It Is Very Important to Establish a Normal Relationship With God
When people believe in, love, and satisfy God, they touch the Spirit of God with their hearts and thereby obtain His satisfaction, they use their hearts to engage with God’s words, and are thus moved by His Spirit. If you wish to live a normal spiritual life and establish a normal relationship with God, then you must first give your heart to Him. Only after you have quieted your heart before Him and poured your whole heart into Him will you be able to gradually develop a normal spiritual life. If in people’s belief in God, they do not give their hearts to Him, if their hearts are not with Him, and they do not treat His burden as their own, then all that they do is an act of cheating God, an act typical of religious people, and it will not receive God’s praise. God cannot gain anything from this kind of person, they can only serve as a foil to His work. These people are like decorations in the house of God—they are placeholders and they are trash, and God does not make use of them. Not only is there no chance of the Holy Spirit working in them, there is no value in perfecting them. This type of person is a veritable walking corpse. No part of them can be used by the Holy Spirit—they have been thoroughly dominated and deeply corrupted by Satan. God will eliminate these people. When the Holy Spirit makes use of people today, He not only employs the desirable parts of them to get things done—He also perfects and changes the parts of them that are undesirable. If you are able to pour your heart into God and quiet it before Him, then you will have the opportunity and the qualifications to be used by the Holy Spirit, and to receive His enlightenment and illumination. Even more than that, you will have the opportunity for the Holy Spirit to remedy your shortcomings. When you give your heart to God, on the positive side, you will be able to gain deeper entry and attain a higher plane of insight. On the negative side, you will have greater knowledge of your deficiencies and shortcomings, and you will yearn more and seek more to satisfy God’s intentions. Furthermore, you will not be negative, you will be able to actively enter in. This shows that you are a correct person. Assuming that your heart is able to remain quiet before God, then whether or not you receive praise from the Holy Spirit, and whether or not you please God, hinges crucially upon whether you can actively enter in. When the Holy Spirit enlightens people and makes use of them, He never makes them negative, He always makes them progress actively. And when He does this, people still have their weaknesses, but they do not live by them. They do not put off their life progress, and they keep seeking to satisfy God’s intentions. This is a standard. If you can attain this, it proves that you have obtained the presence of the Holy Spirit. If a person is always negative, and if, even after receiving enlightenment and coming to know themselves, they remain negative and passive, and they are unable to stand up and work with God, then they have only received the grace of God, and the Holy Spirit is not with them. Their negativity means that their heart is not turned toward God, and that their spirit has not been moved by God’s Spirit. This should be understood by all.
Through experience, it can be seen that quieting one’s heart before God is of the utmost importance. It relates to issues with people’s spiritual lives and life progress. Your pursuit of the truth and dispositional change will only bear fruit if your heart is quiet before God. That is because you have come before Him bearing a burden, because you always feel that you are lacking in so many ways, that there are many truths that you need to know, that there is a great deal of reality that you need to experience, and that you should show consideration for God’s intentions. These things are always on your mind, it feels as if they are pressing down upon you with a force that leaves you unable to breathe, and thus you feel heavy of heart (though you are not in a negative state). Only such a person is qualified to accept the enlightenment of God’s words and to be moved by the Spirit of God. It is because of their burden, because they are heavy of heart, and, it can be said, because of the price they have paid and the suffering they have endured before God, that they receive His enlightenment and illumination. For God does not give anyone special treatment. He is always fair in His treatment of people, but He also does not give to people arbitrarily or unconditionally. This is one aspect of His righteous disposition. In real life, most people have not yet attained this realm. At the very least, their hearts have yet to completely turn toward God, so there still has not been any great change in their life disposition. This is because they only live in God’s grace and they have yet to gain the work of the Holy Spirit. The criteria that people must meet in order to be made use of by God are as follows: Their hearts must be turned toward God, they must carry the burden of His words, they must have hearts of yearning, and they must be resolved to seek the truth. Only these people can obtain the work of the Holy Spirit and frequently gain His enlightenment and illumination. The people that God makes use of appear outwardly to lack reason and normal relationships with others, but they speak carefully, with propriety, and they are always able to keep a quiet heart before God. This is exactly the kind of person who is worthy of being used by the Holy Spirit. These people “without reason” who God speaks of seem to lack normal relationships with others, and they do not care about outward love or outward practices, but when they fellowship on spiritual matters, they are able to open their hearts and selflessly provide others with the illumination and enlightenment they have acquired from their actual experiences before God. That is how they express their love for God and satisfy His intentions. When others slander and ridicule them, they avoid being influenced by outside people, matters, or things, and remain quiet before God. It seems as though they have their own unique insights. Regardless of what other people do, their hearts never leave God. When other people are talking and laughing, their hearts remain before God, they contemplate His word, or silently pray to the God in their hearts, seeking His desires. These people do not attach importance to maintaining normal interpersonal relationships, and they seem to have no philosophy for worldly dealings. They appear lively, lovable, and innocent, but they also possess a certain calmness. This is the likeness of the kind of person that God makes use of. Things like philosophies for worldly dealings or “normal reason” simply do not work in this type of person. They have poured their whole hearts into God’s word, and they seem to only have God in their hearts. This is the kind of person “without reason” that God refers to, and it is precisely this kind of person that is used by God. The mark of a person who God makes use of is: No matter when or where, their heart is always before God, and no matter how dissolute others may be, or how much other people indulge in lust and in the flesh, the heart of this person never leaves God, and they do not follow the crowd. Only this type of person is suited for God’s use, and only this type of person is perfected by the Holy Spirit. If you are unable to attain this, then you are not qualified to be gained by God, or to be perfected by the Holy Spirit.
