Rob Crickett: Four Steps in Doing The Will Of God - Part 2 - Managing Your Project Into Completion

(Continuing from part 1 of Rob Crickett: Four Steps in Doing The Will Of God)

STEP 2: MANAGING YOUR PROJECT TO ITS COMPLETION

Afterwards, as you ponder what has just happened, you know that you have now finally come to a place with God where you have together indeed planned something. You have just purposely brought the will of God into your heart’s vision. You and God have a project in motion now, a project in which you see eye to eye, at least at this starting moment of the project’s conception in the joint womb of your will and the Father’s will.

At that time everything in your life changes a little bit, just as if you were pregnant. Indeed, you are pregnant. Your will is pregnant with the seed of God’s will. The thing that you want to have happen becomes your ideal. It becomes your goal. You begin to walk in it. You defend its coming about, and you soon begin to see it manifest in your life.

OBSTACLES RISE UP AGAINST YOU

Obstacles come against your doing the will of God, especially in the early years of trying to do it. We experience less of the apparent warfare between the flesh and the spirit when we more fully enter the spiritual domain. In it we who are faith sons and daughters of God enjoy considerable deliverance from the slave-like bondage to fleshly matter. Two elements are present: literal release from the flesh, and increased enlightenment about how liberating it is to serve people through the doing of the will of the heavenly Father.

We know that to do the will of God is to serve people. A life in Christ is superbly equipping. Our salvation in Jesus Christ itself enables us to partake of the realities that Jesus himself won for us—such as human communion with the Father; freedom from all human sickness and disease; deliverance from spiritual darkness; heavenly citizenship here on earth; the guarantee of perfection brought about by the Spirit of the Father indwelling us; the guarantee of heavenly power given to us through his own Spirit, the Spirit of Truth. Plus, Jesus showed us a new way to live—as a perfected human being who is perfect in the doing of the will of God. Such a way of living very largely enables us to escape the dire consequences of the Lucifer’s heavenly rebellion that brought sin into the world, and most effectively compensates for the deprivations resulting from the calamity of Adam and Eve’s decisions.

For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Galatians 5:1

For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.  1 John 5:4

The life in Christ makes God-knowing men and women who have been born of the Spirit experience no more conflict with their mortal natures than as if sin had never entered the world, and Adam and Eve had never fallen. Such sons and daughters of God live and operate on intellectual levels and spiritual domains that are far above the conflicts produced by unrestrained or unnatural physical desires. We do not experience the normal urges of created beings nor the natural appetites and impulses of the physical nature to be in conflict with even the highest spiritual attainment. Doing the will of the Father certainly doesn’t require renunciation of the physical body nor rejection of the material world. If anything, it is quite the opposite: one becomes even more responsible for one’s body and mind and worldly environment. There are, however, many people who are ignorant, mistaught, or unfortunately overconscientious who fall prey to the flesh and who make a religious life out of physical torment and worldly rejection. Such souls reflect the spiritual abandonment that enslaves them, against which Jesus taught.

When we first start out to undertake projects that are specifically employing the will of God, however, it is as if the whole world were cast by a template fashioned out of everything that opposes God. In our naivety we believe that the whole world loves and thrives on the truth, beauty and goodness of God. We often are quick, in our hope for a swift return on our simple investment, too quick, in overestimating our own spiritual capacity, and the real distance that might exist between the flesh and the spirit within our own consciousness. Our naivety simply does not perceive the gap between where we are and where we wish to be.

I notice several things that threaten the success of the person who is just in the beginning stages of learning how to do the will of God. They are as follows:

• there is considerable apparent warfare between the flesh and the spirit;
• there is little comparative deliverance from the slave-bondage of the flesh;
• one is easily and regularly enmeshed in the dire consequences of Lucifer’s rebellion;
• one really does experience the deprivations due to the fall of Adam and Eve, but it takes a long time to actually register what they are;
• one initially knows little freedom from the law of animal living and the temptations of evil and sin;
• one has little victory over the flesh, and almost no comprehension of how faith works;
• one experiences varying degrees of conflict with one’s mortal nature;
• one has not much success working on intellectual levels and living on spiritual planes far above ... or even meagrely above...the conflicts produced by unrestrained and unnatural physical desires.

THE PARABLE OF THE SOWER

Jesus said there would be days like this, when he preached on the sower sowing the Word, and he referred to the actions of the birds and the thorns— those things that come against the doing of the Father’s will:

And he told them many things in parables, saying: “A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured them.

Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil, but when the sun rose they were scorched. And since they had no root, they withered away.

Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them.

Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.  He who has ears, let him hear." Matthew 13:3-9

Over a period of trial and error that invariably lasts for years, even when you feed off the written Word of God in the Bible and soak in the experiences of others more gifted than yourself in this matter, you learn to let God fight your battles for you when obstacles arise and want to rob you of the completion of your project.

It is a learned skill, but eventually you have a powerful command of spiritual warfare. As soon as an obstacle comes against you in the world, you can deal with the obstacle by heavenly power. Your life is now augmented by a will in God your heavenly Father that is totally fixated on achievement. It will get you through, so long as you don’t back away from the vision that God has placed in your believing heart.

We find a valuable lesson in Jesus saying to us to not resist evil, just to let it play itself out, and to keep our focus on the Father’s will rather than the lures and illusions of the enemy to our project. When we do just what he said to do, victory lays itself at our feet.

THE PLANTING OF THE LORD

In the beginning, a person who doesn’t know how to do the will of God is tossed all over the place, like the Book of James talks about.

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.  But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.  For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. James 1:5-8

“Tossed in all his ways,” because we don’t yet have the vision that is God’s planting in us. It all depends upon the vision that God plants in our heart. Isaiah 61:3 says that you are “the planting of the Lord”, the “righteousness of the Lord.”

You are a planting. You are a fertile, moist, warm ground into which God Himself delights to plant seeds of His will. The heavenly Father is adjusting your thoughts about things, but when you look to the end result of why God would be adjusting your thought you see that it is to position us so that He can plant seeds of His will into our will.

God wants to plant his vision in you. You can’t do the will of God by your own learning. You can’t just say, “This is what Jesus would do. I’ll go and do that.” That’s nice, but that’s hardly the perfect doing of the will of God.

The perfect doing of the will of God is a matching of the human will with the divine will, and the human vision with the divine vision. Doing the will of God is not a case of “my will doesn’t count for anything and I must completely subjugate myself to God’s will.”

Neither is the doing of the will of God a case of, “It is my will that Your will be done.” This sounds great in theory but the heavenly Father will correct this theory during your actual experience until you find that the doing of the will of God is a case of, “It is my will, Father, that your will enters fully into my will and that we together form a whole new will together.”

It is with such a human-divine fusion of wills that the perfect will of God is performed effortlessly time and time again, to the great satisfaction of the heavenly Father Himself.

THE SIMPLE INCREASES TO THE COMPLEX

Reflecting upon your initial steps, however, after the first time that you get this certain planting of God’s vision into your believing heart, you start to actually do the will of God in your life.

The first episode of doing the will of God might be a simple and a short incident for you. It might entail simply meeting a certain person and delivering some kind of spiritual message or support to the person: a simple engagement.

According to your own success, God will increase the complexity until you can be involved in a long drawn out plan.

BRINGING A PRISONER TO JESUS

I remember bringing one of the more notorious prisoners at Melbourne’s Port Philip Prison into Jesus’ salvation. It took a few months short of two years to accomplish that project.

I knew it was the will of God all along. I had taken a job in a prison because I wanted to find Jesus ministering there and save some souls.

I saw that this particular prisoner was a serious operator in the prison, and I had a desire to claim him for the kingdom. I prayed and my heavenly Father agreed with me.

That agreement is the vision planting I have been teaching you about during the past few pages.

One night, shortly after that, whilst I was at a Rodney Howard-Browne crusade meeting, my Father showed me a Holy Spirit-filled vision of this prisoner coming into salvation and then teaching others about Jesus.

That vision totally satisfied me. From then on, I worked very carefully and conscientiously with God and the rest is history as eventually the day came when he asked me to come pray with him for his reception of Jesus.

Once you have the Father’s vision of success in your heart, in your will, the project is pretty much a done deal.

You have to do something really radical for it to fall apart once you get that vision, and you can defend it into maturation.

But I had practiced the doing of the will of God for a good few years before ever I came upon this particular project in that jail. There was a lot of opportunity in that plan for the whole thing to go off the rails. On one occasion it almost did, as he stood before me threatening to kill me. When he finally came into the kingdom, true to the vision my Father gave me, he did indeed start teaching people the gospel from his cell.

He was released from prison a little while after his salvation experience, but he was soon assassinated. I’m sure that God, however, was pleased with his efforts for this wayward child who so violently struggled with that  “warfare between the flesh and the spirit.”

This case is a good reminder, as is Jesus’ own case, that the doing of the will of God traverses life here and hereafter as if there is an unseen bridge about which the will of God pays little heed and over which it crosses in the blink of an eye. For me it matters little that the person receives salvation one moment and dies the next: salvation exists in the eternal that knows no death.

(Continued in Part 3 of Rob Crickett: Four Steps in Doing The Will Of God)