"Don't wait to leave earth to experience heaven on earth now"
Our family is going on a cruise to the Caribbean and we lost my oldest son's passport. When you want to do ordinary traveling, you don't need a passport. But when you are doing great distance traveling like leaving the country, you have to have a passport. If you ever lose a passport, you will find out its hard work and costly to get another one. It's takes both time and effort to get a new one issued to you.
I believe some of us when it comes to experiencing heaven on earth is like losing our passport. Maybe trying to go to a far away destination comes with too high of a price tag. God desires to draw us closer to Him because He is our destination. God wants us to see and hear the sights and sounds of heaven. God wants us to be tuned in to His voice, renew our minds with God's Word, and fix our eyes on heaven.
For God to work within us in new ways means we first need to be open enough to think in new ways. God's thoughts are not our thoughts and God is calling each of us to go deeper and farther in the spiritual world than we have ever ventured before. We need to know who we truly are in Christ if we are going to understand more the character and ways of God. Only by meditating and contemplating on God's Word will we cultivate our inner life with God. God wants us all to be fully alive in Him.
This deeper spiritual journey of heaven changing earth will also mean that our self obsessions, blind spots, and self deceptions will be challenged and checked by God's Holy Spirit and purifying fire. It is only by becoming still that we experience the rhythm of God's presence. What I am discovering and slowly seeing is what many of the great mystics saw in their visionary experiences of Jesus who is the lover of my soul.
God is always ready to receive us like His little children but we must come honestly and humbly before God's throne of grace. When we pretend, conceal, hide, and deceive, we cheapen God's grace and spurn God's love to trust Him with our most desperate hearts. When we truly pray, the true condition of our hearts are revealed in the light of God's brilliance. The more we pray and come into God's Holy presence, the more we pass from thinking of God as a part of our life to understanding that we are a part of God's life. God's heart enlarges our heart and He transforms our spirit with His Spirit.
So as God prepares us this year of 2015, get ready because things are not always what they seem. Things right now are not as bad as you think and for others who think everything is fine spiritually, look out what God may show you next. This year is about being and not doing. God wants us to rest in His Presence and enter into a season of his peace.
This is also a year of depth. God is taking us deeper and we will not be ready for what is coming next if we do not submit to God's purifying fire and a season where God nourishes our deep spiritual roots so that we can be fruitful for things to come. And the greatest part of this faraway journey is we will learn to dwell and live in love which is to dwell and live in God!
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