Late Winter                                                                                                  March 1, 2013

It is the season of Lent in the Garden, and we prepare our spirits to receive revelation about how we have been rescued from ourselves—how we have been brought into an amazing everlasting relationship with an amazing everlasting God.

I recall a moment in time years ago when I was a young believer—desperate to know why two marriages had resulted in divorce, why I felt so alone even though I knew that God loved me, why I couldn’t seem to get things right in my life.

I was meeting regularly with a man who promoted himself as a Christian counselor.  Over time he encouraged me to find strength and truth in God’s Word, and to look for God’s Spirit in myself.  All well and good.

But the conversation slowly, carefully, took a tiny turn toward something that I soon found to be insidious and threatening.  (I know now that the Holy Spirit was giving me discernment to understand this, and to see the danger in where we were headed.)

The counselor—good man that he was—was deceived, and was being used to deceive me.  As we dug deeper into “me in God, God in me,” his words began to say “you and God are the same” and then “you are God.”  I was at once both fascinated and repelled.  I was a 20^th century Eve.

Now, decades later, I remember this as I meditate upon the craftiness of Satan (the enemy in the Garden) to take a measure of truth and insert into it a measure of lie.

The truth is this: the one true triune God does indeed abide in me (John 14:23) and I have chosen (as much as a fallen soul can) to abide in Him (John 15:4-8.)  But I am not the same as God, and I am not a god.  My God is singularly holy, all powerful, all knowing and ever present in all places and at all times.  He is the Creator of all life.

While I have been rescued from myself—my errant (call it sinful) ways, my inclination to be unholy (call it iniquity or transgression), my mortal earthly death—this rescuing does not make me equal to the God Who created and rescued me.  While God’s Word tells us to be perfect (Matthew 5:48), to be holy (Ephesians 1:4), to understand that we have been made new (2 Corinthians 5:17), God does not say that in this earthly life we ARE perfect, or that we ARE as holy as He is.

We are always pursuing this goal (1 Corinthians 9:24.)  By the grace of God we have been set on a course, a heavenly and perfect plan marked out for us (Hebrews 12:1) that as we work to follow it, leads us ever closer into Him.  We find ourselves ever deeper into the things of His heart, into the revelation of His truth, and into the satisfaction of His embrace.  His Spirit swells within us as we expand within Him.

This is a Garden place not of rift or expulsion as Eve and Adam experienced when they bought the lie, but a Garden place of peace, belonging and fulfilling light.  We can rest in the beauty of His presence; we can find strength in the revelation of His faithfulness.  We are surrounded by His grace and His love.  There is no better Lenten truth.