The Key to Everything - by Norman Grubb

The believer as a container for God’s presence in the world

Norman had been asking God to make him a better servant. He had a deeply felt need of love – he felt that he had a lack of love that bridges the gap – a need for faith and power – all of which were linked together in his mind. There was much more profession than possession.

Have we got something genuinely transforming to transmit to others?

God is love – Jesus is the power of God.

Jesus did not say, "I have the life to give you" — but, "I am the life."

Christ is all and in all (Col 3.11) – Christ is all that matters for Christ lives in all (Phillips).

The only reason for the existence of the entire creation is to contain the Creator!

If He fills all things, all things are containers of Him.

The rest of creation can contain manifestations of God; we can contain God as a Person.

God can manifest His marvels and His beauty through the flowers and trees. We can view them through the microscope and telescope, and marvel—but we do not say, "That's God."

The greatest marvel, the greatest height of personality, is when we can look at a human being and say, "God is there."

The depths and dangers, of humanity are that personality means freedom. Intelligent choice is the essence of personality.

We make self our god, not God. We just naturally run our own lives. And that's the real problem!

Once we know how to handle the human self and put it back where it belongs, we've found the key to life.

You simply receive

Our relation to God is that of containing Him in such a way that He may be recognized.

The importance of receptivity – the primary function of all creation, animate and inanimate!

If there were no receptivity in the springtime, in the trees and flowers and shrubs, we would have a desert around us. These things spring to life because of their quiet reception of the sunlight and moisture poured on them. What they receive they utilize. But utilization is secondary to reception.

God has made us vessels – He is that which we contain. But there are other illustrations that give us an enlarged picture of our position as receivers. Consider the vine and the branches – a vital, active relationship! The living God, the living Christ, and I actually become one person and function as one.

Though the vine is the life and the branch is the channel, yet the branch does things. It utilizes the sap and produces leaf and flower and fruit. But its activity is secondary to its receptivity.

Beware of making activity a substitute for receptivity!

We forever remain the dependent member in the union, and the union is never safe until we know that. So, until you have a few good knocks on the head and discover your conceited self, you're not safe to know the union. Maybe you've had plenty of knocks. They're the healthiest thing we can have. We've got to be made safe and understanding for this tremendous relationship.

God's friends, talk back and forth with Him in plain language.

We need to learn that the divine life keeps flowing in, as we give it out.

The key is receptivity – then we can move out into activity!

It is God who inspires the prayers and imparts the faith and thinks the thoughts through our minds and expresses His compassion through our hearts and puts our bodies into action.

Only when we understand this do we have the key to everything.

Every problem becomes an opportunity.

Your other self

Consider 1Thess 5.23: May the God of peace make you holy through and through. May you be kept sound in spirit, mind (soul) and body, blameless until the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Note that the order is not body, mind and spirit!

The spirit is the seat of the ego; the mind is the seat of the emotions and reason.

What man knows the things of a man save the spirit of man which is in him? (1Cor 2.11).

Knowledge and love – mind and heart – are the real self – the real person! The knower inside us is our spirit. For instance, we Christians know Jesus Christ. How do you know Jesus Christ? I can't tell you. Somehow you've come past the realm of just knowing about this person called Jesus Christ and He is real to you. It's something intuitive inside you, and that's your spirit. That's different from reason.

Your mind (your knowledge) expresses itself in reasons. But reasons can vary. They can be influenced by all sorts of things.

Your heart expresses itself through the affections, the emotions. That's where you feel. But feelings can vary. We say, "I don't feel like this," or "I feel spiritually cold, or dead or dry," and they are all illusions of the mind (soul).

Neither reason nor emotion is our real life, which is deep inside us. We live where we love. We have to learn how to discern between mind and spirit (Hebrews 4:12). We have to refuse in our spirit, our real selves, to be dominated by the reactions of the emotions or the reasons—our souls (or minds).

When we have learned to discern and to discipline the reactions of the mind, then through our reasons and our emotions we channel Christ, and are not moved by the reflex action of the world coming back at us.

We have to move back from our emotions to the inner spirit of love.

Many Christians live with their feet dragging with a sense of condemnation and failure because they feel away from God, or they feel cold, or they feel guilty, or they feel weak, and so on.

They haven't discerned between the variable emotions of the mind and the unvarying reality of spirit—where God's Spirit of love is eternally our other self in our spirit.

The other verse that goes with that is Galatians 2:20, where Paul says, "I am crucified with Christ ....."

That's the old Paul out. Then he says, "..... nevertheless, I live."

That's the new Paul in Christ: a living, thinking, willing, feeling, battling human. A real person.

But then he corrects himself and adds, "Yet not I, but Christ lives in me."

He could very easily have said, "Nevertheless I live and Christ lives in me"—as if Christ lived near him or close by him. But you see, he replaced self by Christ. That's the point.

In other words, your other self is Christ. We can be His means of expressing Himself. Motivation by Jesus Christ – that’s the eternal life which we who know Him have already begun!

Your new spirit

If Christ is your other self, Christ washes dishes.

If Christ is your other self, He spanks the youngsters.

If Christ is your other self, He handles the accounting machine and runs the business.

He lives in common people!

Obviously, humanity has become separated from God. Before I can live in the kind of familiarity with God that He intends for me, I need to know the basis for that kind of a relationship. Once I am sure of my foundations I can forget them and go ahead. Once I am sure of the road under my feet I can proceed to walk confidently.

The history of the creation of man –created to contain God in a living union, was symbolized for him in the offer of "the tree of life in the midst of the garden." As human beings with free choice, there is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We are all by nature egoists and self-lovers. Total love to God and our brother is totally impossible without God who is love living in us.

Are we governed by our mind and our reason? We might have doubts and wonder if God exists. We might have had something deeper and more real! Doubts are the raw material of faith!

This change of union from the spirit of self-centeredness to the spirit of self-giving becomes an actual, down to earth fact in the personality and experience of every human being who, recognizing and admitting his need, receives Him as Lord and Savior. Your old spirit is replaced by your new Spirit!

You were governed by mind and body. Now, as a redeemed person, the Spirit—His Spirit in your spirit—is master of mind and body. You meet the demands of the bodily senses, the varying emotions of the mind stimulated by world, flesh or desire, with the affirmation of the indwelling Christ as Lord.

Mind and body become the manifestation of Jesus Christ.

Here, indeed, is the key to being a normal person—free, happy, familiar, natural—released from the spirit of self-love into the boundless, creative outflowing energy of the new governing Spirit that indwells you: His Spirit.

Here, indeed, is the key to everything.