Vibrance Ministries: Forget The Facts, God Is My Reality

Forget the FACTS, God is my REALITY. What's yours?

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” - Hebrews 11:1

Many don’t recognize it but Christianity calls us into a state of madness, a departure from the defined principles of rational thought and decision-making. Christianity teaches us to find evidence in things we cannot see. Like our God.

Christianity tells us our God spoke and worlds were created, waters parted, earth and sky and trees came into being. Christianity tells us God took a rib from man and made woman, parted an ocean, moved in pillars of cloud and fire, He even saved some guys who were thrown into a fire and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego came out unsinged.

Christianity calls us to believe that the same God who destroyed the world by flood, rained down fire, scattered his people and caused their temple to be destroyed (more than once actually), this same God loved us so much that He came to earth, took on human form, experienced our joys and sorrow and died a horrific death so that we who are gentiles, are heirs to the kingdom of the God of Abraham.

That’s a lot to swallow. Acceptance of God reality requires absolute departure from rationality.

God-Reality defies rationality

Yet, even as we accept our place in His kingdom, we stubbornly hang on to rationality with everything we’ve got. We distil the essence of our God into one book, and we insist that this is the absolute infallible and complete authority on our God. Even though the same book days that God cannot be contained. We need the book so that we can slice and dice, translate and re-translate, break down and process our God. We need to establish the facts.

Forget the facts. God is your reality.

Do you know what the promise of Christianity is? Many would say the promise of everlasting life. Others may say the promise of the new Earth. Others may say He promised that we would tread on scorpions and command demons.

All would be wrong.

The promise of the kingdom is God Himself. God is the promise. God is the fulfillment of the promise. God’s heart is not to give us stuff, His heart is to give us Himself. The fulness of Himself, the glory of Himself, the power and authority of Himself, the nature of Himself, the love of Himself.

The kingdom of heaven is God reconciled with Himself, recognizing Himself and restored to Himself.

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created man in his own image..” - Genesis 1:26-27

The kingdom of heaven is us, restored to what we truly are. God.

“That they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me. And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one:
I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.” - John 17:21-23

To think to claim yourself as God is shocking, delusional, flat out crazy. Yet that is precisely what your God calls you to be. One in Christ as Christ is one in God. Child of God, heir of God, one with God. God.

You cannot inherit His glory until you accept yourself as His glory.

This doesn’t call you to jump from a ship and try to walk on water. It calls for a simple acceptance of your place in God that builds absolute trust. From the place of trust you no longer see the facts of your life, you see beyond them. You no longer try to see your life or your God through the lens of proof and evidence. You become receptive to God’s definition of reality and you begin to embrace it.

The extent to which you embrace God-reality determines the extent to which it becomes the manifested reality of your life.

If you are sick and God tells you that you are well, believe Him. If you are broke and God tells you that you are wealthy believe Him. If you are victimized yet God speaks of your power, believe Him.

It starts with a soft allowing. Just allow yourself to be receptive to the thought, then to entertain the possibility. It’s ok to take it in stages. Softly open to something more hopeful than where you are now and make it your internal reality. As your reality shifts, new possibilities open for you. It’s a sliding scale between fact-reality and God-reality.

Your job is to stay receptive to God-reality. However God speaks to your heart, believe Him. Rest the entirety of your faith in Him, rest the entirety of your future in Him. Don’t rush to flesh out the details (more often than not we get that part totally wrong, bless our hearts).

We are creators when we allow our creator to create through us.

We are gods when we allow our God to be God through us.

First step, God has to become the entirety of our reality. Everything in our reality must exist in submission to God. His heart for us must dominate, His voice must carry authority beyond every other voice. The voice of our sickness, our pain, our lack, our loss; the voices of reason, societal norms, culture, our loved ones or even our own voice must fade in submission to Him. God’s voice must be the voice that defines our reality.

God’s voice must outweigh the facts.

The ‘facts’ as we accept them say that God came as a man, lived for a while and died. Our faith says He conquered death, rose from the grave and ascended to heaven. We allow our faith to define that aspect of our reality. What if we were to allow our faith to define the entirety? What kind of marvel and wonder would we be?

Could our lives transcend the facts and actually reflect the reality of our God?

You have been predestined, preordained and set aside by your God, for the glory of your God. But you cannot be His glory if you allow the facts to define your identity. And your identity defines your reality.

Forget the facts. God is my reality. What's yours?