Welcome to a new feature here at Finding Narnia…the Addendum. The name will probably change because I’m not happy with it at the moment but it’s the best I can find right now. The Addendum is a place where I drop things related to the subjects I want to promote here but has no immediate reference to the Chronicles. The subject I’m chasing after is far bigger than the Chronicles and I want to create a space to go there.
The other day I was chatting with a friend about the LORD and they asked a very important question. To paraphrase, “Why is it that we can seek the LORD and then when we find Him we may enjoy His presence for a while but then we freak out and shut Him out?”
Finding Narnia is all about seeing God for who He is and seeing Him where He is which is all around us and in us. This question is clearly related to the heart of this Blog. Who hasn’t noticed that pattern in our lives?
We find ourselves in crisis with our lives, in a sort of “divine discontent”, and we realize we need Jesus to come in and fix it. We pray, we go to church, we commit ourselves to dig deeper into His Word, we act in obedience and faith, and then the Spirit comes like a rushing wind into our lives. Our outlook changes, our situation may change, we can see more clearly, we can hear the LORD more clearly, we may even fancy we can feel His breath upon us. We can’t imagine living any other way. We found it. He is the answer to all things.
But then something happens and for some reason, we decide we’ve had enough God for now. We are fine now and maybe even we regret getting so “mystic” about what we had experienced. Maybe we realize we aren’t as “fun” as we once were, that it’s time to go back to some of the things we had forsaken to be close to God. Sure, they may have been the source of the original problem but we can kid ourselves that we are strong enough to handle it now.
I have been in that position more times than I can count. Enough times, fortunately, that I have become disgusted with the pattern in my own life. Sometimes, and maybe it’s a universal truth, we have to hit rock-bottom before we can get the help we really need and make the genuine life change.
If we look at scripture we can see why we do this pretty clearly. These days my first reference point in any spiritual discussion is the Garden of Eden. That’s where we see the first instance of Man shutting out God and it’s cause.
God created the Garden, put Man in it both to work it and to have a relationship, and would take an evening walk with Man and talk with him. This is the relationship we were meant to have with God all along. It is what we were created for. And then We broke the relationship and, as a result, we broke the world.
What do Adam and Eve do when God comes down for His evening walk and talk after the sin has occurred? They hid in fear.
When we invite God to move in our lives it’s kind of like when we open a window in our house to let in a breeze. We are aware that the house is stuffy or it’s got a funky smell, or maybe it’s too warm and a breeze is just the thing to make everything better. The Spirit can come to us in a gentle breeze, certainly, but eventually, that breeze will get stronger and stronger until it’s moving things in the room.
When we notice that the breeze has turned into a strong wind and papers start flying and maybe furniture starts moving we don’t casually saunter over to the window to gently close it. We RUN to the window and SLAM it down.
The LORD is not willing that His Spirit should just waft about in our lives and clear out an offending temporary odor. We want to move the furniture and blow away those papers we regard so highly that don’t matter in the eternal sense. When we invite Jesus to be our LORD and savior that wind is always going try to get in at every point. He wants us moved, changed, altered, renewed, and perfected. He always wants a relationship beyond what we can imagine. He always wants in. He always wants Eden again.
I was reading in Exodus the other day, the part where God gives the Ten Commandments to Israel. The text is vague about one particular aspect. Is He giving them to Moses? Or is He giving them straight to the people? My mind has always gone the Charlton Heston route and believed that our man Moses was up on the mountain and God writes the commandments with His finger and explodes the tablets out of the mountainside. Except…that’s not the moment. That moment comes later. God Himself speaks the commandments. If we look closely at Exodus 20 there is every indication that His voice spoke the commandments to all the people. After the commandments are given the people of Israel of freaked out having heard the voice. They plead with Moses that he talk to God and God only talk to them through him because otherwise, they fear they will die.
Our problem is that in the end, we want to go back to Egypt rather than Eden. Our bones ache for the slavery of our past sin while our souls crave the light, presence, and face to face relationship with almighty God. We are no different than the children of Israel. God works mighty wonders, signs, brings water from a rock, speaks to them His laws, sends them provision in the form of daily quail and manna and what do they say? “It would be better if we had died in Egypt. Remember leeks and onions? Oh, man…those were the days. Our life in Egypt was better than this.” Their life in Egypt. They were doing forced labor, beaten mercilessly, and their newborn sons murdered. Somehow they believed that was better.
It is the odd one out, the chosen and beloved people of God who put their past in the proper place and see it for what it was. Hell on earth, in a spiritual sense. We are called to embrace Him in all that He is; to see what He is and all that He has as pure gold and silver, far valuable than ash and bone. He calls us to trade, literally trade, one of the other. No takebacks.
Brothers and Sisters, see Him rightly. Realize what you have been rescued from. Even more than that, realize what you have been rescued TO. The author of the universe, almighty God, the Holy One, He for whom there is no limit, He reached down and chose you as His child. He doesn’t want you to simply stop doing that sin. He wants you to give it to Him so He can replace it with something far greater, far more life-giving, something He is writing into your life for your ultimate blessing.
Finding Narnia 
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