Peeling Back Layers

“Come close to God, and God will come close to you.” James 4:8 (NLT)

by Alexandra Copeland

One of the things that you might be experiencing in your walk with God during this extraordinary season is something that I call advanced peeling. For years too many to count, Heavenly Father has indulged our lack of spiritual maturity. This isn’t an attempt to cause anyone to hang their heads low in self condemnation, or to go on a woe’s me, I can never get it right pity party.  Quite the contrary, this is what I pray is a wake-up call for those of us who are ready to enter a place in the spirit that we could never have imagined in our wildest dreams.

Many Christian prophets have prophesied over the years that before the fulfillment of the end time revelation a great revival period would come upon the earth, a time when God would pour out His spirit among His people as never before. None of us know the hour of the return of Jesus Christ, but I truly believe that we are now in a season that is unprecedented. It is phenomenally rich in God’s outpouring, and this season is just beginning. In my humble opinion, we are not able to define or call it by any of the terms that we’ve heard in the past, like ‘revival’ or ‘enlightenment’. I believe God is telling us that it’s time out for business as usual. What’s been done in the past cannot compete with what He’s doing today, and what He’s going to do in the future for His children.

Many young people in this generation sense this. Millions of them have been exposed to astounding technological and intellectual advances. Their appetite cannot be appeased by business as usual, because they’ve grown accustomed to out of the box. Boundaries are exceeded every day, so as witnesses and ambassadors of Christ, you and I can’t expect that anything spiritually stagnant or stale will grab their attention. There is nothing more revolutionary, out-of-the-box, and exciting than God’s Word and Plan; and unless we believe and know it in the deepest part of our beings, we’re cheating ourselves and others out of what God has in store for us all.

God has not changed, nor has His Word, but our understanding of it must change. It must increase! It is essential that we obtain a greater revelation of who God is, and our comprehension of His Word and limitless love, power, and omniscience must expand as well. 1John 4:4-6 The Message (MSG) tells us, “My dear children, you come from God and belong to God. You have already won a big victory over those false teachers, for the Spirit in you is far stronger than anything in the world.” Nothing rivals what we’ve been given through our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and this is the conviction and energy that should envelope our every move.

To the extent that we’re not quite there yet, we have to be honest and admit it. The only thing standing in your way is a question, and it is one of whether or not you desire to have a closer walk with God. If you do, then you need to know that He hasn’t made it hard to do this. James 4:8 (NLT) tells us, “Come close to God, and God will come close to you.”  Jesus Christ tells us in Matthew 11:30 that his yoke is easy and his burden is light. God wants to be close to us, but we can see from scripture that we must have a desire to be close to Him, and our actions must convey an initiative to act upon the promise.

We block the operation of our faith because often we confuse action with struggle and strife. The world can be a very difficult place. Because of this, some of us have cultivated a belief that we have to strive very hard to receive anything good. The wonderful thing about God is that we don’t have to strive; He requires us to surrender—to let go of our cares and learn to depend solely upon Him.

Why do you suppose this precious act of surrendering to God is so difficult for many people? Well, one of the reasons is because, again, we have layers of stuff that we’ve allowed to build in our minds and hearts, and this is why God tells us that we have to renew our minds. In Hebrews 11, God reminds us that we are surrounded by exemplary examples of individuals that were fully persuaded regarding God’s love and power. Their faith should be monuments of conviction for all of us. They didn’t walk according to their physical hearing-seeing-touching. They refused to be dissuaded from the promises of God by their physical five senses. They trusted in the invisible, in what they could not see or touch.

For many of us this is a stretch, but it isn’t difficult at all if we’ll trust God. He’ll help us peel back the layers of unbelief and doubt that have kept us bound for years. Through Christ we can strip this dead weight away and begin to come alive and be healed in ways we cannot begin to describe. This is what God wants to do in each of us, and we desperately need it. What an amazing transformation He wants us to have, and it’s possible for us if we’ll only let go and let God! What an amazing God we serve, and this is what we have the privilege and honor of sharing with everyone, especially those that need to be encouraged so badly.

We have to get to a point where we simply trust in the magnificence of all that God has made available to us. Romans 10:10 (NKJV) says, “For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” We believe first. We are to trust in God’s promises in our hearts. This is good spiritual stuff. Has nothing to do with the flesh. You and I received salvation through our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, because we believed in him, even though we’ve never seen him. This was the beginning of our process to become more like him. This began our spiritual journey of leaning less and less upon the physical senses and more and more upon our spiritual senses.

Through Christ, we can call those things that are not as though they were. Through faith we can speak things into existence, and it is upon this foundation that we will begin to excel to great and wondrous new levels in our relationship with God. You and I do not have to struggle and strive to believe Him. We just have to flat out believe. It’s effortless, and this is the place that God is leading us to.

Most of us recognize that we need to hear from Him, but we fail to recognize the extent to which our unbelief prevents us from doing so. We’re empowered for miraculous and astounding acts of love and kindness, but it is our sole responsibility to create the hunger within for it. We can create an environment for the supernatural flow of the spirit by stripping away our limitations. We’ve got to pull back layers that confine God to little boxes of faith. We can bring Him out in the open in our lives; we can believe bigger, trust Him greater, and let people see the great, big wonderful God that we serve!

We should be excited to learn and discover all the wonderful things that we can do in the spirit.  The love that God has given us to share with others is astounding. We have the power and faith of Jesus Christ and we’re more than conquerors in any situation, no matter how many darts the devil throws our way or how hard he throws them. The gift of the indwelling Holy Spirit communicates a powerful Word from God to us internally; he tells us about the future and has written God’s Word in the lining of our hearts. We have non-stop, unlimited access to our Heavenly Father, and we should live like we know it.■

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Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001, 2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.