Something Worth Writing Home

I have been reading Oswald Chamber's  "My Utmost for His Highest"  right at fifty years now.  I started using this daily devotional classic my junior year of college and it has always had an easy-to-get-to place on my bookshelf.  He seems to have a way of bringing a word into my life that resonates with my own faith journey.  A recent reading on the Beatitudes had me reading, "The Sermon on the Mount is not a set of rules and regulations; it is a statement of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit is getting His way with us."

 

Too many times we approach the Beatitudes as well as the entire Sermon on the Mount as a way of life that is possible for those who decide to simply live by those words.  Certainly, there was a time when it seemed to me that I could take those words and flesh them out in my own strength.  Determination and commitment would surely be enough.  Of course, like many others who have walked that road before me, I discovered it was a fool's journey.  I could not do what I thought I could do.  What I wanted to do was not possible simply because I decided it would be so.

 

Chambers is right as he speaks of the spiritual possibilities available to us if we allow the Holy Spirit to get His way with us.  What the Holy Spirit can do with us and through us if we give Him the absolute go-ahead is nothing short of extraordinary.  The impossible becomes possible.  But, it is never because of what we can do, but because of what the Holy Spirit can do with us when we allow Him to control completely our heart.  The spiritual life we are going after is never about us so much as it is about Him.  Depending on the Holy Spirit is the key to a spiritual life that gives us something worth writing home.