At Home in Reality

Devotions should bring you to God - not man . . . including yourself.

You cannot stand upon the wisdom of man to glimpse God.

Devotions do not have you at their centre: not your relationship to God, nor your faith, nor anything prefaced with 'your'. Devotions should exist to bring you into the life of God and should therefore take you out of your own life, so that what concerns you or what you are holding clatters to the ground as you forget what is behind. These true devotions do not preoccupy you with a new set of problems; they do not rake over old ground; they do not require you to solve problems; they do not require you to use your wisdom. These are all bleached and rolled by the confontation with God.

Anything: any writing or any speaking that is not taken with the Lord only deals with peripheral things. Devotions do not stroke your self-worth or your gifts or your ministries. Devotions have at their centre Jesus in His risen glory or in His manly life. Your ears are not cluttered with quotes from from others or interjections from well-qualified third parties. You are with your beloved. Any other noise is sandled feet on holy ground; this is why the door to the prayer closet is closed: to disallow interruptions. It is you and His voice.

You have an anointing that is not counterfeit but true and therefore He teaches you Himself. There is no intermediary, no High Priest to represent you to God continually. He has done it once and for all, the way is cleared: you are the Priesthood to minister directly to God. Anything else will muddy the water. Any figure of Moses in your life must be sidestepped; the Lord will lead you Himself from the pillar of cloud and fire, day and night. The old categories of this life and psychology will mean nothing to you. Worldly ways to diagnose the troubles of your ailing heart will prove of no value, they can only observe symptoms from afar; they can only modify the behaviour.

God is not interested in your mental health or your inconvenient behaviour, but He is interested in you; He wants you for Himself. Why let anyone or anything stand in the way? God does not call us on out of our own self-interest but out of obedience to Him. God does not bargain or barter with you, it is always on His terms. He is not interested in our dignity before men or ourselves, but our status before Him. He is not interested in you becoming 'more yourself' or being 'more human'. These so-called devotions should not try to get you back to the comfortable Garden of Eden but into the blood-sweated dark Gethsemane. We no longer become God's original intention but His greatest intention: to lift us up into God himself, wherein before we were below the angels - now we are in Christ. He is not intereseted in a 'better world' or helping you to 'cope' or to avoid suffering. He Himself is our Peace and our Truth. The reality is always found in Christ and nowhere else. God does not want you to be what He first designed you to be, the first creation of man has been abolished just as the first convenant has been surpassed. He wants you to be what He created you to be in Christ. This is the first of the last creation. We are the firstfruits that supplants the previous age, for only in Christ does the new age begin.