport you to higher heights.
The enemy wants us to feel bad and down about ourselves, and he uses shame and condemnation to do it. Self-condemnation and disappointment are two of his greatest weapons, so we need to be aware of this at all times, and not fall into the trap. By the same token, we can’t hide from the reality that our negligence to love ourselves through the truth has also affected our ability to receive love.
Our pasts have left us with some holes, and the emptiness we feel gets expressed through the situations, conditions, and circumstances we experience every day. Our external will bear out what we believe about ourselves, and most importantly what we believe about God and His love for us. For whatever reasons, sometimes deep down we feel unlovable, and the enemy will do his best to perpetuate those feelings by any means he can use. Heavenly Father has given us the most effective and fail-proof way to combat this. He tells us in Matthew 6:33 to seek Him first, because only His love can fill us. Only His love can help us to see where we are not transforming and growing in Christ.
In the name of Jesus Christ, we have to break agreement with every lie that we have believed about ourselves. We must be as relentless about going higher in Christ as the enemy is to keep us down. We haven’t experienced all that Heavenly Father has for us. There’s so much more. He wants to teach us new things in Christ through the Holy Spirit, but we cannot forget that He is a God of order; first things first. Primary is always going to be a heart that seeks Him—a heart that seeks the truth.
We’ve been talking a lot about destiny, and we must take in as much of its heft as humanly possible. God has a destiny that awaits us, and often what stands in the way of it coming into full view is the burden of things like shame, fear, disappointment, and unforegiveness or resentment. For some of us deliverance is swift, but for most of us it is gradual. It takes time to undo the lies we’ve believed about ourselves and others. God is so patient as we digest the truth in small doses and work it out in our own minds and hearts.
The important thing is that we understand the imperativeness of beginning to encounter Heavenly Father’s love intimately in the process of our change. In seeking Him, God’s love brings the healing. If our heart is to embrace His love, He will show us exactly how to lay down our burdens and encounter Him; not in a punishing way, but in a loving way. He wants to show us what it is to be spellbound by His goodness and peace.
Growth dictates that we leave the past behind and press towards the mark of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus! (Philippians 3:14) Part of increase and expanding our territory is coming to grips with what it is we carry—what holds us back and keeps us from loving fully in Christ. If we will recognize our need to go higher, we will come to understand on the deepest level that change and growth in the way God intends is a beautiful reality. It is good and kind, because He is good and kind. We will know this resolutely as we walk more fully in destiny, and embrace the person that we are called to be. ■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
“A New Encounter with God” written by Reverend Fran Mack, edited by Kim Times for Sundie Morning Sistas ©2017. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord! SMS is dedicated to inspiring and encouraging Christian Women through the Word of God.