When
we leave the places of living before men and begin to live before the
Eyes-of-fire alone, we cross over into unknown territory. As we looked
at in the process of His awakening, He has brought us to a certain
wilderness of transformation. And here in this place we are no longer
able to measure our worth by the tangible reality of our success before
men. We leave the old measuring sticks at the door, for they are not
suited for the ways of God. We depart from the false identity that was
based on how respected, known, gifted and influential we were in the
eyes of men and leap into the vast unknown realm, the hidden reality,
of who we are eternally in God. In this hurdle, we take great risk for
we leave every familiar comfort behind us. To abandon the
realm of the seen that we might freefall into the unseen is a daring
endeavor and only faith anchors our souls. We voluntarily jump off the
cliff of our old identity without an absolute clarity of our new one.
Though we know who we are in the corporate sense of the
redeemed-body-of-Christ, the mysteries that He formed in us
individually and the details of who we are personally in the hidden
places, are nearly entirely hidden from our understandings.
We
are trading in what we have always known and what others have always
told us of ourselves for a book of blank pages. We leave all the old
voices, however true or false, for the One voice who is temporarily
very silent in our experience. He shows us so little of who we are in
Him in the beginning because He wants us to experience the “drop off”
from the old ways and be willing to plunge into the unseen realm with
eyes of faith. We face the pain of the barrenness of our
souls. We face the reality of all that we do not yet know of Him when
we once thought we knew so much. We spend a season in this
dangling-in-between place—no longer identified as we once were, yet
still so foreign and distant from who we truly are in Him and our
eternal identity. As we dangle, we pray, “Let me be weighed on honest
scales, that God may know my integrity” (Job 31:6).
In
this season of “dangling,” we slowly and nearly imperceptibly
experience a transfer of all of our wealth. Our “gold” and all that we
are are moved from what is seen into the hidden realm of the unseen.
“Then you will lay your gold in the dust….Yes, the Almighty will be
your gold and your precious silver; for then you will have your delight
in the Almighty…” (Job 22:24-25).What we cling to is no longer of the
essence of what is temporal but what is eternal. We are hidden with
Christ until He is revealed and us with Him. We leave the realm of what
can be communicated and stake our territory in the temporary silence of
eternal reality.
In
this place, the cost is the silence. The price is the hiddenness. No
one, except those rare few with eyes into eternity can perceive who we
are anymore. We cannot communicate except by such feeble words that
never do justice to the beauty or the wonder of what He Himself calls
us in Him. The pain is the namelessness. Though we are far from
nameless in truth, we simply have not heard the very real name He has
given to us and that we will possess for all eternity. This is the cost
and, oh, how worth it is the sacrifice. It is this struggle that brings
forth strength within us in time. We place all of our riches and all of
our inheritance in the realm beyond. We wish we could reach it, but we
cannot. It is hidden. It is behind a veil. Yet it is there. And we begin to know by the testimony of the Spirit within us that we own a very real and genuine reality in that place outside of the seen.
