God wants you (pointing finger)

In the style of Uncle Sam Wants You posters, God wants to join his army.  Fortunately, God respects our free will and will never force you to do anything.  But if you make yourself available, God is eager to use you for his purposes.  And just like Uncle Sam, he doesn’t send you into battle unprepared.  God gives us the Holy Spirit to equip us.  The Holy Spirit does many things in our lives, this is just a few of them:

1. John 14:26 says the Holy Spirit is our Comforter, and reminds us of things Jesus has already taught us.
2. 1 Cor 3:16 says our body is God’s temple, and his Spirit lives in us.  In the Old Testament God lived among his people via the tabernacle and later the inner chamber of the temple.  He sent the Holy Spirit so that he could dwell with all of us.  As my 2 year old daughter would say in a cute 2 year old voice: “God lives in my heart”.  This is only possible by the Holy Spirit.
3. Acts 1:8 says we will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on us, so that we can be Christ’s witness to the ends of the earth.  God wants us to continue his ministry here on earth even after he ascended to heaven.  I don’t believe this is limited to the subject of his ministry, but also the method of his ministry.  The subject of Christ’s ministry was of course love, grace, and salvation.  But the way in which he demonstrated these things to the people was through miracles.  It’s a lot easier to teach someone the gospel after they’ve just been the recipient of God’s mighty love in the form of a personal miracle.  And this is the best form of advertising.  News didn’t travel by fast back in those days, and yet Mark 6:55 tells us that when people heard that Jesus was coming they ran to get their sick so that they too would be healed.  John 21:25 says Jesus did so many miracles that the world does not have room to contain enough books to document what he did.  Jesus wasn’t just about eternity, he was also about the here and now, heaven on earth.  God gives the Holy Spirit so that we can continue the method of Jesus’ ministry.  John 14:12 says:

¹²I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. ¹³And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. ¹⁴You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.

God gives you the Holy Spirit because he wants to use you for his purpose.  But when we exercise the Gifts of the Spirit, who’s really doing the work?  Certainly it requires an obedient person to submit themselves to the work of the Lord, and to align their own spirit with the Holy Spirit, but the work of the manifestation of any of the spiritual gifts still belongs to the Lord.  We merely become a conduit for God’s blessing and power.

This point was made clear to me one night when I was praying with Becca.  I thought I had finished my prayer, yet my spirit still wanted to pray.  I didn’t want to pray in tongues because we are still rather new to that sort of thing and I didn’t know how she would receive it, so I resisted.  But the impulse to continue to pray did not subside, in fact I was soon feeling physical twitches in my lips!  So I told my Becca that I felt I needed to be obedient to what the Lord would have me do and I began to pray in the spirit.  During my prayer there was one phrase where I felt I had received the interpretation, so I shared the interpretation as “more of me, less of you”.  As soon as I said this, I flinched.  I recognized what I had just said but thought I had botched it up.  “Less of me, more of you” is a phrase that we sometimes here at our church, and has become a kind of a prayer mantra for me this year, but I had said “more of me, less of you”, which taken plainly is a very selfish statement.  So, thinking that I had inadvertently switched the words, I felt somewhat embarrassed but corrected myself and continued my prayer, “less of me, more of you”.

Some days later I was pondering how I could have made such a silly mistake in a time of intense prayer.  Yes, it could have been a simple mental slip up, easy to do, but given that I had prayed it many times before it was less likely.  Then God gave me a revelation:  If praying in tongues is a gift given by the Spirit so that God can use it to execute his will, then the wording “more of me, less of you” actually makes perfect sense!  If the Holy Spirit was praying through my mouth that Becca would focus more on God and less on her immediate troubles, then “more of me, less of you” is 100% appropriate.

Coming to this realization was very humbling.  It wasn’t that I had spoken in tongues or I had received an interpretation, but instead it was that God was able to work through me by manifesting 2 of the spiritual gifts within me.   I wasn’t providing the words, God was providing the words!  Or more generically, we don’t summon the power of the Holy Spirit so that we can do miracles.  Instead, we simply make ourselves available to be used by the Holy Spirit so that God can do miracles simply because he loves his children.  The distinction between the two is very minor and easy to lose in words, but the implications of the two mindsets is tremendous for someone who wants to serve Jesus in the way that we are empowered to in John 14:12 and 15:7.

Even if it was a mental mistake, I thought it was a pretty cool revelation and in faith choose to accept it as words from God.