[meditations]

Over the past several months, God has been showing me things about myself. It’s like a dam has burst, and I’ve just been overwhelmed. I question it, the skeptic in me. How much of this stuff am I just making up and attributing to God’s voice? A book I’ve been reading suggests that “mystics” such as myself may have a keener ear for the voice of God. I want to believe that the things God has been showing me are truly from him. And in the end, perhaps it all boils down to choice: I can choose to either trust God, to trust his Spirit in me, or I can choose to interpret what I feel to be his presence and voice as something psychological, void of any “divine stamp.” Trust itself boils down to choice: we have to choose to trust someone, even before the story’s written in full. The things God has been telling me are beautiful things: he likes me and loves me, he doesn’t condemn me, I’m his treasured child, he cares for me and takes care of me, and he has good things planned for me and through me. Some time ago I could’ve sworn I heard God’s voice: “Trust in Me. Don’t lose hope. Focus on Me, and I’ll show you what I can do.” It’s a call to choose, to make the choice to surrender to him, to give up all that I am and want to become all that he intends me to be. I want to believe that God has indeed spoken such things to me. I want to believe that what he spoke to me in my earlier years, a command and a promise, are left intact.

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Conformity to Christ. That’s the goal of spiritual transformation, the heart of sanctification, the rule of the Spirit. Conformity to Christ is what’s lacking in the church and within myself. We’re promised the Spirit insofar as we conform ourselves to the cross of Christ and his sufferings. Life conformed to Christ is a beautiful, albeit difficult, thing; it’s the antidote to the futile, wasteful lives we live, the remedy to the ills and poisons of society, it’s what human life looks like “plugged into” God. It is, in a word, what genuine human living is all about. So often I despair at my lack of conformity, and instead of being propelled towards greater submission and co-crucifixion with Christ, I find myself overwhelmed by my shortcomings and failures. This should not be so: my struggles and sins, coupled with my desire to please God and conform to Christ, ought to elicit praise for God’s grace and mercy, and spurn me towards greater holiness in the Spirit. Conformity to Christ, life in the Spirit, seems a difficult thing; but Jesus says his yoke is good, and his burden is light. Absent the Spirit, conformity to Christ is impossible; but with the Spirit, we are able, by God’s strength and power in our weakness, to fulfill “the just requirement of the Law.” The Spirit lives within me and desires to shape my life around Christ, if only I persevere. The monk Thomas a’ Kempis insisted, over and over, that the life of the man of faith is marked by two things: (1) putting to death the deeds of the body, refusing to indulge worldly passions, lusts, and inclinations; and (2) pursuing the things of God, practicing virtue and striving diligently to be conformed to Christ.

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I was walking around downtown and praying about things that have been going on, and God spoke to me: “I want to give you something: myself.” I pray constantly for this or that, thinking that if God would answer my prayer in such a way, that would relieve the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, the chasm inside slowly consuming me like an incurable cancer. Those things won’t satisfy, and I know as much logically; but God is offering me something that does satisfy, and that’s his own self. Jesus said that God delights in giving good gifts, and the greatest gift God gives us his Spirit. The Spirit is the ultimate gift: God in me and me in God. Union with God is the prime reward; restoration to a vibrant, dynamic relationship with the Creator is what God offers us in the Spirit. I pray for deliverance, demanding that rescue to be done in a certain fashion, and God’s offering me something far better: life in the Spirit. That’s what I keep coming back to. I’ve received the Spirit, but I’ve slowly replaced life in the Spirit with a compartmentalized spirituality and faith by academia. I’ve quenched the Spirit in me, and the result has been toxic. I’ve replaced daily conformity to Christ with a meager template of “show people Christians can be nice and intelligent.” But God doesn’t want me to be a smart, friendly Christian; he wants me to die to myself and live for him, to live and walk by the Spirit, to experience genuine human living. Such a life has a purpose transcending myself: not MY kingdom come and MY will be done, but God’s kingdom come and his will be done. God isn’t calling me to an easy life, but a purposeful one. We’re created not for ourselves but for him, and genuine, fully-flourishing human life therefore entails turning from life-to-self to life-for-God. In such a life, I dare to believe, is satisfaction, joy, and hope found.

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Life in the Spirit. Not an esoteric fascination with tongues and miracles but a life consumed by the Spirit of God. It is not I who live but Christ in me. Life in the Spirit is about conformity to Christ, conformity to the genuine pattern of human living. Life in the Spirit, involving death to self and life to God, spills out into our hearts. The Spirit works in us, changing our hearts, our desires, our motivations and inclinations. By the Spirit we are made new creations—and the Spirit means business. I yearn for my heart, my life, to be transformed; I want to be changed, inside and out. The Spirit is a gift going beyond anything we could have imagined. Indeed, the presence of the Spirit marked a new age in cosmic history, and I’m guilty of taking this mind-blowing gift and turning it into a doctrine to be studied rather than a person to be engaged. I’ve been holding the gift in my hands, studying the packaging and reading the manual; I want to unwrap the gift and plunge into it headfirst. Jesus said he brings life abundant; not a life marked by acquiring certain things or experiencing prosperity at the hand of God, but a life “plugged into the life source.” I want life to be more bearable with certain accompaniments, but God’s offering me, in the Spirit, a life illuminated, infused, and transformed by his Spirit in me. Life in the Spirit is a life of union with God, of being transformed into the image of his sin, of becoming a new sort of person in the world. I’m tired of fruitless, anxious, wasteful living; I’m tired of the struggle of trying to control my life and make it pan out a certain way; I’m tired of the emptiness and loneliness of a life spent pursuing my own kingdom and my own will. I want something different, and that’s what God’s offering me, if only I abandon my own thirst for glory and live for his glory instead. Down the path of life-for-self is an “easy life” that leads to death, and down the path for life-for-God (and, by consequence, life-for-others) is a “hard life” that, paradoxically, gives life.