Working Out What God Has Worked In: Living From the Overflow

By Ryan Sturgis

Do you know your life is meant to be a genuine expression of God’s will, just like Jesus’s earthly life was? Working Out What God Has Worked In will bring this truth into focus for you.
Author Ryan A. Sturgis will show you why you are most like the person God designed you to be when you are allowing Him to flow through your life. Ryan will walk you through the process of allowing God to set you apart in sanctification and reproduce the life of Christ in you, which becomes a natural result of abiding in His presence. You will see how surrendering to His desires will validate and establish the individuality with which He made you. You will be invited to embrace a faith that is free from striving, one characterized by peace and reliance on God's continuous inpouring.
Want to start living out the purpose for which you were created? Working Out What God Has Worked In will show you how. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Creation House
• Release date: Oct 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781629984285

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INTRODUCTION

Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.

—PHILIPPIANS 2:12–13

HOW WOULD YOU describe Jesus’s earthly life? There are many ways to answer that question, but I believe the best way to describe it is as a genuine and accurate expression of the will of God the Father. Believe it or not, that is exactly what your life is meant to be. Is that how you would describe your life? Your life is meant to be a genuine and accurate expression of the will of God the Father. While this is not a new revelation, it is, in fact, a lost one.

It may be scary to think of human actions as being a representation of the will of God. Over the years, we have developed a phobia of people who claim to be doing the will of God—and with good reason! There have been many people who have committed egregious acts and claimed to be acting on behalf of God. Though unfortunate, we cannot escape the reality that the Bible does say that the hope of glory is Christ in you (Col. 1:27).

God wants the best for you. He literally wants the best you. He wants you to be exactly who He created you to be, and you are no more fully who God designed you to be than when you allow God to impact the world through your life. You were created to be the perfect reflection of God’s glory. You were created for God—for His glory and His purposes. This is not meant to take away from your individuality or personal uniqueness. In fact, this validates and is the very reason for it. God created you to be a unique representation of His preferences, passions, and priorities. This means that you were created to desire the very same things that God Himself desires.

When God created you, it was as an extension of Himself. Just as your arm is an extension of you in that it extends your reach, so you are an extension of God. You are an extension of His love, His grace, and His mercy. As your arm only functions as life (blood) flows to it, you only function as an extension of your Heavenly Father as long as His life flows through you in communion with Him.

You are who God designed you to be only when you allow God to flow through your life. This is not something that you can will to happen. You cannot force the life of God to flow through you, nor can you manipulate God through spiritual rituals and disciplines. If you really want to live out the purpose for which you were created, you need to learn how to work out what God works into your life.

Learning how to be available to God’s life-flow is important and so is getting up and expressing that life. Neither one of these things happens by accident. You need to allow the life of God to flow through you. This requires cooperation with God.

For much of my Christian life, I wore myself out trying to perfect my Christianity. I tried to give God my best through countless hours of reading, studying, and practicing rigorous spiritual disciplines. Religion became a craft that I aimed to master. Yet, for all of my efforts, I continued to struggle with obeying God and yielding eternal fruit for His kingdom. On top of that, my heart was still hurt from past wounds, and I remained unable to love myself or others. