Wherein does restraint come from? For a grace person, the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, the Person, becomes my new restrictor. He is also known as the Spirit of grace in Heb 10:29. In John 13 He convicts. What does this mean? It means I can no longer use grace as a license to sin because He has the ability to make my life miserable when I do. How?
Well, when The Holy Spirit, becomes grieved or quenched, He withdraws Himself, and this takes away the witness of my son-ship. He points out my failure, and encourages me to change my mind. If He is pushed to the periphery, the sense of God’s love and my security in Him also fade. Grace loses it’s practicality in my experience. If I ignore all His pleadings, He lets me reap what I have sown.
See, the belittling of grace becomes a mockery of God’s policy, operation, and nature. The Holy Spirit will always teach pure grace. The Person of the Holy Spirit effects grace, since grace glues all my faculties together and reveals another person; Jesus Christ. This grace manifests not as a principle; but a gift, Jesus Christ himself. This explains why it outshines my soul’s best and worst efforts. Insights all, and mental wonders, as awesome potentials, still scratch not upward until The Personal Spirit strikes it alive in my heart and soul. Then we are healed!
There is a spirit in a man and the inspiration of the Almighty gives us understanding (Job 32:8). This refers to the human spirit. So, where has this spirit been hiding? Well, it has had no existence; came alive when The Holy Spirit entered. All psychological ‘spirit talk’ trashes truth or my question poses; what spirit do you mean? Perhaps some combination of religious feeling, altered state of consciousness, or intuitive hype, consists it? These psych guys don’t even recognize a personal kingdom made up of spirit beings that oppose their life, and they think they can tell me about spirit? Get a Bible, please!
And what understands? Well, understanding exists a capability, effective in holding the right criteria, causing a new truth versus error distinguishing. So, when my spirit activates, I gain the capability. Simultaneously, and at the point of this spirit activation, I gain this essential discriminator, and equally I get special insight into the nature of things,(the big picture of wisdom from above). Instead of subjecting our self under opinion’s fluctuating winds, we acquire inspired Holy Spirit dynamics to govern us. In addition we receive a firm sense of value-importance, decision making grace-ability, and self-control for conduct.
No longer are we ruled by running imagination, uncontrolled impulse or sentimental journeys; no longer intuition. Sound practical spirit energy activated by God’s Spirit of grace emerges our new dynamic.The Spirit becomes my ability to focus on grace also. In the journey of the children of Israel through the wilderness, they were, at some point, afflicted with snake bites and some sickened and some died. Praying to God, Moses got instruction to make a serpent of brass. When the serpent was lifted up on a pole, Moses commanded the people to look at the serpent and be healed. A quick take got them healed.
The simplicity of glancing at the serpent however holds an implication; they had to take their focus off their wounds. People freeze while looking at their hurts and pains and their eyes stick. Healing bogs down here; can’t look away. Healing needs grace and looking needs faith. Both are gifts of God or neither would ever happen. So, men block healing when they block grace’s entering and working. Nurturing builds faith in a Christian.
The way this works is: the Bible, God’s Word, when heard consistently taught from a man who has this grace ability, will produce faith. So we nurture faith by looking away consistently to the word of grace,( Acts 20:32), and this exercise of faith gains for us more faith. We take that faith and mix it with the next opportunity to hear the Word and gain another capacity for looking away.
Before we know it we are going from faith to faith as the Bible teaches, and are living in a constant look-away focus. When my muscles for faith grow and get strong I exercise faith as a lifestyle. I have essentially forsaken ‘sick,’ and made ‘whole’ my new me. Halleluiah!