Daily Encouragement: Day 278

Adapted from: Handbook to Spiritual Growth

AN ONGOING SERIES OF RESPONSES

The most important response of our lives is to say Yes to the gospel. As Brennan Manning observes in The Lion and the Lamb, “There are two elements which are central in the Christian experience. First, a man hears God say, ‘Thou art the man.’ Secondly, he replies, ‘Thou art my God.’” The former is the point of conviction (see 2 Samuel 12:7), and the latter is the point of turning from self to Christ.

Once having come to Christ in this way, the spiritual life becomes a continuous series of daily responses to the Lord’s promptings in our lives. In each case we will choose to walk by sight or by faith, by law or by grace, by the flesh or by the Spirit, by our will or God’s will, by submission or resistance, by dependence or by autonomy, by worldly wisdom or by divine wisdom, by betting everything on God’s promises and character or by trying to control our world on our own terms, by the temporal or by the eternal, by trying to find our lives or by losing them for Christ’s sake. Until we see Christ, we will always be engaged in this warfare in which we are tempted on a daily basis to drop out of the process of the obedience of faith.