No Ordinary Thaw

If nothing else, you should see the incredible video attached to this at the end, but…

I’ve been contemplating a thought for a while now. Deeply disturbed for years at the prevailing views so easily foisted upon us by the enemy — so quick we are to cry “foul!” and to approach so many things with a “What’s the big deal?!” posture… Surely we are not to live anxiously or with some kind of unhealthy paranoia. But yet at the same time, a more healthy suspicion of our world would go a long way. The problem really seems to ultimately lay in the cost that is associated with sacrifice which our flesh inherently detects and rebels against.

For those interested in antidotes against these kinds of things — “[we fight] with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left” stated Paul (2 Corinthians 6:6 NIV) — I’d like to offer one: Eternal Perspective. In fact, the context of that entire passage in 2 Corinthians 6 is all about Eternal Perspective because there is no way Paul nor anyone else would undergo all of what is mentioned in that passage without it.

Eternal Perspective is one of the greatest weapons against what the enemy throws at us. What is Eternal Perspective? It’s essentially seeing things just as God sees them. From the perspective of time, God is able to stand back and look down on time. He sees the past. He sees the present. He sees the future. According to Ephesians 2, “we’re seated with Christ in the heavenly realms.” Anyone who sees and experiences this as a Spiritual Reality is properly positioned to see time as God sees it. We should be able to “step back” and view past history applied to the present with some discrimination and see the future with anticipation and hope as a result of how we view the past and the present.

What does this mean? What’s the application? For one, it should help us with many things that the world, which has been “blinded by the god of this age” cannot see nor if they could would they accept. The picture that Hollywood paints is accepted. The “cultural norms” of today — and this could be any of a myriad of things concerning dress, modesty, morality, what is called “arts and sciences,” what is presented to us as “professional” or “expert,” etc. — are generally accepted as they are presented. What was considered immodest in 1920 is laughed at today. What is considered normative from the standpoint of celebrations, holidays, shopping, books, entertainment, games, technology, etc. is always presented as right and okay and innocuous.
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The “Letting Go” or “Let Go” theme has been a major emphasis in my personal life for the last year and God has worked in huge and “hard” ((to the flesh) ways all year long on this. I got this in my inbasket just as I was about to pull out the book Let Go and read a little bit more from it this afternoon before some chores. I don’t know if God could highlight something any better even if He came down and spoke audibly to me. Just slapped by it:

I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between Me and the earth. (Genesis 9:13)

It is the Will of God that human beings should get into moral relationship with Him, and His covenants are for this purpose. Why does not God save me? He has saved me, but I have not entered into relationship with Him. Why does not God do this and that? He has done it, the point is — Will I step into covenant relationship? All the great blessings of God are finished and complete, but they are not mine until I enter into relationship with Him on the basis of His covenant.

Waiting for God is incarnate unbelief, it means that I have no faith in Him; I wait for Him to do something in me that I may trust in that. God will not do it, because that is not the basis of the God-and-man relationship. Man has to go out of himself in his covenant with God as God goes out of Himself in His covenant with man. It is a question of faith in God – the rarest thing; we have faith only in our feelings. I do not believe God unless He will give me something in my hand whereby I may know I have it, then I say — “Now I believe.” There is no faith there. “Look unto Me, and be ye saved.”

When I have really transacted business with God on His covenant and have let go entirely, there is no sense of merit, no human ingredient in it at all, but a complete overwhelming sense of being brought into union with God, and the whole thing is transfigured with peace and joy.

-Oswald Chambers (emphasis mine)