Washington DC, Gathering of the Eagles, March 18-22, 2019 with a JA Day on Saturday, March 23rd! 

Location:

Holiday Inn Washington Dulles Ballroom & Morven Park

Accommodations:

Holiday Inn Washington Dulles

45425 Holiday Drive

Dulles, VA 20166

800-465-4329

Room Rate: $118.00*

When your will is in a battle, you join your will to win Christ. This is a fight which requires you to wrestle to the end. Our sinful nature refuses to die easily. The things which we hate we will sometimes do. The things which we love to do, because He loves them, we will not always do. We will have to come back to Him again and again, to repent, apologize, re-grasp the vision, and stubbornly refuse to let go. Tell yourself repeatedly, “If this is available to me, I want it—whatever the cost.” Remember salvation is free, but, all other things in the Kingdom come with a price which always amounts to letting go of more of the world.

When Jesus begins to reveal those costs, sometimes we find they are a little harder or costlier than we expected. If you were to go into your back yard, you could easily cut down a little one or two year old tree. However, if you went to the California redwoods, and you tried to cut down one of those giant redwoods, it would take a much greater effort. How long do you think it would take to cut it down with an ax? The sinful nature is very strong. It has a very strong hold on your soul, as does the devil, through your sinful nature. Like a giant redwood, the sinful nature is not easy to cut down. California's Sequoia National Park has Sequoias. A few of those fallen trees are so huge you can drive your car on their trunks. I have photos of my car sitting atop one of those grand old fallen trees. Some trees in our souls are very large and deeply rooted. They are not going to be easily torn down.

I am telling you this to encourage you. Although my words do not sound encouraging, I want you to remember them when you are trying to whack down that tree. You will think, “She said it would be like this, so there's still hope.” Some trees have very spindly trunks which yield easily to the ax. Nevertheless, the bigger trees—the bigger rudiments of the soul—are not so easy to cut down. I shared earlier with you about the passion of the Lord. He will work with you relentlessly and never quit if He sees you mean business. He will hold your hand. You can walk around that same mountain half a dozen times. If He sees in your heart that you really mean to have freedom, He will help you cut down those giant trees. He will not do it for you, but He will help and strengthen you to do it. We are double-yoked with the Holy Spirit. On our part it takes prayer, fasting, obedience and determination.

Sometimes you can get so frustrated when, in His wonderful goodness and infinite wisdom, He takes you right back to something you were so sure had died ten years ago. Now you get to rediscover that old thing still lives. You think, “I thought this creature was dead. I thought I really had overcome this.” It can get so discouraging that you may want to give up. He knows that. He knows where your button is. He will take you right up to it, and He will press it. You say, “Why would He do that? If He does that, I'll get mad and walk away.” The answer is: “Anyone who will!” When you finally reach the place where you are willing to go through whatever it takes to get you to Him, it no longer matters how many buttons get pressed. You will stand in the love of Christ and let Him do whatever He has to do in order to get the job done. It is worth it because every step of the way, you learn to love the fact that His is a holy way. You come to love holiness so much you only desire to be holy like He is holy. After all of the pruning and chiseling, and all that He has to do, you only thirst for more of Him.

There have been times when I have been without the sense of the manifest Presence for two or three years. The Presence is still there and the revelations are still given but, for whatever reason, He withdraws the tangible sense of His abiding presence. I can remember once when He took me through such a season. Some writers refer to it as the “dark night of the soul.” It is a lonely place quite accurately described as a dark night. On the very day that He touched me, restored the sense of His manifest Presence, and took me out of my dark night, I could do nothing but weep. I did not want to take one step away and risk losing His glorious Presence. I felt such desperation, so anxious to remain right there with Him.

What I learned during that dark season of terrible loss of His manifest Presence was that I was actually standing before the face of Jesus Christ in a higher way, closer than at any time before. The entire time, He was actually closer to me. During this time I was being filled with Him, notwithstanding it was all being accomplished in silence. I did not know it until after His manifest Presence returned. Only then did I realize how much I had grown and how much He had filled me with Himself during that time of silence. Many people, who start feeling the loss of His Presence, or who find things not going the way they think they ought, will pull away in offense. They will abandon the end goal. You cannot do that! Whoever will! The will must be captivated by the passion of the vision. It is the only way you can reach union in Christ.

Some people love to romanticize the concept of union with Christ. The style of their prose becomes very romanticized. You can read my book, Canticles of the Exchanged Life, and see that the entire book of the Song of Solomon is about the path into union. It is very much romanticized. When our Bible translator edited that book, he said, “You know, I am a man, and it's very difficult for men to read this particular book in the Bible.” “Why?” I naively asked. Without further explanation, he simply replied, “Let's just trust me on this one.” Even the Bible, then, could cause us to romanticize this quest for union. That is very good for the first several years of your walk, but after a certain point in time the Lord pulls you away from earlier romantic notions about what union really means. He impresses upon you, in no uncertain terms, the fact that the flesh must die; the sinful nature must be aborted. You must either choose life in Christ, or the loss of the promise by choosing the way of the soul. When He finally brings you to choose life, you discover that your quest and the way you perceive things are changed. Even the way the Bible speaks to you seems to change.

To be continued next week…

In His love,
Nita Johnson