Tag Archives: all flesh is as grass

Knowing God, Walking in the Spirit

Resurrection Life and The Human Flea

Leave a comment

“Then Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel:

“Sun, stand still over Gibeon;
And Moon, in the Valley of Aijalon.”

So the sun stood still,
And the moon stopped,
Till the people had revenge
Upon their enemies.
Is this not written in the Book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day.” (Joshua 10: 12-13)

This famous passage of scripture was quoted in a prayer meeting I was attending one morning. I was on a bit of a “spiritual low,“ so the sceptic that is never very far away from my thinking immediately saw a chance to rock my faith. “How can that possibly happen?” said the sceptic. “For the Sun to stand still would’ve actually meant for the Earth to stop turning – or even, when the shadow went back down the steps in the days of King Hezehiah, to spin in the opposite direction.” (See 2 Kings 20: 8-11.) Shortly after that, when the sceptic was still arguing with my spirit, Anne quoted the following paragraph from one of the sermons of Smith Wigglesworth:

“But I must recognise the difference between my own spirit and the Holy Spirit. My own spirit can do certain things on natural lines, can even weep and pray and Worship, but it is all on a human plane, and we must not depend on our human thoughts and activities or on our own personality. If the baptism (ie the baptism in the Holy Spirit – my note) means anything to you, it will bring you to the death of the ordinary. where you are no longer putting faith in your own understanding; but, conscious of your own poverty, you ever yielded to the Spirit. Then it is that your body becomes filled with heaven on earth.”
(Smith Wigglesworth: “Present time blessings for present time saints” April 14, 1923 from Smith Wigglesworth, The Complete Collection of his Life Teachings, compiled by Roberts Liardon)

This caught my attention, as I’ve come across that same passage before and have even quoted it elsewhere on these pages. It struck me forcibly that the heights of the human spirit, even at its most “spiritual”, are like the leaps of a jumping flea when compared with the activity, the dunamis of the spirit of God.

As we began to pray for our Church from that standpoint the Holy Spirit began to bring revelation of the majesty of God when compared with the poverty of our own spirits, and the skeptic I’d been listening to was silenced by the thought that this majestic God who created the universe, could, if he so wished, indeed tweak the rules that he had set in motion for a few hours and cause the Earth to stand still in its orbit for a day, or spin it in the opposite direction for a few hours. Nothing is impossible with Him, since He created all the possibilities anyway, and holds them in the palm of His hand.

And this brought me back to the flea. The word “Science” comes from the Latin word scientia, which means knowledge. Our knowledge can, and does, attempt to cast its net around the whole of the known universe, and the known universe is pretty big: but what of the unknown universe? How big is that? What is out there beyond our knowledge, our telescopes, and our computers – beyond even the digital football pitches that Power AI? The truth remains, “Man is but grass, and the glory of man as the flowers of the grass. The grass withers, and its flower falls away, But the word of the LORD endures forever.” (1 Peter 1: 24-25)

Smith Wigglesworth reminds us that part of the Work of the Holy Spirit is to make us aware of our own spiritual poverty without Him; but the wonderful corollary to that is the promise that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the poor in spirit (Matthew 5:3). Once we recognise that we really are fleas in our own flesh, and no matter how high we can jump our glory is that of the flowers of the grass, all of the kingdom of heaven is ours. His grace is made perfect in our weakness. But it’s only resurrection life that can take us out of the mindset of the human flea, and to enter its domain we have to die to our human understanding and “be renewed in the spirit of (our) minds,” (Ephesians 4:23)  or as Paul puts it in Romans 12:1 “be transformed by the renewing of (our) mind” by the Holy Spirit.

It is when our transformed minds have really grasped who God is, and who we are, that we can truly pray in the Spirit and not, as Smith Wigglesworth likes to put it, “on the human plane.” This is when the truth of proverbs 3:5 can ignite faith in our hearts instead of just being filed in our collection of memory verses: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding.” When we lean on our own understanding, our human spirits can remember (or look up) a Bible verse that speaks into our need, but in my experience – both in my own prayer life and in the lives of those around me -those prayers tend to remain unanswered. Why? Because they are not birthed in and breathed by the spirit of God, but have been prayed on the human plane. They might be Bible verses, but they are still flea jumps.

Elijah said “As surely as the Lord of hosts lives, before whom I stand.“ (1 Kings 18:15) and, somewhat more recently, writing about the day when we all meet face-to-face with God, CS Lewis said: “What will all that chatter and hearsay count? (will you even be able to remember it?) when the anaesthetic fog which we call nature or “the real world“ fades away and the presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate, and unavoidable?“ (CS Lewis: Mere Christianity).

