Stop Striving and Start Abiding – EGP Blog post from February 10, 2019

“Jesus didn’t come to GIVE you a key, He IS the key. And lot of us, we want a key to God’s hidden treasures, but Jesus didn’t come to GIVE us hidden treasures, He came to BE for us the hidden treasure. … A lot of us really want what God HAS for us, but we don’t want GOD. We want whatever Jesus might PASS ON to us, but we want to pass on JESUS. And a huge part of the dilemma is that we have a sense that Jesus has INSIGHTS to life, He has PRINCIPLES we need. That, the scriptures, if we can just get AHOLD of them and UNDERSTAND them, could help us live the life we’re created to live. But can we do that without God INVADING our space? … We don’t understand that EVERYTHING God wants to do IN us, He wants to do WITH us in HIM.

Just because you ‘ACCEPTED Jesus as Lord,’ doesn’t mean that you live in UNION with Him. … What happens is we’re STRIVING, and STRIVING, and STRIVING, and then we RUN INTO God. We come to this LIFE-CHANGING moment with Jesus, but we actually think it’s our STRIVING that got us there, but it’s not. It’s your DESPERATION. And so what happens then, is we RECEIVE Jesus and we go back to what we KNOW. We KEEP striving, and striving, and striving, … And what [Paul’s] telling us is, ‘No, after you ACCEPT Jesus, you need to stop STRIVING and start ABIDING.’ …

The way you develop this RELATIONSHIP of abiding is you need to keep your roots DEEP in Him. … Before you can have FRUIT, you have to have ROOTS. And there is no tree on this planet that has fruit within MINUTES of having roots. But we all want to bear FRUIT without going through the SEASONS. … He doesn’t want you to NEED Him the way you needed Him when you STARTED. He wants you to GROW in the DEPTH of your need for Him. And that’s a part of what happens in a UNION with God, is He actually makes you WHOLE.”