Working together

But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.

1 John 1:7

Stefanie Chappell, our guest speaker @ this week's TNW touched on this verse as she spoke on living our lives openly before God and each other. When the message was over she invited us to move into the light by making a private confession to the masks we wear to hide our true selves. Anonymously we wrote down our inadequacies, our failings, and our sins and symbolically released them to God as we dropped them in the front of the chapel. It was a powerful act of choosing to walk in the light. For some of you, it was the probably the first time you've ever confessed to the things you wrote--maybe even to yourself. When the service ended the words a friend and mentor, Harvey Herman, wrote came to mind.

"For Jesus to bring freedom into our lives, we need both deliverance and discipline. Deliverance is an encounter with Christ by the Spirit. These are moments when Jesus comes strongly into our lives and breaks the power that has enslaved us in some way. God has intervened and we will be different from that time on. Discipline, on the other hand, is not instantaneous. It is by nature experienced over time. Discipline is repentance lived out. Spiritual disciplines in our lives are ways we continue to express repentance and turn our lives to the Lord."

It's easy to allow our personalities to move us to one side or the other. For those who are in the deliverance camp, this past Thursday night could mark a significant moment with God that can carry us along in our journey with Him for a little while, but if it's not followed up soon by another "God moment" we can find ourselves losing spiritual momentum. For those in the discipline camp, it's easy to discount what happened on Thursday as purely emotionalism or the power of suggestion and set about to focus our efforts on how to manage our relationship with God. What my friend Harvey is pointing out in the above paragraphs is both of these mindsets are lacking. We need those "God moments" to remind us of His love toward us and his desire to work on our behalf, but we also need to actively pursue Christ and the transformation He has promised by continually and consistently placing ourselves in a position to receive his freely given grace. My prayer this Thursday and always is that you would recognize the light our God lovingly shines on us and that you would choose to walk in it every day.