If you want to establish a normal relationship with God, your heart must be turned toward Him; with this as a foundation, you will then have normal relationships with other people too. If you do not have a normal relationship with God, then no matter what you do to maintain your relationships with other people, no matter how hard you work or how much energy you put in, it will all belong to a human philosophy for worldly dealings. You will be protecting your position among people and attaining their praise through human perspectives and human philosophies, rather than establishing normal interpersonal relationships according to the word of God. If you do not focus on your relationships with people, and maintain a normal relationship with God instead, if you are willing to give your heart to God and learn to submit to Him, then your interpersonal relationships will naturally become normal. These relationships will then not be built upon the flesh, but upon the foundation of God’s love. You will have almost no fleshly interactions with other people, but on a spiritual level, there will be fellowship and mutual love, comfort, and provision between you. All of this is done upon the foundation of a desire to satisfy God—these relationships are not maintained through human philosophies for worldly dealings, they are formed naturally when one carries a burden for God. They do not require any artificial, human effort from you, you need only to practice according to the principles of God’s words. Are you willing to be considerate of God’s intentions? Are you willing to be a person who is “without reason” before Him? Are you willing to completely give your heart to God and to disregard your position among other people? Of all the people you interact with, whom do you have the best relationships with? With whom do you have the worst relationships? Are your relationships with people normal? Do you treat all people equally? Are your relationships with others maintained according to your philosophy for worldly dealings, or are they built upon the foundation of God’s love? When people do not give their hearts to God, their spirits become sluggish, numb, and unconscious. Such people will never understand God’s words, they will never have a normal relationship with God, and they will never achieve a change in their disposition. Changing one’s disposition is the process of giving one’s heart completely to God, and of receiving enlightenment and illumination from His words. God’s work allows people to actively enter in, and it enables them to cast off the negative parts of themselves after gaining knowledge of them. When you have given your heart to God, you will be able to sense every time that your spirit is slightly moved, and know every part of God’s enlightenment and illumination. If you persevere, you will gradually enter onto the path of being perfected by the Holy Spirit. The quieter your heart is before God, the more sensitive and delicate your spirit will be, the more it will be able to perceive how the Holy Spirit moves it, and the more normal your relationship with God will become. Normal interpersonal relationships are established upon the foundation of turning one’s heart toward God, not through human effort. If God is absent from a person’s heart, then their relationships with other people are merely relationships of the flesh. They are not normal, they are lustful indulgences, and they are hated and loathed by God. If you say that your spirit has been moved, but you are only willing to fellowship with people whom you like and respect, and you are biased against and refuse to speak with people whom you dislike when they come to seek from you, this is even more proof that you are ruled by your feelings and that you do not have a normal relationship with God at all. It shows that you are attempting to fool God and cover up your own ugliness. You may be able to share some of your knowledge, but if your intents are wrong, then everything you do is only good by human standards, and God will not praise you. Your actions will be driven by your flesh, not by God’s burden. You are only fit for God’s use if you are able to quiet your heart before Him and have normal interactions with all those who love Him. If you can do that, then no matter how you interact with others, you will not be acting out a philosophy for worldly dealings, you will be considering God’s burden and living before Him. How many people like this are there amongst you? Are your relationships with others really normal? On what foundation are they built? How many philosophies for worldly dealings are there within you? Have you cast them off? If your heart cannot turn completely toward God, then you are not of God—you have come from Satan, you will ultimately return to Satan, and you do not deserve to be one of God’s people. You must examine these things carefully.