Everyone wants to do well in life; there is nothing wrong with that. But it all depends on where the motives and desires to achieve are coming from. The soul just wants to be reunited with the Spirit of God. When the soul receives eternal life, it gets its needs met because it finally gets what it has been looking for. When the soul does not have eternal life, it seeks to achieve things with the motive of being happy, fulfilled and approved by others. Receiving eternal life takes away these motives and desires from the soul because eternal life gives the soul what it has been longing for.
Eternal life brings unconditional happiness and peace of mind; eternal life is the evidence of God's approval and the restoration of His manifest presence. Then, when a believer receives eternal life, he is then ready for the Holy Spirit to lead him and guide him. At that moment, love is able to work in your life as the desires and motives of your unredeemed nature are not in conflict with the will of God for your life. Therefore, establishing eternal life by faith should be one of the first steps that a believer takes. If this step is not taken, the believer will become confused because a lot of what happens in his life will be geared towards causing him to come to the realisation of how futile his own desires and motives are.
Whatever you do in life, make sure that your motives are driven by love - God's love. Whatever you purpose to do in life, make sure that you do it because you want to do it, not because you feel that you must do it or that it is expected of you or just because you seek some sort of reward if you do it. Just assume that whatever you do will not be recognised or rewarded by anyone. Just do what you do because you want to do it. Let what you do be a natural expression of who you are inside. Allow your new nature of love to express itself naturally.
The great impressionist painters did not pain to please other people, they did it because it was a labour of love for them; it was an expression of themselves. Painters such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh were given little in the way of recognition during their lifetime. But now, their masterpieces are worth millions of pounds. If these painters were waiting for someone else’s approval before they would paint, then the world would not have seen their great work. Thankfully, these painters were not moved by what other people thought about them and what they did; they were moved by what their heart sought to express.
When you have motives of love in your heart, no-one needs to tell you what to do or to encourage you to act on what you know to do. It is like being told by a marriage counsellor to give gifts and flowers occasionally to your wife, tell her that you love her from time to time and take her out to a restaurant occasionally. But if you really loved your wife with all your heart, then you would be naturally prompted by that love to do those kinds of things.
Faith works by love because it is an expression of the desires and motives of God in your heart. When you become born-again, you adopt the very nature of God Himself. This means that when you allow your re-created spirit to dominate your soul, love becomes a natural expression. When we try to walk in love and live by faith just out of our heads, we are simply play-acting and it will not work. If the soul is not brought into subjection to the re-created spirit, we can end-up just operating out of the soul in response to what other people tell us is right or wrong. It can be difficult sometimes to know whether you are taking action from the mind or the spirit, the head or the heart. If the Word of God is confessed from the mind only, it will not work because it has got to come from the heart.
0 comments:
Post a Comment