This is The Way – Devo Day 8

The incarnation is the framework for how we love, the resurrection is the foundation for everything we believe, and the Word of God is the source and means for living and succeeding.

Steven Peschke

There are two great and correlated needs in the Western Church today – holiness and power. Both have been and are still being abused in the Church by ignorance and arrogance. Power without holiness is destructive and manipulative; holiness without power is dead. We must have both. It is very much like the issue of truth and grace. Jesus embodied both, not in balance but both fully and completely expressed.

The source of all power is the Word of God. He created everything that is by the power of His Word. The Genesis account illustrates his power not just over the elemental but his ability to create out of nothing. He created the elemental things (light, energy, matter, life, time) and then continually sustains the universe all by the power of His Word. This is the great cosmic premise of our uniquely powerful God and the mind-blowing revelation that the Spirit of the All-Mighty God can and will cohabit our being and empower our lives.

… yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. – This is The Way

1 Corinthians 8:6 (ESV)

APPLICATION – Questions to Answer

1. We are beginning to realize that the Bible is no ordinary book. It is part of the communication one has in a relationship with God. It’s not just what happened long ago or even what people long dead said. It is the definitive collection of everything God wants every human to know about himself, ourselves, and the purposes of creation (including us). It’s all the big questions that God has placed in every human heart – that we might seek him out.
   
   In light of these truths, what is changing in how you are approaching, reading, and reflecting on the written Word? What new things are you planning to do? How will you make them a reality in your life?
   
   
2. Anyone else a little apprehensive, maybe even fearful, of inviting an all-powerful being, totally holy in every respect that knows even your deepest, darkest secrets to take up residence in your life?
   
   That feeling brings the story of Eustace in C.S.Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in his Narnia series to my mind. Eustace initially is the character you would like to punch in the face and is continually frustrating the others because he is arrogant, self-centered, and just all-around annoying. On one of their voyages, the kids land on an island where dragons live. Eustace finds a dragon lair with its hoard of treasure. Eustance becomes consumed with greed puts on a gold bracelet and then falls asleep atop the hoard.
   
   When he wakes he has become a dragon. Lewis writes, “Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.” Eustace had fleeting thoughts of grandeur at being the most powerful thing around, but he quickly realizes he was cut off from his friends, and he feels the weight of loneliness. He also is experiencing great pain from his arm where the gold bracelet, that he put on when he was human, was now digging into his flesh. He quickly longed to be a boy again.
   
   That night, Aslan comes to Eustace and leads him to a large well “like a very big round bath with marble steps going down into it.” Eustace describes the scene to Edmund after the fact. He says the water was so clear and he thought if he could get in there and bathe it would ease the pain in his leg. But Aslan told him he had to undress first.
   
   And doesn’t God ask this of us as well? As Lewis wrote in Letters to Malcolm: “We must lay before him [God] what is in us; not what ought to be in us.” Eustace found that no matter how many layers of dragon skins he managed to peel off of himself, he was still a dragon.

“Then the lion said – but I don’t know if it spoke – ‘You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know – if you’ve ever picked the scab off a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.”

… Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off … And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me – I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on – and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again…”

C. S> Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawntreader

This scene always grabs my heart. It reminds me that I cannot fix myself. It paints a beautiful picture of the transformation to new life that God promises us. It humbles me as I put myself in Eustace’s place. And even long after our initial baptism into The Way we have the ongoing challenge of continually surrendering to God’s work in our lives which can be painful at times, even when it’s a good pain. I like Lewis’s note of narration at the end of this scene as well:

“It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that “from that time forth Eustace was a different boy.” To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.”

This is The Way it is for all of us. We begin the metamorphous as the grace of God through the Word of God by the power of God changes us for the better (into the image of Christ).

What is God asking you to do? What are you doing to cooperate?

Has the cure has begun for you? If not, why not surrender right now?

PRAY

Wrap up this first section of the devotional combining the Scriptures that we’ve focused on the last two days and your answers to the questions above into a prayer. Pray it back to God – what you learned, what you decided, what you committed to. Then, when you are done, make sure you wait silently, patiently, expectantly for God to speak to you (that’s the exciting part).

If you are just starting and want to go back and read the previous posts in this series