The Speck, the Plank, and the Coming Move of God
By John Paul Jackson

Sometimes, letting God be God is one of the hardest, most trying, most nerve-wracking experiences we can go through. Simply put, it is a matter of trust, for letting God be everything He wants to be in our life means we are no longer in control. Quite often, this is a very difficult thing to accept. 

Our life is in His hands, not our own. In the same way, the lives of those around us are in His hands, not ours. We prayerfully commit them to Him, and after we have done so, we must let them go, for there isn’t anything else we can do. This is what trust truly means—letting God be in control and do whatever He sees fit.

With this in mind, in the approaching revival, each of us must come to a decision: Are we going to try to “fix” others ourselves? Or are we going to commit them to God and let God do the correcting, should He deem that any correcting truly needs to be done?

Every day, God purposefully sets us in situations in which we have to answer this question, where we have to decide who is the better leader—Him or us. One situation He uses all the time to teach us is the Church. We are very aware of the fact that not everything we see in church is one hundred percent spiritual—in other words, free of the flesh. Not everything coheres to the spiritual ideals and standards we have in our hearts. But despite these things, God is God, and if He isn’t offended by another’s interactions with Him, neither should we.

We are entering a season in which God is leading His people out into the wild, unknown territory called the realm of the spirit. This means that much of what we will see, hear, and experience—and have already begun to see, hear, and experience—could be called . . . a little odd, to say the least. We might be made uncomfortable. We might find heart issues, feelings, and strongholds rising up inside us, and we previously had no idea they were there. But if we study past revivals and other incredible moves of God, we will find that each one was accompanied by actions and reactions humans could describe in only one of two ways—of God or of the flesh.

This is where trust is so important. God knows what He is about and what He is doing, even when we do not.

Before deciding it’s time to remove the speck from our brother’s or sister’s eye, we have to stop and examine our motives. How do we see ourselves? Do we view ourselves as the Christian Gestapo? The spiritual police? God can so easily stop what is not from Him. It is not our responsibility to do so.

What stopped every one of the major moves of God in the past was criticism. Somebody thought he or she knew what God wanted. Somebody attempted to rein in and quiet the crowd and in so doing, he or she stopped up the flow of the Holy Spirit.

True revival comes to the contrite and humble, to those who love one another, to those who hunger and thirst for righteousness and for God to move in their lives. God, by definition, is not human, and so we cannot expect, then, to keep our fallen human nature when we are in His presence. Either we become like Him, letting go of our criticism, pride, and the need to be correct, or we pull away. The only way we will see God face to face is if we choose to lose ourselves and allow God to do and be everything He desires, not only in us but in those around us as well.

CG