What you believe rules your life, whether it be right believing, or wrong. You do not rule your believing but what you believe, rules you, resulting in the expression of your lifestyle. The Holy Spirit is our ever present Guide to direct us along the pathway of “all truth”. Jesus was the full expression of all the fullness of God. For us, this is our goal and birthright, but for Jesus it will be His “inheritance in the saints”. Just as we want to walk in our inheritance, our Lord Jesus desires His, in us.
Today, we are the full expression of what we believe. Proverbs 23: 7 declares “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he…”. What you believe rules your life, thus we live our lives accordingly.
In conversation with a friend, a man was sharing that he could not afford something. Later in the day, the Holy Spirit gave revelation conviction. The Lord impressed on the man this lesson: “Don’t use the words I can’t afford ever again. If something is My will, you can afford it. If it is not My will, you should not want to afford it”. The man had to change his believing in line with God’s instruction and choose to live his life accordingly. Wrong believing imprisons us, right believing brings freedom in Christ. John 8:32 Jesus declared: “And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free”. John 8:36 “If the Son therefore shall make you free, you shall be free indeed”.
Charles Wesley penned the hymn “And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Saviour’s Blood?” Verse 4 is as follows:
“Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature’s night,
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray, I woke, the dungeon flamed with light,
My chains fell off, my heart was free. I rose, went forth and followed Thee”.
In order to walk in the fullness of God, the Holy Spirit reveals to us the places we need to exchange our wrong believing for right. As we shed the imprisoning chains of wrong beliefs, we will discover new freedom in Christ – free indeed!
2 Kings 6: 1-7 is the record of an unusual account. The sons of the prophets told Elisha that the place where they lived with him was too small. (In line with our theme today, our wrong believing binds us in a prison of smallness. The fullness of God is a large habitation of divine life and liberty, (not license though)….). To continue the account in Kings: They asked Elisha to go with them to Jordan to build a larger dwelling place there for them. Elisha went with them and the men began to fell the trees, in order to build. As one man was using his axe, the axehead flew off the wooden shaft and into the water. The man was dismayed, especially so as he had borrowed the tool. He told Elisha his woeful tale and Elisha enquired whereabouts the axehead had fallen into the water. The man showed Elisha the place. Elisha cut down a stick and cast it into that same place. Miraculously, the iron axehead arose and swam. Elisha instructed the man to pick it up. He put out his hand and recovered it.
There is so much to be gleaned from this story. Where we read of wood in scripture, it is typical of humanity. The axehead, iron, is typical of power. The power of God in our lives enables us to function according to His will in all things related to daily living. The man had lost his axehead, (power). A tree cannot be cut down with wood, he needed his axehead. Elisha is typical of the Holy Spirit in this incident. He took the man back to show Him where he had lost his axehead, (power). The Holy Spirit often takes us back to certain incidents in the past, sometimes long forgotten, where we made mistakes which have resulted in consequences that have impaired our walk with the Lord. The Lord wants to restore what He means us to have. As we walk in truth before the Holy Spirit, embracing the place He shows us where we lost our axehead, (power), He supernaturally restores us and causes the axehead to float! Restoration.
We all have certain areas of wrong believing in our lives. The Spirit of God seeks to deal with these. Anything that does not come up to the standards of His Son, Jesus Christ, God wants to change. We cannot fulfil the will of God in our lives without His enabling power, the axehead. God’s heart is to restore us and set us on a forward pathway again towards our Promised Land. Free indeed!
Photo by Hamza NOUASRIA on Unsplash
