The Resurrection Awakens Our Needs

[HKHaugan]

What we have said about needs, our deepest needs, is that Jesus meets them completely and proved it by His Cross and Resurrection. We needed a relationship of perfect trust and He offered it. We needed to recognize how imperfect we are, humble our pride, confess it and He embraced us. We needed to look at Him for forgiveness and He gave it. We needed to know how to love others and He demonstrated it. We needed balance of mind, heart and spirit and He became our peace within. In all five He brought us the beginning of our new birth and growth in Him. As they were integrated into our experience we discovered their reality was not just something that helped us to survive each day but opened to us a path into eternity, into timelessness, into a completion He has prepared for each of us who are willing to let Him be our Lord.

Deepest needs met, we continue and discover there is far more. We found the real problem aggravating our needs is that spiritual separator called sin. Sin is the self-centering stimulus that avoids God, isolates our heart from Him and others and seeks its level in our inclination to place self-satisfaction as our main goal. It comes from an evil spiritual source, the devil. He is the subtle manipulator whose methodology is temptation. Jesus exposed Him and thoroughly neutralized all his weapons on the Cross, the proof of which was His Resurrection through the power of His Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, God the Spirit, was revealed in that spectacular event in which the devil’s ultimate weapon, death, was cancelled. The Holy Spirit was sent to not only bring Jesus into our hearts but to be our constant companion, counselor and inner light. It is the Holy Spirit who brings clarity when choices and decisions have to be made. He takes God’s Word and moves its messages into our mind through which He helps us discern that murky atmosphere of needs. Like the parable about the wheat and the chaff, He separates real needs from perceived needs as we move through every next moment. He gets us to do what Jesus did and that is to think spiritually, trust spiritually and then act faithfully in the Spirit.

It is by the Holy Spirit that Scripture comes alive. And here is our spiritual need, the Holy Spirit. Our need is to be conscious of His presence, His willingness to help us discern, determine, and decide how we respond and then sense His leading. It is our need to continue to be filled (Eph.5:18) and keep in step with the Spirit (Gal.5:25). It is those deep basic needs He meets through the Word. It is the Word that opens the mind to see spiritually, the heart to feel spiritually and our spirits revived to act spiritually. The more we are into the Word the more the Spirit has to work with in us.

The Word is God’s pry bar to bring us out of the self-centered box of sin. The Spirit moves along the edges of who we are within and gently opens the fear-nailed areas to allow us to breathe the spiritual life that heals and takes us out of ourselves towards Him and others. The self-protective devices we have used in the past are melted by His forgiveness and love. We are no longer governed by the attitudes and opinions of others. In fact they become opportunities to witness the love and truth of God.

Here are really comforting words to buoy us,
“23 Yet I am always with you;
you hold me by my right hand.
24 You guide me with your counsel,
and afterward you will take me into glory.
25 Whom have I in heaven but you?
And earth has nothing I desire besides you.
26 My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength of my heart
and my portion forever (Ps.73).”