Do we stand before the living Lord of hosts, or are we jumping around in our natural minds? The difference between the human spirit and the spirit of God is the difference between our flesh and resurrection life. When the spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead – and who caused the Sun to stand still – breathes a word into our spirits, we can truly pray with faith and expect to see results. Surely these words are the mustard seeds that move mountains.

Pursuing Love, Walking in the Spirit

Mountains and Waterfalls

6 Comments
The flowers of the grass

“Since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure heart, having been born again, not of corruptible seed but incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and abides forever, 
because

“All flesh is as grass,
And all the glory of man as the flower of the grass.
The grass withers,
And its flower falls away, But the word of the LORD endures forever.” 

Now this is the word which by the gospel was preached to you.” (1 Pe 1 22-25)

I was on a mission trip to Switzerland in May, staying at a Bible college up in the hills overlooking a lake, facing some prominent peaks of the Alps. I was walking down a path one morning to check out the bird life, having read the above passage from1 Peter before I left. In all the times I have read that scripture, I had never thought about “the flower of the grass,” until this moment when I found myself standing in it, looking across the valley at the view which the photo above captures a corner of. I took the picture from where I stood with the flower of the grass at my feet, the Bible school behind me, representing the enduring Word of God, looking across the valley at the beauty and majesty of God’s creation, drinking in liquid bird song and the flutter of butterflies among the wildflowers, drenched in peace, and above all feeling cradled in the love of the one who had made it all. After nearly 40 years in the Lord, I felt the Father’s love in a new, intimate way that morning.  And while I was standing there trying to contemplate the majesty of my loving Father through this tiny fragment of His creation the thought occurred to me: the flower of the grass doesn’t even last anything like as long as the grass itself. And this is as much as our glory is worth!

The thoughts tumbled in: how often do we try to elevate ourselves with our opinions, our superior “wisdom,” our spirituality, our ”rightness” – especially our rightness? But our glory is no more than the flower of the grass at my feet compared with the glory of God in all His majesty and the eternal truth of His Word, and my opinions are of no more value by comparison than a used bus ticket buried in the folds of  my pocket. “All flesh is as grass, And all the glory of man as the flower of the grass.” And yet we carry within us the glory of the One who made the mountains. How can I possibly offer people my bus tickets instead of letting them know something of the love, the peace and the glory that has been poured out into my heart by the Holy Spirit of Creator Father God? Why do I even look at them?

Without love, we stand alone, and all we manifest is what is corruptible;  the flower of the grass. When we reach out in love to others we can manifest the glory of God and the incorruptible truth of His word, quickened by the power of His Spirit. Switzerland is full of waterfalls. I was telling a wise friend about my experience on the hillside, and likened the idea of standing in the flow of God’s love to standing under a waterfall (I am hardly the first person to do so…) My friend said “A waterfall pours into a pool, then flows out of it. Our job (actually he said “your job,” but it applies to all of us) isn’t to try and direct the flow of the water, but just to stand beneath it. It will take its own course out of the pool.”

Our hearts are that pool. The love of God has been poured into them (Romans 5:5), and it pours out as rivers of living water (John 7:38). I don’t think we can truly love unless we stand under that waterfall. Jesus came and died to make it possible. The Father’s waterfall carries no negative pollutants; it always brings forgiveness, always drives away hurt. It always renews, always washes away the old, it is always fresh, always new, always clean, always pure. It is the Father’s waterfall that drives the dynamo of His power on the Earth. When we stand beneath it we cannot hold onto pain and disappointment, but letting go we can let the water come, and in our own situations we can be like Jesus, “who, when He was reviled, did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges righteously.” (1 Peter 2:23)

“Every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17), and so the greatest and most perfect gift of all, the love of God, must also come down from above. It can’t return from where the waterfall has already passed. If we look to any other source to meet our deepest need we are looking for secondhand water.

“Deep calls unto deep at the noise of Your waterfalls;
All Your waves and billows have gone over me. The LORD will command His lovingkindness in the daytime,
And in the night His song shall be with me—
A prayer to the God of my life. |(Psalm 43:7-8)

Isaiah exhorts all who are thirsty to “Come to the waters” (Isaiah 55:1). When we do, it is not just our thirst that is quenched, but the thirst of those around us as the Lord commands His lovingkindness with the water that pours out of the pool of our hearts. If we will stand in the Father’s waterfall we will see the glory of the mountains made manifest, not just the flower of the grass.