Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Are You Normal?

 The following is from W. Ian Thomas' final book The Indwelling Life of Christ:  All of Him in All of Me:

 "God Himself, as our Creator, always intended that He should indwell us; His cherished ambition was to be seen and heard in those He created.  That  is normality for a human being, when God Himself is behaving in and through a man or woman.  This is the purpose for which He created us, that we might be a physical, visible expression on this earth of the God who is otherwise invisible, as John tells us, 'No one has seen God at any time' (John 1:18).

"God created each human being with a physical, visible, and audible body to be inhabited by an invisible God, to make Himself visible through what that person does and says and is.  

"God Himself must be the origin of this activity within us, which is called righteousness.  God is the author of all righteousness, and for you and me to produce it, He must be within us the origin of His own image, the source of His own activity, the dynamic of His own demands, and the cause of His own effect.

"Therefore if any human being is truly normal in his or her behavior, there is only One Person to be congratulated, and that is God Himself.  Normality for a human being is when God can be seen by anything and everything which that person does and says and is.

"Our 'natural' man, or who we are in our flesh, is void of righteousness and also of any true spirituality:  'The natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned' (1 Corinthians 2:14).

"The natural man cannot know the things of the Spirit of God because he is morally and intellectually incapacitated.   The natural man is not normal; he is not  what God created and intended man to be.  In his fallen condition he is destitute, empty, and alienated from the person of his Creator.

"The moment you come to realize that only God can make a person righteous and godly, you are left with no option but to find God, and to know Him, and to let God be God in and through you, whatever that will mean.  This will leave you with no margin for picking and choosing, for there is only one God, and He is absolute, and He made you expressly for Himself."

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