Depend on Him

Galatians 3:2-3
Did you receive the Holy Spirit by obeying the law of Moses? Of course not! You received the Spirit because you believed the message you heard about Christ. How foolish can you be? After starting your Christian lives in the Spirit, why are you now trying to become perfect by your own human effort? (NLT)

I enjoy reading. I like to sit back with a good novel and read for enjoyment. I even like to read about history; about things that happened long ago. Sometimes I can get lost for a while in my browser as I look up something and it leads to something else which takes me off in another area altogether.

In school we all learned to read for knowledge. We read to know about stuff. We read to fill our head with useful information-data from the past we may be able to apply later in life. Some of it is useless and I really cannot understand why I still know it! Other bits have been quite useful and throughout my life I have needed to know them.

However, it is as I used that stored data in life that it became real. The application of the information created personal experiences which helped mold me into the person I am today.

When I received the Holy Spirit it was not because of what I had learned from books or from the Internet or from others. I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior and He came to live in me. I was baptized by fire in the name of God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues.

There was nothing logical about it. I believed the message I had heard and my spirit man was born again. I was a new person in the spirit. However, I was still an old person in the flesh.

My flesh, my mortal man rather than my spirit man, learned all the "rules" about being a Christian. So I set out to become a good Christian. There were things I should do and things I should avoid. There were people I should hang out with and people to be avoided. There were movies good to watch and movies to be avoided. Some things were good to talk about and others not. And I learned new phrases that all good Christians seemed to be using.

If I could just appear to be a good Christian I would be all set. I was trying to become perfect by my own human effort.

I am not saying this was necessarily a bad thing. It just was not changing the real me. It just allowed others to see the person I wanted to be, and this was not the person I turned into under pressure.

Only God can change us and that occurs when we allow the Holy Spirit to work in our lives. It is He that convicts us when we drift off the path. As we recognize His voice and ask to be changed, our desires to repeat what He pointed out leave and we are changed.

I no longer want to view those movies, hang around with people using coarse language, gossip about others, or even be fluent in the latest Christianize phrases. Do not get me wrong here. I am nowhere near perfection. I just want to give God all the glory, praise Him in my life, and let the Holy Spirit guide me through this life long journey.