A Life Beyond Your Wildest Dreams

Today Cinthia discusses concepts from her book God Wants You Truly Living (Not Walking Dead).  God knows we cannot achieve happiness by chasing it.  The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible demonstrates this; Solomon chased happiness with gusto and resources but found the chase futile.  Jesus, however, said that He came that we might have abundant life – the kind of life He had.  Jesus was truly free despite living in an oppressed people group dominated by the Roman Empire.  He had a deep, meaningful relationship with the Father, and it was in this relationship that He got His value.  He had meaning and purpose, a clear conscience, and deep, meaningful relationships with others.  Perhaps most powerfully, though, Jesus was willing to die.  He died literally, physically, for others in obedience to His Father, God.  He died to Satan’s temptation to pursue His destiny and rights outside of obedience to His Father God.  And He calls each of us to die to ourselves.  This does not necessarily mean physical death – at least not yet.  We are not to go looking for physical death.  But each of us has things to which we cling, things that feel like death to release.  Often these are things we think we need but that are actually choking the life out of us.  Sometimes they are good things that are in the way of the best things.

Abundance is more than enough but never excessive.  Jesus went first in dying to Himself.  He is the Way.  We have to follow Him in “death” even while we are still alive by dying to whatever He calls us to let die.  See Philippians 3:10, Ephesians 3:20, and John 10:10.  Jesus trusted that His Father God knew Him to the core of His Being.  He entrusted His rights, His identity, His destiny, His authority, His life to the Father.  If we are to follow Him in this, we also have to learn to trust that our Creator knows us to the core of our beings.  God is not trying to make us happy as His primary goal because He knows that happiness is an overflow of an abundant life; He knows that for which we are truly made and also sees the good things that are getting in the way of the best things.  The enemy also knows that the pursuit of happiness only increases the emptiness inside of us.

It's easy to dismiss Jesus’s death as being something He could do because He was perfect.  But Jesus was also human, and He made it clear in Gethsemane that He did not want to have to go to the cross.  He asked not to have to do it, to have another way made if it could be made.  Still, He obeyed and went.  He died to Himself.

Dying to myself means, in part, that all the things my body is screaming for me to do, I release to Him.  I have to determine as an adult whether or not those things are healthy, holy, of good repute, pleasing to Him, and His best for me at this time, or whether He wants me to deny myself some or all of those things.  We don’t often like the death to ourselves that Jesus showed us.  But He was willing to do it, and He tells us that we need to be willing to do it.  When Jesus took on a created body, He was willing to live His life the Creator’s way.  We fight the Creator.  We want a shorter, easier, faster, less-painful way to our destiny.  Satan tempted Jesus with this route in the desert, and He rejected it.  We think that we can discover, create, or defend our own identity.  But we do not know ourselves as well as our Father knows us.  He knows the identity He intended for us.  If you won’t let go of the thing you are cherishing, it may kill you.

Cinthia discussed the seed that dies in order to produce the fruit.  Don’t protect or abandon the seed.  Water it, nourish it, but allow it to die.  It is in death that the seed will be able to reach beyond its packaging.  We are very used to bondage in a lot of ways, to the boxes in which we enclose ourselves.  We have to die to ourselves as the seed does, usually long before we face physical death.  Ephesians 3:20 (Message version) says, “God can do anything, you know – far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in you wildest dreams!  He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.”  And John 10:10 (Amplified version) says, “The thief comes only in order to steal and kill and destroy.  I came that they may have life, and have it in abundance [to the full, till it overflows].”  This is God’s desire for His people.  Not only that, but He also promises in Psalm138:8 that He “will fulfill His purpose for me.”  Psalm 23:4 describes Him as with us as we walk through the shadow of death.  There are two types of death that have to occur in order to produce and sustain life:  The first is the death of a good thing in order to become the best thing.  The second is the death of “the thing that is killing me.”  How many of us fight to keep alive the thing that is killing us? 

So ask yourself, “Am I refusing to move forward in ways that are age- and circumstance-appropriate?  Am I resisting age-appropriate tasks?  Am I holding onto previous life stages, to behaviors and clothing and self-care patterns that are no longer appropriate to my current life stage?  Do I refuse to move forward with technology?  What do I want to ignore or deny?  Am I unwilling to go through the grief and loss process?  Do I hold onto a person, decade, paradigm, or belief system?  Do I allow a system that isn’t working to continue?  Am I willing to let expectations die?  Am I resisting a new season that is only going to happen anyway?  Am I willing to let go of my dream or my vision for myself or another person?  What are the birth pains that I may be ignoring or resisting?  What is trying to come out of me?  Am I resisting dying to self?”  Do not continue to resist what you know is natural for you to do – not those things that are natural in their decadence, but those that are natural to what God has created in you.

Consider Philippians 1:6 and Isaiah 66:7-10.  We don’t know the mind of God.  We cannot force to die what He wants to live or force to live what He knows must die.  The only way out is through.  You were born for a reason.  So what has to die in order for that reason to live?  God says to us, essentially, “Don’t quit on Me now.  I’m not finished with the good work I’ve begun in you.  God wants to give us peace that passes understanding.  We need to stop trying to understand everything.  God has a way, His way, and we need to trust Him, whether or not we understand.