After The Barriers Are Gone

It is incredible the number of barriers we put between us and people as well as between us and God. I am thankful that our Father does not respect our barriers and works through them to reach us. We will never be able to use the excuse that God did not try enough to rescue us from our own doom. He reaches through our barriers and presents us with a choice but the decision will always be ours. He offers everyone, despite barriers, sins, opinions, the same choice.

Over the last few days we have examined Jesus' encounter with the woman at the well, a woman he sought out to present her with a choice. She presented him with four barriers to keep him at a distance:

   - social barrier
   - exclusive barrier
   - sin barrier
   - religious barrier

Jesus faced and overcame each of these, showing us how it ought to be done be showing how God does it in us. And after he went through each of the barriers and the woman was presented with the full truth, with everything else stripped away, things changed:

The woman said, “I know that the Messiah will come. He is the one we call Christ. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

“I am that one,” Jesus told her, “and I am speaking to you now.”  (John 4:25-26) 

The woman was so convinced of it that she told her whole town and they came out en mass to see for themselves. God will always break through our barriers but the incredible only happens when we decide to accept what he is offering.

There are people all around us with barriers and we try to get through while maintaining our own barriers. Jesus approached this woman in openness. He was transparent. He assailed each barrier presented and he gave her the truth. It was then up to her what to do with that truth. We have to make sure we are not approaching people with our own agenda and with our barriers still intact.

It is an easy thing to do, approach people with our own agenda. The true work of the Spirit is not going to happen unless we have allowed God to remove our barriers and we are standing in his truth. It is when we allow the Spirit to direct, to give us the words, the knowledge and when we trust he is using us that we are able to see God's power at work in the lives of those hidden behind barriers.

We have to get rid of all our methodology, agendas, schemes, systems and just deal in the raw honesty of the Holy Spirit. We don't need training in evangelism, we need training in the Spirit. People don't want our opinion, they need the Word of God. People don't need to see my success in this world, they need to see Jesus succeed in me. We need to understand the Word when it says that our strength is not found in ourselves or in the tools of this world but in God himself. In Jesus we can be the overcomers of all barriers, of all things, as Jesus proclaimed we are.

No more barriers as we live by the Spirit.