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Spirit of Wisdom and Revelation

          I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength. (Ephesians 1:17-19 NIV)

 

            I suspect I’ve written about this passage recently in connection with Battle Bible verses, but this morning’s walk included some prayer time about plans for this summer, and the three things that came to mind were hearing and trusting God and praying more effectively. That brought this passage to mind.

            We are allowed to pray for the Spirit to be given to us. And what that Spirit provides is wisdom and revelation, so that we can know God better. We’re allowed to pray to know God better. We are allowed to pray that the eyes of our hearts may be enlightened and that we may know the hope to which he has called us, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people (us!), and his incomparably great power for us.

            Can you begin to imagine? Any one of those would be overwhelming. Consider one. Because we don’t think we have received much wisdom or revelation, can you imagine what it might be like to receive more? What if wisdom and revelation from God were such a normal, regular thing that – in general – it no longer generated more of a response than from hearing from anyone else? I don’t mean that we would treat the revelation with the contempt that we so often show toward others – but that it would be as normal for us to say, “This morning, God said …” in the same way that we’d say, “This morning, my spouse/parent/child/neighbor said ...”

            Now, part of the Spirit of revelation would address the other dangerous side to this – with our hearing from the world, the flesh, or the devil and saying, “God said…” But this brings us back to the walking on the water incident. What if Peter had gotten it wrong? What if it hadn’t been Jesus calling him to walk on the water? The worst-case scenario is that he would have died trying to do what he believed he was called to do. He would have died trying.

            The other issue is the possibility that if we received such a revelation, we would grow proud. Paul was not permitted to tell others of at least one of his visions, and he was given a thorn in the flesh to keep him from being proud. But the problem is that worry can keep us from becoming monsters and destroying for the love of destruction, but it can also cause us to become a different kind of monster that destroys for fear of doing anything.

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