"Be Thou My Vision" is a classic hymn that originates with a poem written in the 6th century by Irish poet Dallan Forgaill. The first three stanzas:
- Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art;
Thou my best Thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light. - Be Thou my Wisdom, and Thou my true Word;
I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;
Thou my great Father, I Thy true son;
Thou in me dwelling, and I with Thee one. - Be Thou my battle Shield, Sword for the fight;
Be Thou my Dignity, Thou my Delight;
Thou my soul’s Shelter, Thou my high Tow’r:
Raise Thou me heav’nward, O Pow’r of my pow’r.
"Spiritual growth is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to your own.
“Preachers spend time trying to get people to do more, to try harder, to live radically for God, change your life, etc.—and the result is really stunted spiritual growth because you fix your eyes on yourself and you can’t do it. It’s not going to be you.
“Most of the thinking about Christian living and sanctification is really just terribly narcissistic. It’s thinking, ‘How are we doing? How are we growing? Am I doing it right? Am I not doing it right?’
“We brood over our spiritual failures and ponder over our spiritual successes and it’s all about us. The more you focus on your need to be better, the worse you really get. You wind up becoming neurotic and self-absorbed and all of life’s about you.
“When you’re possessed with your performance, instead of Christ’s performance; when you spend your time thinking about what you’re doing, instead of what He’s doing, well, then, what are you going to do but get worse? That hinders your spiritual growth because it makes you increasingly self-centered.
“Sanctification, set-apart living, is about forgetting about yourself: ‘It’s not me! It’s Christ!’ The grace of God works--is manifested, put on display--in your minuses, not your pluses. It’s in your weaknesses, not your strengths. That’s the opposite of religion. Religion says, ‘YOU got to make it, YOU got to create it , or you’re going to fail.’
"It’s Christ who’s the issue. He’s the cornerstone; the point of reference that all of our life and all of our growth originates from. Spiritual growth and deliverance is by God’s design and God’s timing.
“Back in I Kings 6, when Solomon’s building the temple, all of the stones that were put into that temple were fitted, prepared, structured off-site at the quarry and then brought and put in, and there was not a hammer—no noise as the temple was put together. It just kind of grew silently.
“The work to shape and to form US was designed and finished before we were ever set into place into the building. ‘For we are his workmanship.’ You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. He already invented it.
“God’s made you a part of something that before the foundation of the world He planned to do. He’s already formed it and fitted you into it.
"It’s His design and you grow in that. If you’re going to bring that design into the reality of your experience, you appropriate it by FAITH. The reality is that’s the reality!
“He came to live His life fully in you and Paul says, ‘Wake up, dudes, don’t you know that?!’ You’re bought with a price. You ought to live in the reality of who God has made you. If God came to dwell in you, how should you live?! 'Wake up!' If you’ve got an asset like THAT, what should you do?! USE IT!
“God’s in you to live His life. Now, in I Corinthians 6, that’s talking about you as an individual. His purpose in you personally is to make your life a vehicle, a vessel; that is, a living manifestation of the One who inhabits you.
“You remember Paul in Philippians 1 says that his desire is that whether by life or by death that Christ would be magnified in his body? That when people would see him, even in the extremity of death, they would see that the one he treasured, the one he valued, the one that was of the greatest magnitude to him was Jesus Christ, and when he made choices, he made them based upon what God’s Word said. When he took actions, it was based upon what God wanted done.
“The way sin doesn’t run your life is you’re not under the law; you’re not focusing on your performance. You’re under grace, looking at who God has made you in His Son.
If you look at Romans 7:1, Paul says, [1] Know ye not, brethren, (for I speak to them that know the law,) how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth? He's saying, 'As long as it’s going to be about what you do, here’s what’s going to happen to you.'
“Then he writes in verse 14, [14] For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.
I don’t like to argue with Paul, but that verse is wrong. Oh, I know Paul’s saying it, but Paul is not sold under sin. He just spent 23 verses in chapter 6, and then six verses in chapter 7, telling you he’s free. He started looking at himself and his performance and said, ‘You know, I don’t look free.’
“The more he focused on himself, you know what the more happened? Those accusatory thoughts came in and sin revived and you know what happens when you start looking at yourself? You begin to see yourself, and when you begin to see yourself, you know what you begin to see? Failure.
“You go back to the psalmist in Psalm 3 and he could have been talking about Job of old. He says, ‘People look at me and they see what’s going on in my life and say, There’s no help from God for him; he’s so far gone even God can’t help him!’
“Paul says, ‘You know, those voices of condemnation and accusing are going to come because you’re conscious of who you are in you, and when you focus on who you are in you, you know what happens? ‘O wretched man that I am.’
“You see, it’s an inner struggle. There’s a spiritual battle that goes on but of faith. The victory is an inner victory, seeing the invisible reality. Moses won the victory, Hebrews 11 says, over Pharaoh by ‘seeing Him who is invisible.’ By faith, looking at the truth of God.
“Paul says, ‘I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.’
“When you have your ‘I’ moments, they’re really not ‘I’ moments. They’re moments when you need to be learning that, ‘I can’t do this.’ And when you see, ‘I can’t do it,’ that’s what Galatians 2 told you.
“You only learn two things in your whole Christian life: ‘It’s not I, it’s Christ.’ And when you get into the, ‘The deliverance isn’t here; I can’t do it,’ you say, ‘Whoa, I need to look at Christ! Because HE can; because HE did!' "
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