WCTLC

Steps To A Sanctified Life Through Spiritual Growth

James 4:8-10 (NIV) Come near to God and He will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will lift you up.

Step One

Come near to God and He will come near to you.

When we open the four doors to God, we feel like we have arrived. However, we can't look at spiritual growth as a check list. We aren't trying to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and then walk off. Check, I did that step. A RELATIONSHIP with God is ongoing. In our General Spiritual Growth study, we did get a lot closer to God than ever before. But, we want more of God and all He has to offer. We are now learning how to do that. Our only real goal in Step One is to get closer to God. But we have to include in that goal a desire to make Him number One in our lives. We must take an attitude of continuing to come close to God for the rest of our lives. More of God pushes out the habits, addictions, people associations, life patterns, and memories that need pushed out; BUT, MORE OF GOD HAS TO SHOW US WHAT THEY ARE FIRST. God wants a deep relationship with us that is close and personal. He also wants a relationship with us that is exclusive.

Exo 34:14 (NIV) Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, Whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.

Mat 6:24 (NIV) "No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.

Hey, This Is Starting To Cause Me Pain!

Once we commit ourselves to a CONSTANT, INTENSE pursuit of God, we will start putting all our desires toward Him. The closer our relationship with God becomes, the more He will start pointing out those things we have in our belief system, our emotions, our lifestyle, and our relationships that shouldn't be there. All we are working on in this step is to intensify our desire and submission toward God. We may not have a lot of success in changing the way we live. But, we must want God with a deeper and deeper level of desire.

Our goal is to keep coming nearer and nearer to God. When we start doing that, God's promise is to keep coming nearer and nearer to us. As God comes near to us, He will shine His light into our life and reveal the truth about what is in there. Then His powerful light will drive the darkness of undesirable things out of our life. We can't do that; only God can. Now, here's the strange part about this experience; the more we grow in our relationship with God, the more we will get frustrated with our current life situation. We will get frustrated with the way we don't love the things we know we should be loving. And we will get frustrated with the way we don't hate things we know we should be hating. We must NOT fight that frustration. This frustration is a GOOD attitude. And, we must NOT stop seeking to keep getting closer to God. It is true that this closeness to God is making us more miserable about the inconsistencies and undesirable attitudes in our life. But, we have to always keep in mind that it isn't the love relationship that is making us miserable. It is the inconsistencies in our likes and dislikes that are making us miserable. The love relationship with God is just pointing them out.

Take these miserable feelings and turn them into prayers and requests before God.

Mark 11:24 (NIV) Therefore I tell you, WHATEVER you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

Here is our chance to express our desire. This verse opens up the door for us to couple our love for God and our misery against these inconsistencies together to form a very intense prayer. This is where we let God know that we REALLY want Him and we REALLY don't want the things we have allowed into our heart. We have to ask God to help us start yielding our belief system, emotional wounds, life-habits and addictions, and damaging relationships over to Him. We have to BELIEVE that He will start coming closer to us as we start praying to Him. We have to BELIEVE that as He comes closer, He will use His powerful, loving light to drive out these inconsistencies of darkness from our heart that are causing all this pain.

Purification Through Exposure

Step One