https://vimeo.com/77545158

I'm Wayne Jacobson and this is Engage. Well, we just got a few of these videos to do before we're done with this Engage series. I didn't intend to go on forever and it to be your link to God. In fact, I was hoping these videos would help you open to God in a way that gets your own journey going and if that's happened by now, you don't even need to watch the rest of these. But for those of you still trying to figure out how we do it, I just back from a trip to England and a lot of conversations all over England and Scotland while I was there. And one of the things that kept coming up I thought was interesting is how we've learned to live this Christian walk for the most part because someone taught us a sense of principles we ought to believe and things we ought to do and we try to wrap our heads around it and then we try to do those things the best we can. And I know when we start to shift between seeing life as more, at least what we've been involved in the past as more religious and more performance oriented and want to move to something more life in the spirit, it's like we need a whole different set of principles to wrap our heads around that and the questions for that are endless because I think the temptation is we want to figure it all out before we start on a journey and there's just no way to figure it out first. I think that's why Jesus didn't give us a plan to follow, he didn't give us a church to obey. When he was leaving us, what he said was this, I'm going to give you my spirit and he will lead you into all truth, that's John 16. And since then we've seemed like well we're going to get truth if we follow the right pastor, author, guru type or we're going to follow him by following the scriptures and as valuable as the scriptures are and we've talked about them, they're not our way to follow him because unfortunately we end up misinterpreting the scriptures, the scriptures are great until we start misinterpreting them and then they're a bit of a mess. We need to follow as the Holy Spirit who lives in us and that's what Jesus said, I'm going to give you him, he will guide you into all truth. So this journey is not about wrapping my head around the right set of principles, it really is about following the Holy Spirit as he makes himself known within us. Well I was in England, I found myself sharing an illustration with someone that I thought might be helpful to some of you, involved salt and pepper shaker but we're going to use balls this time. We're going to let this ball be the earth, this little stick be us, we're on this earth and I want to think of these bodies as the gravitational pull of the earth that holds us here and I want this ball to represent the moon and it hangs out over here somewhere and its gravitational pull isn't as strong as this but we still feel it. We see it when our tides are pulled to high and low tides, that's the influence of the moon's gravitational pull. Pulling us, when our astronauts went from here to here, when they settled on the moon for a bit, they reached a point somewhere out here where the pull of this got stronger than the pull of this. I'm hoping our engaged videos kind of move us that direction. If this is the Spirit of God drawing us into the life of the Father and this is the old way of thinking. This is the world and the way it thinks and the way we were trained to live in the world and how our twistedness of flesh grounded us here and it also represents how religion twisted us even further, that old performance space, God to achieve, God to do for God. When we start here and we begin to come alive in the Spirit, the Spirit begins to draw us into a different orbit, into a different life but that's very faint sometimes. We just hear the beck and call but it's following that Spirit that Jesus wanted us to do and sometimes it looks like this. We nudge this way a little bit but it still seems like this is so hard to resist and this seems so weak and so distant in our lives but here's what I want to encourage you. The more we move this way the less this has significance and the more pull this has that lets us live in the freedom of this reality and that's what the Holy Spirit's doing. He's drawing us here. The reality though is we don't we don't go like that to get from A to B. In fact we start here and the pull of that, our fears, our coping mechanisms, our sin, our desires to even when we want to be blessed by God, most of the time our blessed by God is in earthly realities, not really learning to live here and the Holy Spirit just draws us. He draws this this way and yet we feel the pull of the world sometimes and the ways of thinking that aren't worthy of Him draws us back here and then the Holy Spirit keeps pulling. Sometimes we go along, sometimes we fade back and maybe three steps forward, two steps back and that's why our spiritual life doesn't feel so smooth. It's not always easy but it's not a new set. This is what I want to really emphasize. It's not a new set of principles we're going after. It's learning to live in the life of the Spirit. That's what Jesus gave us. He said, learn to follow Him, those nudges when you wake up, the thought in your head that's not yours, the idea of laying your life down somewhere for someone that you would never have thought of it or never wanted to do it. But when we seize the moment and we take the risk to follow what's in our heart, that's how we learn to keep moving this way where this pull gets less, this pull gets greater until we find our way to live here in the life of the Spirit. So I guess what I want to encourage you to do is learn to listen to that. It may be faint, it may be incredibly weak and you're not even sure sometimes, but if what you're feeling nudged to do isn't mean spirited, isn't going to hurt someone else, isn't demanding someone else serve you, but in fact seems kind, seems generous, seems wise, not by earthly standards necessarily but by godly standards, then go ahead and give it a risk. Take that step forward and the more we learn to respond to this, the freer we're going to be. In the initial days, yes, I can tell you we're always being pulled back toward religious ways of thinking, we're always pulled back to the the way we indulge our flesh, but if you'll just keep walking, just keep getting here, you do reach a point at which the gravitational pull of here is less than the gravitational pull of here and that's where this journey gets really, really fun because now this doesn't draw me back so much anymore. In fact, I don't even want that. I want to live here. I want to live inside the life of the Spirit as he makes Jesus known to me. So wake up every morning, listen, follow what you know to do and see how he teaches you to walk in the Father's life.