Trading It All In

John 3:34 LITV
(34) For the One whom God sent speaks the Words of God, for God does not give the Spirit by measure.

Our pastor tells us that if we have a measure of the Holy Spirit, it is us who set the measure, not God. He also says that we can have all the Holy Spirit we want. It's really true. The precept applies to many aspects of our lives.

We hear the fabled love stories of men and women who wait to kiss until they are married. That wedding night, for them, is magical. But we trade that in for premarital sex, unfaithfulness, or other types of quick gratification.

Many of us want very much to carry the anointing of a great bible teacher or evangelist but we trade study and preparation in on TV.

Prayer is traded for sleep. Dedication is traded for recreation. Love is traded for apathy. Hot is traded for luke-warm. We end up making peace with mediocrity in everything. That junky mindset grows like mold and pretty soon we have a stale existence that shuns change and classifies anything more as fanaticism.

I need more than that. I've tried much of the above - and it's lousy. It's empty. It's lifeless. I've traded the eternal for the temporal (birthright for beans, basically) more times than I care to recall and I reject that now in the name of Jesus. What I need is more of Him.