For this morning’s blog, I’m going to share some words with you that are totally blowing my mind. I don’t usually parrot the words of another writer in my blogs, but I just had to share this brief excerpt from an amazing book I’m reading right now called “The Forgotten Way” by Ted Dekker. You may be familiar with Dekker as a popular novelist; but this non-fiction treatise about following Jesus is as honest, vulnerable, and true to scripture as anything else I’ve come across. It’s a series of deeply scriptural meditations, preceded by his personal testimony of finding Intimacy and Identity with Christ. I’m reading it as part of my own personal devotions right now, and wanted to pass this along to you to strengthen your journey with Him. I welcome your comments…
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2)
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? …How much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask Him!” (Matthew 7:7, 9-11)
“The prophet Ezekiel was among the first to write about a radical personal encounter with God, high and lifted up. His writing shook the religious establishment of his day. How could God be encountered so directly outside of the Temple, and without the help of a priest? More, how could God be described in such strange terms, as a wheel within a wheel?
Still, many people longed to have a relationship with God like the one he described. To know God so directly – so personally – made the establishment as nervous then as it has throughout history and still does today. How can this be? A deep, personal relationship with God, not with dogma or with institutionalized religion, is at the heart of Christianity. The wall between mankind and God, erected by the church and heavily reinforced for over a thousand years, began to crumble during the Reformation. Many periods of renewal and revelation in the five hundred years since have further demolished that wall of separation. Perhaps the most significant one occurred in the early 1900s, when explosive personal encounters with God defied the traditions of men. The movement to know God experientially continues to accelerate today as more and more believers find true peace and love and power. Such gifts come only from knowing God INTIMATELY and sharing His divine nature through IDENTITY in Christ…
Has any church more fully experienced the power of the gospel than the one that first embraced Jesus’ Spirit in the twenty years following His resurrection? This church did not have any of the gospels or the epistles to argue about or defend. And yet perhaps far more than we, its members lived and breathed the power of ‘being in Christ’ on earth. Those sacred writings that we now have are called the Scriptures, and they point to Christ, but they are not the Word who is Christ and Christ manifested in us. Let us worship Christ alone, not the words or the religious dogmas that point to Him. If we worship doctrine, we will have unwittingly made a god out of something other than God. Then we will not understand our need to KNOW (experience) Him intimately. We will be no different from the religious leaders during the time of Jesus who would not yield to Him.
Take comfort, because we know, as Jesus said, that God reveals Himself to children, so His way must be simple. We know that His yoke (His interpretation) is easy and His burden (what is required to follow that interpretation) is light. So we look for the good news of the Father in a simple story, and we become like children so that we may know the Father.”
Dictionary.com definitions….
INTIMACY – A close, familiar, and usually affectionate or loving personal relationship with another person or group. A close association with or detailed knowledge or deep understanding of a place, subject, period of history, etc.
IDENTITY – The state or fact of remaining the same one or ones, as under varying aspects or conditions. The condition of being oneself or itself, and not another… the qualities, beliefs, etc., that distinguish or identify a person or thing.
