David Jeremiah's Book, 'God in You'

I had a chance to pick up this book yesterday and I'm very impressed based on only skimming it so far. The thrust of the book is that, related to a previous post made here, God the Holy Spirit lives inside of us as believers. As such, we can pray to the Holy Spirit who is a person. It's a simple yet profound concept, especially for me as I'm used to praying 'up there' or 'out there' to the Father.

Of course, we can pray to the Father and Son and expect an answer. The Bible says that God's ways are not our ways, and his thoughts are not our thoughts. Where I've been tripping up lately is praying to a conception of who I think God is, which has actually turned out to be an idol. For example, I have this image of God as the nit-picker who has all this power to engineer circumstances and change things, yet he doesn't do it because he wants to see me fail. This is a terrible image and is a flat out lie, yet is has been ingrained since childhood and it takes time to overcome this false image of who God is when I pray.

I find it refreshing to pray to the Holy Spirit because of the assurance from the Bible that this is how God lives inside of us. With time and the work of the Spirit, he can help overcome these lies of who I think the Father and Son are, because of the promise from the Bible that the role of the Holy Spirit is to give glory to Jesus, who in turn loves and obeys the Father.

David Jeremiah is one of my favorite authors because he writes about so many different Christian topics, not just exclusively about the 'end times'. Actually, this is a similar direction this blog is going. At first I wanted to write just about 'end time' things, but that may not happen for awhile yet. Everything inter-relates together in the Christian walk, for whichever particular topic we happen to be discussing is connected with another one.

It is very timely to learn the principles of 'God in You' from Jeremiah's new book because I recently went through a rather nasty setback. It may seem small, but I experienced some unfairness and injustice. You can read about it on my parallel blog.

http://www.based-in-shanghai.blogspot.com

Thankfully, it is pushing me to draw closer to God in prayer, yet the way I pray reveals the false images of God I have. This is not the first time either, and it is a pattern than has emerged from previous setbacks and the immediate knee-jerk reaction that God somehow enjoys watching me suffer. Obviously, this is a lie, but it will take some time to overcome this.