My heart is so full. Yesterday I had the honor of baptizing several young people (and some older alike). One of these youth, a young woman now, was a girl who I had watched grow up since her birth. She was once on fire for God, was led away by the enemy, and is now totally committed to Christ. To watch the work of healing and restoration that the Holy Spirit is doing in her life is something that has made me weep for joy. I sat for four hours in a Starbucks a few months ago as her older brother shared with me his journey and how God had freed him from bondage about six months ago. The workings of God in these lives has been, to me, amazing. I have been overjoyed to see it and to be involved in it.
I have also been very cognizant lately of God's working in my own life. Just as God has been radically transforming these two lives, He has been doing the same to mine, and wants to do the same in all of us. It is some of these thoughts that I would like to share.
I have noticed that our lives are a bit like an onion. Layer upon layer of "us" surrounds the core of who we are. When we were born again, it was in our spirit that we were make new creatures as Jesus taught in John 3. We are declared righteous in God's eyes by the blood of Jesus who became sin for us so that we might be made the very righteousness of God through Him. Yet, in our soul, our mind and our will and our emotions, and in our body we yet remain human and battle with the fallen flesh. We so often focus on the very obvious and blatant things that are so easily seen in us by others, but really this is only the outer skin of the onion that God is beginning, layer by layer, to deal with.
It is the deeper layers that really reveal to us our level of carnality and our need for God's transforming work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. God in His love reveals a layer to us and asks us to submit that layer to Him. This is not easy, for it means that we die another death. It means that we must recognize, admit, repent, and throw ourselves on His transforming power. The outer layers may have been habits, behaviors, actions, but the inner layers are motives, strongholds of opinion, pride, self-determination, desire for the love and acceptance of man. How hard these things are for us to see in ourselves, and how hard for us to admit them to ourselves.
I noticed as these young men and women were symbolically baptized into His death, burial, and resurrection that the symbolism gave way to some very deep works of the Holy Spirit. We know that baptism is the outward sign of an inward work, but it is oh so much more than just symbolism. Some came from the water with a new expression on their face. A transaction had taken place. In the same way we continue to be baptized into death with Him and rise in newness of life each time we surrender a new layer to the Lord and allow Him to peel it back.
Really isn't that what sanctification is. It is a setting apart for His use, but it is walked out in all of the surrender and obedience that being changed into His image from glory to glory demands.
But it is not an easy road, for death is never a pleasant thing for the flesh of man. But for the spirit death is an act of liberation. It is the inseparable link between death to the flesh and walking in the Spirit. The latter necessitates the former.
How does this work out practically in our lives? Do we resist these dealings of God? Oh the initiation of the process is always painful, but what is birthed as a result is more glory.