Inside Out

Several years ago, Merlin Carothers, author of Prison to Praise, asked the Lord in prayer why it was that so many times when His children prayed for healing, that the miracle didn't happen. He really wanted to know the answer.

This is what the Lord told him: "My children are not healed because they ask to be healed of the wrong thing. They pray to be healed of the things in life that are hurting them. Instead, they need to pray to be healed of the things IN THEM that are hurting others."

Real healing happens from the inside out, just like real Christianity happens from the inside of us, when the Spirit comes to take up residence, and as He takes precedence more and more, and becomes more and more precious to us individually, He will start, continue, and complete the work He intended for us. We aren't perfect and we don't have to clean ourselves up first, before we are adopted into His family. Once there, the same work of unmerited favour, grace, is required on a daily basis to accomplish in our lives what is absolutely impossible otherwise: living the Christian life the way He intended.

God's grace through the finished work of Jesus on the cross is life's blood to us as Christians. As soon as we start imposing on ourselves the rules, expectations and regulations that our society - and even the church - has placed on us in order to gain acceptance before God, we have fallen from grace. That's the whole theme of the book of Galatians. Falling from grace doesn't mean we've chosen to walk away from the church. It means we've allowed the church to take the place of God in our lives. The cart is before the horse.

This is what living "Inside Out" means. We pray, read the Word, live out our Christian lives, talk to people about the Master, because He has done so much for us that out of sheer gratitude we can't help but be excited about it. Any other reason is imposed upon us externally: it goes from the outside in, and that is religion.

Jesus hates religion.

I want to live from the Inside Out.
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