Take Heart, At Your End Is God’s Beginning

God’s will is that we are brought to the end of ourselves, so we can stop building The House in vain, and begin building The House from the foundations up in truth and love.

The House is a metaphor for the structure that is our faith relationship – featuring a humble and wise dependence on God as its cornerstone.

When our structure is built upon nothing less than the fullest commitment to God’s truth we finally live conscience free.

This, I think, is the eternal life that Jesus came to usher in, for us all individually, through the Holy Spirit. That is, that ultimately there would be no halcyon highs or abysmal lows of emotion; that, as we do God’s unadulterated bidding we would take neither glory nor entertain self-condemnation for the successes or failures that inevitably come.

Freedom from self so the self might be in God is living in the eternal plane.

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When God rules The House everything else is ordered appropriately. There is both the supernatural and the natural consequence: God’s will is executed, in keeping with the leading of the Spirit, because we simply obey without labouring in thought.

When we no longer need to bend the circumstances of life into the shape of our will, we are then trusted by the Spirit of God to do that very bidding that God needs, from within the midst of our lives, for us to do.

Some will say, “God doesn’t need us,” but, in the knowledge that he has gifted us life, and purposed us to live for his purposes, God does need us. God needs us to do his will; to discern it and then to do it. When we might act for God or against God, our Lord needs us to choose God-honouring action.

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As soon as we have realised that our end – a rock bottom experience, the abject lack of hope, or the ending of our desires, etc – brings the initiation of God’s beginning we know new life. This is life like we’ve never experienced before.

Starting life from scratch, choosing the foundational materials with which to work with and build, and using the Father’s design, the foundation of The House is constructed reliably, for the first time ever in our experience. All because we put God’s will first above all, and especially above our own will.

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The most important beginning comes when are at the end of ourselves.

When at last we are at the end of ourselves, God can finally get through and show us a new beginning.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.