Personal Spiritual Experience?

The Oswald Chambers devotional was certainly interesting today. (Read here.) Oswald said, “It is much easier to do something than to trust in God; we see the activity and mistake panic for inspiration. That is why we see so few fellow workers with God, yet so many people working for God. We would much rather work for God than believe in Him…The degree of panic activity in my life is equal to the degree of my lack of personal spiritual experience.”

Or Panic Activity?

Wow. Panic activity. That is a phrase I will remember. It is easy to fall into a rhythm of doing for God instead of being with Him. It is especially easy to get caught up in frenetic activity instead of waiting and trusting. Instead of being still. Sometimes we need to just go to God. Go to Him. Be with Him. Talk to Him about how we feel, not only about all we’re doing for Him. This is a relationship.

The Most Important Relationship

Sometimes we forget this most important relationship in our life. And then we have to ask ourselves, if we forget that easily, is it really our most important relationship? For many of us, the answer is, “Yes, absolutely.” It still is—even when we seemingly “forget” to put it first—the reason being, this is also the only relationship someone is actively fighting against. The enemy is constantly doing all he can to distract us and to keep us from seeking God and advancing His kingdom.

We don’t need to fall into condemnation when we realize we are in a “panic activity” mode or that we have temporarily lost sight of “sitting at Jesus’ feet.” We just need to hold still for a moment. Stop. Wait. Cease all activity.

His Presence

Now… come into His Presence. Do we hesitate? Then we need to ask ourselves, why are we avoiding God? Yes, we can avoid Him. We can be going to church, teaching Sunday school and witnessing to friends and still be avoiding Him! God can be our whole life and we can still push Him out of the deep places in our hearts.

The question is, are we staying active to keep our hurts buried under an avalanche of activity? Are we doing for Him so we don’t have to take some disappointment to Him? We can hold Him at arms length, but what we really need to do…is let Him in close. We need to be with Him. We need to listen. We need to be willing to hear whatever He will say to us. We need to let Him put His finger on that spot in our life He wants to change.

God of the Unexpected

The thing is, God always does something unexpected. Believe me, I know He does! Just when we have our little God Activity Box all set up, He blows the walls out and says, “Let’s move into greater freedom.” People like me, who find safety in structure, really like our God-routines, but God says, “I’m bigger than your routine. Come find Me over here. I want to speak to you in other ways too.”

I think that sometimes, the better we know Him, the more tempting it is to try and quantify and mold Him. “I’ve known God a long time and He fits into my life in this way,” we think. But that is completely backwards! We are on the journey of molding our lives to God, thrilled that He has a place for us in Him. And He does have a glorious, living place for us in Him. He wants to bring us into that place more and more through our relationship with Him. Even as we work for Him with all our hearts and strength, let’s be sure our highest priority is to be with Him today.

Are you working for God or living with God? Do you need to make time to be with Him today?