Not my will, but yours be done...

During my devotional time today I read some very life-giving words and I wanted to pass them along. I am using the book "Spiritual Classics" edited by Richard Foster and Emilie Griffin for my devotions this summer. The one I was reading today was under the spiritual discipline of submission. Now when I first read the title submission I first thought of the submission that is talked about of women and all the political and theological debates and arguments that go with it. I was happy to be redirected and reminded that the discipline of submission is really talking about us submitting to the Lord.

Today the excerpt that I was reading was talking about holy obedience and was written by a man named Thomas R. Kelly from his work A Testament of Devotion. Because he has such great writing I am simply going to let his work speak for itself.

"In considering one gateway into this life of holy obedience, let us dare to venture together into the inner sanctuary of the soul, where God meets man in awful immediacy...

It is an overwhelming experience to fall into the hands of the living God, to be invaded to the depths of one's being by His presence, to be, without warning, wholly uprooted from all earth-born securities and assurances, and to be blown by a tempest of unbelievable power which leaves one's old proud self utterly, utterly defenseless, until one cries, " All Thy waves and thy billows are gone over me" (Ps 42:7). Then is the soul swept into a Loving Center of ineffable sweetness, where calm and unspeakable peace and ravishing joy steal over one...There stands the world of struggling, sinful, earth-blinded men and nations of plants and animals and wheeling stars of heaven, all new, all lapped in the tender, persuading Love at the Center... In one awful solemnity the Holy One is over all and in all, exquisitely loving, infinitely patient, tenderly smiling. Marks of glory are upon all things, and the marks are cruciform and blood-stained. And one sighs, like the convinced Thomas of old, " My Lord and my God" (John 20:28). Dare one lift one's eyes and look? Nay, whither can one look and not see Him? For field and stream and teeming streets are full of Him. Yet as Moses knew, no man can look on God and live-live as his old self. Death comes, blessed death, death of one's alienating will. And one knows what Paul meant when he wrote, "The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God" (Gal 2:20).

One emerges from such soul-shaking, Love-invaded times into more normal states of consciousness. But one knows ever after that the Eternal Lover of the world, the Hound of Heaven, is utterly, utterly real, and that life must henceforth be forever determined by that Real...Self is emptied into God, and God in-fills it. In glad, amazed humility we cast on Him out little lives in trusting obedience, in erect serene, and smiling joy...For nothing else in all of heaven or earth counts as much as His will, His slightest wish, His faintest breathing. And holy obedience sets in...ready to run and not be weary, and to walk and not faint."

Lord, help me to love you with this kind of abandon. Abandon that says "not my will, but yours be done." Lord continue to conform my thoughts to yours. Continue to use your Word to be water to my soul. Help me to live in a state of prayer. May your love overflow from me in such a way that people would look at me and see not me, but you pouring out of me.