This morning given all this North Carolina winter weather, I seemed to have plenty of time on my hands. In fact, when I finished my devotions I still had coffee left and my wife had not yet awakened. I reached for a book not yet finished and as if the Lord was waiting for me, I began to sense His voice. The more I read, the more I knew that He was affirming my writings of late.
Just yesterday I finished the manuscript for my next book, Judah, the Journey to Delight. The book details my discipleship journey through three life phases of Desire, Discipline and Delight. There it was in Steve McVey’s book, Grace Walk, as he described his walk with God, first founded around a legalistic approach through discipline, the very same prescription offered by the church in my early days of Christianity. He goes on to describe this former understanding of discipleship with words found in his thick thesaurus like “chastisement, control, order or restraint…. It’s no wonder I (McVey) found it hard to be consistent in these areas! But grace has turned it into delight. The same thesaurus suggests synonyms for delight: ‘enjoyment, pleasure, happiness, and joy.”1 Grace is in fact a journey toward delight!
McVey earlier in the book, had described a walk with Christ wherein we have the mind of Christ, and rather than worrying so much about Satan’s threats, as we often spend so much time doing, we should have “confidence that the Holy Spirit will guide every thought and deed. Christians need to give as much credit to God’s ability to lead as they do to the ability of Satan to mislead!”2
That alone was worth the price of the book!
God loves you more than you love Him. If you are “working” hard to follow Him, you can bet (believe) that He is working hard to assure your walk. The average Christian I meet spends so much time trying to discern the voice of God, that the verbal clutter in their head simply confuses the matter. Often so cluttering their mind, that they make poorer decisions than unbelievers!
Lighten up! Live in grace and trust His voice. If Christ crushed the head of the serpent at Calvary, should His voice not come more readily and more clear than the voice of the one crushed?
Give God a little credit! If you will rest in His love, He will converse with you, impress upon you, while creating circumstances that favor you, even “lift up a standard” (Is. 59:19) around you. You are His beloved!
(1) Steve McVey, Grace Walk (Eugene, Ore.: Harvest House, 1995), p.146.
(2) Ibid, p.145.
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