When God gives you a vision of what he wants, speaking to you by his Spirit through his word, and your mind and soul thrill to that vision, you must walk in the light of what you’ve seen. If you don’t, you will sink into servitude to a point of view our Lord never had. Disobedience to a heavenly vision will make you a slave to points of view that are alien to Jesus Christ. Don’t look at someone else and say, “If they can have those views and prosper, why can’t I?” You have to walk in the light of the vision that has been given to you, not compare yourself to others or judge them. How others think and behave is between them and God.
When you find that a point of view in which you’ve been delighting clashes with a heavenly vision, put it away at once. Debating with God will only develop certain mindsets in you: a sense of property, a sense of personal rights—things in which Jesus Christ put absolutely no stock. He was always against any sense of personal entitlement, considering it the root of everything alien to himself. “Watch out!” he told his disciples. “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions” (Luke 12:15). If we don’t recognize this, we’re ignoring the undercurrent of our Lord’s teaching.
We have the tendency to lie back and bask in the memory of the wonderful experiences we’ve had. If there’s any standard in the New Testament revealed by the light of God that you don’t meet—that you don’t even feel inclined to meet—that is the beginning of backsliding, because it means your conscience isn’t answering to the truth. You can never be the same after God unveils a truth to you. That moment marks a turning point: either you go on as an ever truer disciple of Jesus Christ, or you turn back as a deserter.
