Reach!

 "And may you have the power to understand, as all God's people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love is." Ephesians 3:18

In response to Paul's prayer in Ephesians, I wrote my own in my prayer journal. Lord, stretch our minds to take in all that You are and enlarge our spirits to receive all that You give." Now, we being finite can never take in all the wonder and truth of who He is. We'll spend eternity discovering His beauty and never come to all of His fullness. But, we can receive Him to the full of our capacity....but we'll need to stretch ourselves in every way for that to be our reality. Sadly, we're spiritually lazy people, and stretching sounds way too much like work. So, we'll let Him reach for us. He may do that when He seeks after us in our lost state, but once we've come to Him His expectation is that we "seek and find Him" in ever deepening ways. We're in a dangerous time in the church when we're falling ever deeper into "cheap grace" and "easy believism," mindset.

The letter from James in the Bible is one many have problems with, especially those who overstate His grace. James' message stresses the responsibility of the believer to live out the truth of the Bible in their day to day lives. We're saved by grace, kept by grace, but grace doesn't make allowance for knowingly sinful lifestyles and open disobedience to He and His Word.

The other day I heard a young preacher who is rapidly gaining popularity say that James was in error in his writing because he didn't understand grace. Think on what he's saying. He's declaring that a book in the Holy Bible is invalid, at least in part if not the whole. Such an approach will always lead to our dismissing those parts of His Word we don't like, accepting only that which we do. Our flesh (lazy flesh) will always look for what's easiest and costless. It has no room for a cross or our dying to ourselves upon it. Voices like his have always been lurking within the church, but they're growing in this age....and many are being seduced by them. Have you?

I started off this writing by pointing to the fact that laying hold of Him and all that He seeks to be to us will involve our stretching out spiritually to do so. It will require exercising spiritual muscles that may have been dormant for some time. It will not be comfortable....but oh the results. 

I once watched the regimen of a Chinese martial arts master as he trained a young student. One of the things he did was to take the boy and place him upon his knees. He then bent and stretched the boy so as to give his muscles and tissues the needed strength and flexibility he would need to become a master himself. Was there pain involved? I'm sure there was, but the boy had yielded himself to it. His desire was to become as his master was. So too will there be pain and discomfort for us as we stretch forth to lay hold of all that He is. What we gain in the pain is a knowledge and experience of Him, of His Life, and of His power. 

He calls us to reach forward with all our being. What do we do? Stand still in our comfort zone, even in our unbelief, or.....do we reach with all that we are that we might lay hold of all that He is?

Blessings,
Pastor O