God Will Not Let You Stay Stuck. By Graham Cooke

 

When we understand how God interacts with us, our lives are transformed. We are able to see what God is doing in us, and what He is doing through us. And we no longer confuse the two. We’re able to spend time in His presence receiving revelation, guidance and love.

But this is not usually an immediate experience. Waiting on God takes patience, because there is a perfect time for everything. “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven,” as Ecclesiastes 3:1 reminds us.

We have to resist the urge to doubt God when things take longer to happen than we want or expect. “Nothing’s happening,” we whine sometimes. “Am I even in the right place?”

I’ve discovered the more impatient I am, the more God slows things down.

He’s like a watched kettle — He never boils when we’re in a hurry.

So it’s important we remember to live in Christ, not our circumstances. He is our rest and peace. We cannot benefit from trying to apply peace to our life situations. Peace comes from the heart, not the head.
Peace is relational, not circumstantial.

Rejoicing and true thanksgiving produce peace and rest. That’s because giving thanks from the heart will always overpower anything negative. Rejoicing from the mind gives only a temporary relief, but rejoicing from the heart changes our lifestyle.

Thanksgiving is not casual; it’s an experience of the Lord’s joy that liberates us to rejoice. Joy is the abiding atmosphere of Heaven, and so it changes our internal atmosphere permanently.

Joy is who God is; rejoicing is our response to who God is!

We can abide in joy, simply because He does.

Peace and rest become a lifestyle that emanates out of our internal abiding atmosphere. Do not just visit the nature of God; live in Him. Abide in Him, and He will abide in you ( John 15:1-11). Peace and rest are the consequence of abiding, and they are a part of our inheritance— HE is our inheritance.

God wants us to be constantly moving forward in our faith in this truth.

We are called to walk a path of spiritual maturity, so we must grow up in our understanding of waiting on Him. He has made more provision for us than we can possibly imagine, as we read in 1 Corinthians 2:9, “No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”

But to inherit His gifts, we have to live in Him. We must enter the place He has set aside for us in Christ. The goal of all our gatherings is to establish each of us in that relationship with Jesus. We have a personal responsibility to the Holy Spirit to learn how to abide and stay in Christ, and then the rest follows.

PS) If interested in learning more about abiding in peace, be sure to pick up The Practice of Rest series.