Spiritual Subversion
A good friend recently asked, “Can we completely subvert the working of the Spirit in our lives totally?” They went on to reference Ezekiel 36:27 which says that God, thru the indwelling Spirit and new heart He gives us will “cause” us to walk in His statutes.
I think this is an insightful question and one that many believers find themselves asking at one time or another.
There are many Christ-ones who live earthly lives influenced more by the flesh and its worldly desires than by the Spirit and His godly desires. That is to say, they are not yielding to the Spirit as often as they are yielding to the fleshly worldly way of living. Their mindset is on things of the earth more than it is on things above. Consequently, they succumb to the gravitational pull of the precepts and systems of this fallen world more often than they let themselves be guided by the Still Small Voice.
This is not Father’s desire for any of us, yet He does not overrule our choices. As believers, each of us has the ability to let, to allow, to yield to, the Spirit, or to live according to the flesh. God wants what is best for us. It is His desire that we function as He designed us to function.
Holy Spirit cannot be completely subverted in the life of a Christ-one, but we can ignore His prompting, choosing instead to do what seems right to us based on worldly thinking. We can quench the Spirit and that grieves Him. Nevertheless, He is persistent at urging us back to dependent living.
He tirelessly acts in our very best interests. He does this out of Love for us. As many have pointed out, God does what He does because He is who He is. He cannot and will not act in ways inconsistent with His character. We find this summed up in 1 Corinthians 13 where the culminating statement about Love is that it never fails.
“What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:31–32, NASB 2020)
