Can you serve a God that you don’t understand? Being vulnerable and insecure is natural for all of us to avoid. We want to feel safe secure comfortable. And what do we put our faith and trust in? Ourselves? A parent or guardian? God? Do we as children obey our parents without question? So do we have to understand God in order to put our faith and trust in him? Our initial answer is probably yes, which is the wrong answer if we were to ask God. Since we can never understand him I’m sure if he were to answer he would say it is illogical to expect to, and as illogical to wait until we do before we put our trust and faith in him.
Religious chaos is something that happens all the time. Governments don’t like it churches don’t like it leaders don’t like it. The first example of settling religious chaos with understanding is the 10 Commandments. Even then it took Moses two trips to the mountain to come back with one unbroken tablet with ten laws of God that the people would be willing to accept.
Then Jesus came to explain that the laws of God can be summed up in two statements. Love God with all your heart all your mind all your soul, and love others as yourself! Too simple? So Jesus was explaining that understanding wasn’t necessary to know God, but that faith and trust was all you needed. He also said he would send the Holy Spirit to help us and he did! He didn’t say he would send another tablet of laws. He didn’t say I’ll send you volumes of laws for you to learn. In fact he chastised the Pharisees the Sadducees and the scholars for creating so many laws that they made it impossible for anyone to know God in the way that he wants to be known.
So after Jesus overcame death and satan, rose, and the Father started giving the Holy Spirit, we have people receiving the Holy Spirit left and right all the time, everywhere, jews and gentiles. But soon after, we had different cultures receiving the same holy spirit yet forming different churches. 300 years goes by and Constantine decides to hold a council of “experts” in this new religious faith. So they gathered in Nocia and they agreed on only 27 of all the letters and all the books that were ever written about the new faith. Will never know how many books that there were to choose from, which is sad. But we know that they banned all but those 27 and made it in a criminal offense to own them, to read them, or to have them in your possession. They burned them from the world. They sought to eliminate the religious chaos and bring order and control to the people under one Christianity.
And what was the result of that attempt at control? To be fair most all the population couldn’t read for themselves anyway. Even the books that were written had to be read by scholars to the people (more control). So I ask the question… by reducing it all down to 27 letters, did it eliminate the religious chaos? No it accelerated it. How many churches and religions do we have today that would call themselves Christians? I don’t think we can count them, there are so many. So once again man and the pursuit of control, to feel safe, secure, orderly, tried to put God on a tablet, in a book, or in a series of books. Man demonstrated once again he is not willing to put his faith and trust in something he doesn’t understand. I can point to many other religions over history when they did the same thing. Indians created totem poles. Egyptians created pyramids. And the list goes on and on. Yet when a true prophet is asked what must I do to know God. Their simple answer is just trust him and have faith in him and he will reveal himself to you.
And today what do we have? We have people that have gone to seminary, invested a great deal of time and money and themselves, so they can go teach the masses who God really is, because they assume they cannot find Him on their own, that the Holy Spirit has gone AWAl, and that the design for the life and death of Jesus, to allow us to receive directly God into us, His Holy Spirit, has someone been changed. But we know God doesn’t change. Now we have Speakers, Preachers, Leaders that need you to listen, obey, and follow them. What do most of them do? They try to explain who God is so you can put your trust and faith their understanding of him (not yours). They have so much time and money and energy invested in themselves coming to an understanding of who He is, they would consider their lives a failure if they didn’t spend the rest of it teaching it to you. Imagine telling someone like that, hey you wasted all that time and effort, because God only considers the heart, not what you know or don’t know about him, and whether you even understand a single thing about the relationship that Jesus made the way to have. Jesus said he wanted us to be one with the Father, just as he was one. Just take that statement in for a moment. That is one on one, direct, no filters, no helpers, just you and Him, with His Holy Spirit in you, teaching you, guiding you, comforting you. That is why Jesus came, to make that very thing possible. Do NOT let anyone tell you otherwise.
Read the Bible for yourself! If you read anything else, your subjecting yourself to the understanding of someone else who has to understand God in order to explain him and know him. They may know of him, but you Know Him personally, as a friend you perhaps don’t understand, but a friend for eternity just the same. Jesus said have faith in me, trust me the man, surrender yourself to me the person, and be honest and humble and ask me for help, and I will give it. There’s no more qualifier than that. And yet he asked for all of your heart not just part of it. So if you want to receive the Holy Spirit and you want to have God in you then you have to do we God asks. Don’t complicate it, keep it simple. Don’t make it any more difficult than it already is. Don’t even try to say you have to understand it to trust it or trust him. That is exactly what you don’t want to do! The corner stone that the builders rejected is the corner stone of the true church of Jesus Christ. The fruits of his spirit are faith hope love perseverance forgiveness honesty humility joy peace gratitude and worship. Fill your hearts and your minds with these, cast out any understanding that keeps you from experiencing these fruits of the spirit in their fullest. Do NOT overthink this! And do NOT get bogged down over a word here and there, or a definition, do not argue with each other over the Faith, just live yours and pray for others to live theirs, as the Holy Spirit prompts. Do not judge others, and do not let others judge you. They are surely not qualified, nor are you. Pleasing God is simply living the life that he wants us to live. That’s a job big enough for you to spend all your time and effort on, as they say, you’ve got enough work just inside of you to focus on. Everyone has logs in their eyes, even you, ignore them. Our Lord and savior focuses on the condition of our heart and our relationship with him not what we’ve accomplished or what we’ve learned. Take comfort in this. You don’t have to be smart, you don’t have to have wealth, you don’t have to be sinless (and you will never be that) , and You don’t have to have knowledge, in fact the less you understand the better. Everyone is qualified to know him, right now, right where you are at and who you are at this very moment! It’s a question of the will not the mind. Will you surrender? Will you give him your life? Will you ask Jesus to help you fight satan? Will you open your heart by faith to the expectation of receiving his Spirit in you with evidence?
For this is his will. And all those that would believe and trust and have faith would receive him into them, his Holy Spirit in a baptism of wind and fire with evidence. This happens today just as it happened then, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Because those that would tell you otherwise are trying to make you as much a slave to knowledge as they are. They want you to follow them. They want you to depend on their interpretation of the Bible not yours. They want to control you so that they can develop their ministry not your relationship with Jesus. They want your money, they want your codependency. There is only one that you need to be codependent with and that is the Trinity, The father the son and the Holy Spirit. Even then he doesn’t want your dependency, he wants your heart… freely. He doesn’t enslave us! He frees us from everything else that tries to enslave. If you catch yourself trying to learn how to know God, to get closer to God or how to discover him… stop! It is not a learned thing! It is simply the decision of the will to trust him without learning who he is. Yes, it is ironic that God the creator of the universe asks you to do something that’s contrary to most all other things you do in life. But it’s perfect because God is not like anything else in this life! He is spirit, he is love, he is heaven, he’s everything that is good. It is truly a miracle when someone does what he asks, and in a simple act of complete faith puts their total trust in him, and God gives his Spirit to them. It is an experience without understanding, undeniably a miracle! There is a saying I quote often, and it is applicable here… to those who have not had this Holy Spirit experience no explanation is possible. To those who have had the experience of receiving the Holy Spirit of God in them, no explanation is necessary.
