The Gift to Choose

It is dawning on us more and more in these past few years at Bellwether, the power that God left to us after the fall. We lost everything in the garden but not our free will, not the power, not the gift to choose. God left us with that gift to choose. He took a great risk when He did it. Are we going to choose ourselves? Or, are we going to choose the enemy's way? Or will we choose the Lord? It is our choice.

In Scripture God says, "Choose! Choose between life and death." He keeps saying this to us in so many ways, "Choose Me! Choose Me so you can live." Eve chose to disobey God and she lost that intimacy, she lost that light and that union as well. And now God is saying, "You have the freedom! You have the freedom to choose, even if you have made wrong choices in the past, you still have the freedom to make it right. Even satan cannot touch our free will. He will attempt to, try to, have you make choices for him. But God will give us wonderful graces to make choices for Him. But, ultimately, the choice will be up to us. What a tremendous gift God has given to us!

So doing whatever He tells us simply means that we are allowing ourselves to be led by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, the Spirit of counsel, the same Spirit that led Jesus off the plain, that led Jesus out of Nazareth, that led Jesus into the Nazareth and, yes, that led Jesus to the Cross.

We read in 1 Peter 1:1-2, "We are consecrated now by the Spirit, that means we are set aside." At the Mass when the priest consecrates the bread and wine it is changed into the Body and Blood of Jesus. The Spirit has consecrated us and transforms us into Jesus if we will allow that. He said, "We are consecrated by the Spirit to a life of obedience, to Jesus Christ." That is our vocation. It is for all of us. It is our ticket to Heaven. Paul says,as well as John, says "Those who are led by the Spirit are the children of God." (Rom 8:14). Children will allow themselves to be led. Children love to play follow the leader and so this is why this conversion process is so important. We must become children. The kingdom of Heaven is theirs! We want to be docile to the Holy Spirit, obedient to the Holy Spirit. We want to try to get all our thoughts, and our actions and our words - everything - to come under the power and the influence of the Holy Spirit, just as Jesus did, just as the Jesus now living within us wants us to constantly be in submission, in full surrender to the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit always knows the perfect will of God. He knows the deep things of God.

Sometimes, this docility to the Spirit will come to us simply through a word of knowledge. That word, that understanding, will just drop in. One moment we don't know something, then the next moment we do. It behooves us to ask the Spirit to guide us. There are so few that want to know God's perfect will that to those that do ask, God is so willing to let them know. Ask! Then, see if a word of knowledge will come. It might be that God will bring you to a Scripture or bring that Scripture to your mind and that will be His perfect will for the situation, whatever that is. It might be that a song will start in the heart and you will keep singing it over and over. There is the answer; there is the answer.

God indicated to us in prayer, through our team, that our upcoming conference is to be entitled, Sound the Trumpet. But we had to ask, "Lord what do You mean? Sound the Trumpet in Zion? Sound the Trumpet in Omaha? Sound the Trumpet where? There are all sorts of Scriptures in which we read, "Sound the trumpet." What does that mean?" The answer did not come in a word of knowledge. So, we thought, "When You are ready, Lord, to let us know what You want, You will let us know." Sometimes you just put it aside.

The next morning I started humming, "Lift high the banners of love! Alleluia! Sound the trumpets of war!" There it was! It can come in a song. It can come in something you might hear on television but it will come. God wants us to know His perfect will. It might come in a simple inspiration of the Holy Spirit but we need to stop that inner noise again; we need to look to listen and learn to wait upon the Lord for that word.

There is God's perfect will and then there is what we call God's permissive will. He does allow us to live out of His permissive will. Many of us do because many people do not want to know His perfect will. But He is calling us to live as Jesus lived, out of His perfect, perfect will. Every thought must be captivated by the Holy Spirit. Your understanding, your discernment, will come from the promptings of the heart. The more that you are in contemplative prayer, the more you will hear the movements of the heart. That is how wisdom works.

I read one time that the wise old owl had one ear above the other. It can hear two things at the same time. When wisdom is working within us, we can hear things outside of us, what other people are saying at the same time we are attentive to what the Spirit is saying within. And so that sometimes it can just be a heart prompting, heart knowledge. Follow those promptings of the heart.

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