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    As If: If we live by the Spirit, we should also walk by the Spirit
    As If: If we live by the Spirit, we should also walk by the Spirit
    As If: If we live by the Spirit, we should also walk by the Spirit
    Ebook128 pages1 hour

    As If: If we live by the Spirit, we should also walk by the Spirit

    By Graeme Schultz

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    About this ebook

    It would be very strange to see a butterfly living its life like a caterpillar, never trusting its wings to carry it and never embracing its new identity. It would be a denial of all that defines its existence.
    It occurred to me some time ago that I had spent a significant part of my life making statements about faith, but not actually liv

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGobsmacked Publishing
    Release dateJul 19, 2019
    ISBN9780648469032
    As If: If we live by the Spirit, we should also walk by the Spirit

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      Book preview

      As If - Graeme Schultz

      Introduction

      Have you ever wondered why Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God so much?

      Sure, it was His home base, and the place where His Father lived, so it held a special place in His heart; but apart from that, it seems like an unusual subject with which to be preoccupied. And He was preoccupied with it. By my count, Jesus referred to the Kingdom of God more than fifty times in the gospels, and the apostles that number again.

      If it had been up to me, I would have spent more time talking about the big-ticket items like sin, holy living, worship and prayer. But while Jesus may have touched on these subjects, He always seemed to be distracted by the one subject that really filled His screen, the Kingdom of God. It was like an obsession, an addiction of the best kind—Jesus seemed to be totally distracted by the Kingdom of God.

      For most of my life, I wrote it off as simply an unusual turn of phrase that was used in a generic way to encompass all things spiritual—but now, I’m not so sure. Lately I’ve been wondering if the thing that consumed Jesus is supposed to consume us all, and we can’t get a handle on this whole Christianity thing unless we get the Kingdom of God resolved for what it truly is.

      I’m not suggesting that we can’t be saved—that is a gift—but I am suggesting that we can’t walk profoundly and deeply in our salvation without grasping what made Jesus tick.

      I probably wouldn’t even be writing about it now if I hadn’t been stopped in my tracks by a time of hardship about a decade ago. That time in my life made me rethink everything. I found myself asking God some questions—questions about how to fix troubling circumstances, and about whether some circumstances were beyond fixing because of the wrong decisions I had made which created them.

      There is a lot of ground still to cover in this book, but let me say from the outset that I know now that most of these questions were asked from the perspective of the kingdom of this world. I didn’t know how to relate to God as a resident of His kingdom, so my dialogue was an attempt to leap across the great chasm that existed between my world and His.

      To be honest, I didn’t know that residency in the Kingdom of God was an option for me; nobody told me that I could approach God as a beloved son. I thought the best I could hope for was to serve God to the best of my ability and hope it would be enough to attract His attention.

      Nobody told me how to live as a son of God.

      Maybe nobody knew.

      Maybe we Christians have become so accustomed to yelling out to God across the great chasm that we think it is normal to approach God with uncertainty, normal to invite God into our earthly issues instead of relocating ourselves into the safety of His love.

      If these words sound like the ramblings of a religious crank, be patient with me please. I have much to explain, and my words are simple words strung together like a necklace of seashells—I will need all of your tenacity and concentration to make a thing of beauty out of a collection of such ordinary words.

      My fear is that I will have written too poorly to convey to you a treasure that is beyond imagination, and that we will arrive at the end of this book without you having crossed over the chasm. I know that in the end it’s not up to me; it is only the Holy Spirit who draws us towards the splendour of God’s love expressed so completely at the cross of Christ. But I want to do honour to that great love by conveying in simple language a love that is far beyond man-made superlatives.

      No easy task.

      Paul crafted new words to help him as he attempted to convey that which is beyond human expression: immeasurable, surpassing, unthinkable. That is the point for us, too; we must have the courage to push off from the safe harbour of our familiar thinking if we are to discover the lost treasure of God’s Kingdom. We know deep down that it is out there; something resonates within us and draws us onward—a memory perhaps, or an ancient longing we can’t deny that we were made for the Kingdom of God’s love, and we can never be truly satisfied until we are at rest in it.

      The chasm that separates the Kingdom of God from the kingdom of this world is impossible to cross by human effort, yet we can be carried over it in an instant if we will change our thinking.

      If this book is about anything, it is about crossing that chasm.

      Thanks for your patience so far … stay with me now; the road ahead might get a bit bumpy.

      CHAPTER 1

      What the Kingdom of God isn’t

      I remember hearing a story about two little orphaned girls who were adopted by a Christian couple and lifted out of the hardship of a third world country. They left behind a life of squalor, fear, and hunger, living on the streets, and began a new life in the relative ease and safety of rural Australia.

      Their new parents loved and nurtured them as their own. They were embraced into the family household as equal members, with all of the rights and privileges of natural born children. Every day they were treated with love and respect. Meal times, daily activities, and bedtime were all lavish expressions of their new parents’ love.

      The two environments could not have been more different: now food was plentiful, their home was safe and warm, and the stress of living on the streets was replaced by the kindness and gentleness of two truly good parents.

      Yet something wasn’t right.

      Every day the children would secretly stockpile food under their beds. They took fruit, biscuits, and anything else they could get their hands on, and squirreled them away in preparation for the time when life would revert to the old days.

      And perhaps even worse than their compulsion to shore up for their physical needs, they also continued to live in fear. Even though they were treated well by all at home, school and church, they remained emotionally insecure and clung to each other in private, wondering when this temporary nirvana would all come to an end and they would find themselves impoverished and alone all over again.

      Their entire environment was bathed in love and security, yet they continued to live as children of another land. But it was all in their heads—they couldn’t bring their thinking into agreement with their new environment.

      A great chasm separated these two environments—

      a chasm that was constructed and maintained by their thinking.

      They thought their new home was makeshift, and that their comfort and security could not be counted upon; so they lived in their new home with the mindset of temporary visitors, even though the assurance of permanence was all around them.

      Unbeknownst to their new parents, the girls doubted the reality of their new life, and in spite of the promise of a wonderful future, they continued to live by the ways of the past.

      They didn’t know how to live as children of the promise…just like I didn’t know how to live as a son of God. There was no problem with the girls’ new home, just as there is no problem with the Kingdom of God. The problem for me, as it was for the two girls, was changing my thinking and learning how to live there.

      We cannot bring our old paradigms and habits with us into the Kingdom of God, else we find ourselves behaving like beggars rather than the sons and daughters we really are.

      So the problem for us is not that our citizenship in the Kingdom of God is in any way tenuous or conditional, rather it is that we attempt to live in the promises and abundance of God’s heart by the means of our old pre-salvation mindset.

      We will see God as He really is when we pass through the veil of death, and then the great chasm created by our earthbound thinking will fall away. But for now we must learn to live by faith—not faith generated by self-effort, but a restful faith that God is as good and loving as He claims to be.

      It is in our hands (and our heads).

      God has transferred us to the Kingdom of His Beloved Son, just as He promised in Colossians 1:3. All that remains is for us to boldly walk in it. Our relocation is complete; we are home where we belong, yet our natural instincts stand in opposition to our new citizenship.

      So we circle around and around God’s love attempting to bridge the divide by the means we have always employed, yet knowing in our hearts that there is a better way…if we could only figure it out.

      If only we could learn how to live in this new truth.

      CHAPTER 2

      The better way

      The two little girls brought their old way of thinking to their new home with the result that they enjoyed only a fraction of the potential of their new lives. But they couldn’t help it; they had no way of knowing how to think differently. They had been pre-wired by their past to think and live as they did; they had no other previous experience to lean on.

      The experience they

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