All new Christians need an inner desire to be the best believers they can be for our King and the Kingdom of God. This must be a part of our spiritual makeup. The driving force for our desires must be the Holy Spirit. As far as our natural bodies, they will resist all efforts by the Holy Spirit and attempt to weave fleshly attitudes and pride into our spiritual makeups, thereby weakening them.
One of the Holy Spirit’s main jobs in our lives is to separate the chaff in us from thew spiritual wheat as we walk with the Lord.
In a perfect vacuum, the Holy Spirit would successfully guide and help us put down all of our fleshly desires, especially pride and lust. We would be overcomers in every situation. Yet, none of us live in a perfect vacuum, we live on earth, which is controlled by the god of this world − Satan.
I had a simple dream as a young believer, which should have helped me in understanding my walk with the Lord.
In it, I stood outside a major league baseball stadium, but all of the entrance gates were locked shut. The crowd inside the stadium roared for its favorite teams. The excitement stirred me to hunger for being a part of the action.
I banged on the gate with both hands. The gate finally opened and I entered, not to sit in the grandstands with the crowd, but instead, I was escorted onto the playing field to be a member of Jesus’ team.
There I stood in the outfield, wearing a new white home team uniform with a baseball hat on my head and a glove on my left hand. I looked around at the beautiful green grass, the reddish infield dirt and the gigantic stadium. It was such an exhilarating feeling, knowing I was a member of the team.
Then, like a little boy, I took off running around the outfield. Here and there, helter-skelter, I didn’t care what others thought and ran around the outfield in my excitement, kicking up my heels. I noticed numerous other players in the outfield, doing much the same thing. We all ran around, waving our hands in the air and yelling like a bunch of sugar intoxicated kids.
Now, mind you, the game was going on.
A baseball would fly or bounce into the outfield every so often, but because we were all just aimlessly running around, we couldn’t catch any of them. The best we could do was chase after a ball and wait for it to stop rolling. One of us would pick it up and toss it back toward the infield to a waiting infielder. We outfielders then reverted back to aimlessly running around.
The team somehow promoted me into the dugout to be used for offensive purposes. I was no longer dressed in a glorious white uniform, but instead, I was a wooden baseball bat, hanging on a bat rack with numerous other ones.
A bat, I thought. I’m just a bat! All of my preparation and training has prepared me to be just a wooden bat. How can this be important?
With two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning and the score tied, Jesus readied Himself to bat. He walked over to the rack and chose me as His bat. He walked up to the plate with me in His hands.
The pitcher, Satan, threw a hundred miles per hour fastball on the first pitch to Jesus. The Lord timed the pitch perfectly and smashed it high over the center field fence. He hit a walk-off, game winning home run.
Jesus headed for first base on His home run trot and tossed me − His bat − into the dirt. The crowd stood, cheering and praising Jesus for the victory, but as for me, I laid there, doing nothing and saying nothing.
A batboy came, picked me up and placed me back on the bat rack, waiting to be used sometime in the future by Jesus again.
This simple dream reveals a game within a game whereby we believers move from immaturity to maturity, ending in deaths to our own selfish desires. We are then used by the Lord Jesus to defeat the purposes of Satan.
I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me. (Galatians 2:20)
(Excerpt from my memoir, The Hunt for Larry Who, an Amazon eBook.
Larry Who 