I’ve often thought of the Christian life as a continual process of opening oneself up to God. We start our Christian journey by saying yes to Jesus—and then the difficult work of actually giving over every part of our being to God begins. A.W. Tozer questions whether or not any of us fully understands the extent to which the Spirit wants to take over our lives. Have we truly counted the costs of letting God be the Lord of our Lives?

Before a man can be filled with the Spirit he must be sure he wants to be. And let this be taken seriously. Many Christians want to be filled, but their desire is a vague romantic kind of thing hardly worthy to be called desire. They have almost no knowledge of what it will cost them to realize it.

Let us imagine that we are talking to an inquirer, some eager young Christian, let us say, who has sought us out to learn about the Spirit-filled life. As gently as possible, considering the pointed nature of the questions, we would probe his soul somewhat as follows: “Are you sure you want to be filled with a Spirit who, though He is like Jesus in His gentleness and love, will nevertheless demand to be Lord of your life? Are you willing to let your personality be taken over by another, even if that other be the Spirit of God Himself?

What areas in your life are you holding back from God? Is it out of fear, pride, or something else?

By: Chris. This entry was posted on Thursday, November 4th, 2010 at 11:35 am and is filed under Devotional, Faith, god. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.