INSTANTANEOUS MOMENTS [393a]

Our lives are a series of instantaneous moments, which then develop a history of such moments. Each moment is sufficient in itself to become part of the makeup of  life.

Time, faith, love, and answers to prayer are all involved and dependent on these series of moments. [Wigglesworth? would enter into prayer and stay in prayer until he had actually got to a point where he could say that he had achieved the answer, had obtained the result of that prayer.]

There is a cleansing in/of the moment.

There is complete security* in the immediate moment, unlike that security which is sought by people who are emotionally dependent on keeping things, hoarding things, because they see their very identity as being in those things. It appears as though those who feel the furthest away from God, need to gather around them many worldly goods, whereas those who are closest to God seem to devoid themselves of worldly possessions.

When Jesus sent out his followers he sent them without cloak or bag, so they would be dependent on God and not on the world. So they would be clothed in the immediacy of the moment, reliant on the Spirit.

Jesus came to reveal the unknown God. The pharisees were told that if they had known the Father, they would have known Jesus also. But that they were of their father the devil, and his works they did. They were peddlers of the law, they knew scripture but they did not know God.

“You have heard it said…” Jesus said. The God Jesus proclaimed was very different to the God they claimed. All religions based on law have a similar God, one who does not enable mercy and forgiveness to be acquired, for all the good intent of old testament scripture. [The law and the prophets]

This is because the God of Jesus was one he was intimately connected to by the Spirit. It was this Spirit that he confronted Nicodemus with and admonished him because he was supposed to be a teacher of Israel, yet was in ignorance of such matters.

The matter of the Spirit was so central to the reality of God, being God himself, that the religious teachers had no inkling of any of it and were teaching and preaching the falseness of righteousness by law. Matters of the Spirit of the living God were so strange to them that they accused Jesus of being mad, of being “possessed by a demon”, of being a crazy person. We see similar accusations being ascribed to the prophets and perhaps to John the Baptist.

But back to the instantaneous moment. We are what we believe. If we believe we are condemned, then the reality is that we become condemned in, by, our own thinking. If we believe God in that he has dealt with sin and death in Christ, then our reality will become that we are free from sin and death.

We have established ourselves as those who have built up an identity based on our experiences, based on our past failures, and also based on future fears. The security of the immediate moment is love. If we believe that God has totally acquired us through the filter of Christ’s redemption, then we are those who believe we can be, and are, totally dependent on his love. Now God himself is that love, and he and that love are also the Spirit.

If we are relying on God via His Spirit, via Jesus, then every immediate moment is holy, sanctified, and connects us directly to God via the Spirit. Every immediate moment is one in which we are loved, forgiven, and free. As we rely more and more on these moments we begin to lose sight of earthly moments, as they assume the correct perspective and fade away in relative importance.

Every immediate moment we are alive, we have eternal life. We will live forever. We should be familiar with the spontaneousness of the Spirit, and not be afraid of it. Time is a series of instantaneous moments. Faith and answers to prayer should be immediate moments of confidence in God and answers to prayer. Finally, the immediate moment should place us squarely in his love.

The practical realities of this present life may require our adaptation to how we involve our immediate situation in Christ, with our immediate situation in this world. We should always carry with us the understanding that at any given moment, regardless of how we feel, we are actually bathed in his love and forgiveness, bathed in his Spirit and freedom.

[*Perfect love casts out all fear][Book recommendation “Present Tense Realities” TR Holloway][Jesus lived in a complete sequence of “instantaneous moments”]