I haven't written in a while, so I'll ramble for a while. I was thinking about the Church the other day and having one of my critical moments when I started asking why the Church doesn't stir things up like it did in the bible. The Church, moving in the power and the authority of God, made leaders feel uneasy, healed people and all that good stuff. I know what I'm saying has been said at least one billion times, "the Church isn't where it ought to be and it's because (insert solution here)." I started looking at my life and what hinders the power of God in my life how I get entangled with my "stuff" and how I can get so busy grappling with it that before I know it I'm not going anywhere and haven't been for quite some time. I get wary of the idea of us finding a "new thing" when God has always been the same. Christianity without Christ just doesn't work, that is what I have been learning. A wrong view of Jesus, not gazing at Him and immediately I start to become a Christian with a nice exterior but hollow on the inside. I think over and over about when Jesus said "I am the way, the truth and the life." Jesus told His disciples that He was going to the Father and that they knew the way and they in turn said they didn't know the way and to show them the Father. To which He replied with something along the lines of 'I've been with you all this time and still you don't know Me.' I seek Jesus for truth and He says "here I am" and I ask Him for a way, a direction and He says "here I am." It makes me wonder if I really want Jesus, to get to know His heart instead of asking what I have to do be OK. I wonder if I really know the commitment He calls for, He doesn't force it, but He beckons. How much more I have to explore the depths of His desire for me. He calls me to surrender my life because He desires me that bad, how often do I look for a certain set of rules to surrender to so that I can feel secure. I see parts of me that God is calling and I am running desperately just like Adam and Eve covering up in shame. I can sense the tender question, "how come you won't trust Me with this?"

I always found it interesting that God asked Adam and Eve "Who told you you were naked?" Who told you that you needed to cover up? Who told you that there was something wrong with the way I made you? I remember my father told me there was something wrong with my body as a boy. Offhanded comments that, unbeknownst to him, cut me to the core and gave satan the opportunity to lie to me about what it meant to be a real man. I covered up and ran in shame until I found appreciation from people. Let me stop here and say that I love my father and I have forgiven him and the one whom I hate was behind it all. Evil forces unseen that have been at work since the Fall had worked on the men in my family, we believed lies, didn't know how to love and so they hurt until that became how to love someone. I heard it said once that love without understanding condones cruelty and that is true. I have hurt people many times because I didn't know how to love them and I didn't how to be loved. So God has been asking me "who told you that weren't a man?" I'm tired of seeing people victimized, tired of seeing the patterns and the cycles. I am glad that Jesus has condemned sin in the flesh, so that while I still live in this earthly body there will always be this stupid sinful nature that wants love in all the wrong ways there is the eternal part of me, my flesh is passing away and God is greater than all of that. I am choosing to exercise God's power in my life by forgiving people. I reject and renounce the voice that tells me that there is something I can do to get what I have born to receive from God; love. This flesh is passing away and I am by no means no where near perfection but I really do have an eternal hope. There are lies about what hope is, some think of as hope as unrealistic and impractical. "Hope for the best and expect the worst" is something I think is absurd. My hope is the most practical of all, it is hope in God, the God who is love. He is the love He expresses, He moves in His complete nature and nothing He does is separate from who He is. People do things with wrong motives and facades but not Jesus. Hope in circumstances is where I find distress and disappointment and that is why faith and hope are looked as weak nowadays. People have put their hope in things and when it didn't work we've looked to the sky and shook our fists at God.

When I am not bearing fruit in my life it's because, simply, I need Jesus. When I am bearing fruit, I still need Jesus. When Jesus left He said He was leaving so He could send His Spirit which came to testify about Him to give us understanding in our hearts so that we could move with the emotions of His heart and out of that love we would have power to move in. Even these gifts of the Spirit that allow us to move in His power will pass away and all that we have left is how much of God's love in Christ we have chosen to accept. I want to see revival come and I believe it is but I want to see us walk rightly through it and not just have it be something that is an end unto itself. I'd rather have personal revival that helps me in the every day, mundane drudgery of life still look at Jesus with love and adoration. Moments of intense experience are good and necessary but what good is it if I build on that alone? On Christ alone, not experience, not things I do for Him, but on Him alone rests my redemption, the ultimate revival of my soul.