Our God desires us to live in the moment. This is His heart. Living is about relationship with Him. And the way He accomplishes this is to reduce us down, down to dependence on Him, a moment-by-moment involvement.

He will not give us a book, not a chapter, not even a page nor a sentence. Often giving not even a word at a time but merely a letter. You have no idea what the meaning is until you totally focus on Him, so absorbed with Him that He can merely breathe the idea into you. Human nature wants the book first.

"Give me the title and tell me what the book is about. Give me a preface and the introduction, the back title! Give me reviews, Let me know there's no risk of unknowns, then I'll get into it! I will wait for the ending but let me know exactly where I am going. At any given point you can give me a twist in the book. But just make sure I have a picture of where the book is going." 

But God doesn't often give you the subject of the book. He wants you to be so dependent on him that each letter of each sentence has to come from His nearness. Why did John know Jesus as God? Because John had his ear on His breast.

Now why does God want this? The reason is because He is so hungry for our fellowship, so completely desirous of our love and relationship. His hunger is to give.
We think that when we are hungry, the hunger is from us but the hunger you have is not your own. "It is My hunger coming through you."

We have no hunger, no desire for anything of God. In us is nothing, nothing so if we have any desire to read the word, worship - any desire - it is because He is pouring that through us. His desire for intimacy is birthed THROUGH me and it feels like it's me. But I have to know that I am by nature a brute beast. I will not - by any means - ever seek anything spiritual or anything in the Spirit. Naturally I will grunt and forage through dirt because that is the nature of man. A perspective change needs to take place. If I have desire for God, it is God's desire coming through me. If I have hunger for prayer, for spiritual things, it is the Life of God coming through me. It's the indwelling of His desire moving my spirit toward Himself.

Why does He dangle us? God has to reduce our options. No one is going to live moment by moment by choice. It's too frightening. It's too unknown. It's like walking the tightwire across the Niagara in the dark. It's too risky. You are tricked onto the wire. You are reduced to the tight wire. Everything behind you has disappeared. The road narrows and narrows until there is no road. The way behind you is gone, the past is gone. Even the light is gone! And you are on the tightrope with no way to go back and no ability to go forward. So you are suspended onto God.

That dependence is a fragrance that impassionates God Himself. It is an aroma of flailing human need that is a stimulant to Him. Weakness moves Him to response. Weakness is grotesque to us, it's so vile we will arm ourselves with whatever we can to avoid this naked state of being, which is really just who we are naturally. But God is entreated by this grotesque state. He likes the vulnerable man on the tightrope without even a pole of balance. We are repulsed by what excites God. We want a whole armory to fortress ourselves against that vulnerability. This very thrust of our flesh propels us away from God.

This is our enmity with God. We are trying to equip ourselves, clothe ourselves and God is trying to remove the armor and the clothing. God goes far beyond securing our nakedness. He wants us to be stripped AND vulnerably strung, hanging out on the tightrope. That is where God wants us. In that place, at that point, is the power that Peter experienced. The very power that enabled him to walk on water. At that moment, the natural laws no longer bound him. He stepped out in utter helplessness to walk on water, to walk outside the laws of nature, above the character of his own humanity.

This is the reason you want to be reduced: you are moved into a different realm. When Peter stepped out of that boat in complete helplessness and utter abandon, he left all that held him up but also all that restricted him. And Peter entered the world of Jesus. When you allow the omnipotent God to hold you up, and dictate your step-by-step movement, you leap into the realm of omni possibilities. Faith is not demanding that God come to you. It's going into where He is.

When you are on that tightrope, that vulnerable, then you are IN that place of God's absolute rule. Peter was in that realm but with just a thought, just a turn, just a look back, he left it. That's how fragile it is, the division between the two worlds, the two laws.

This is the genius of Peter. He left the others, he left himself, he left the realm of this earth.
He moved out of the physical realm and stepped into the heavenly realm. Peter's body was in the natural, his spirit was somewhere else. And his body obeyed the realm of his spirit.

In devastating helplessness, faith is found, when there is nothing else to hold you.

 Copyright ©  John Enslow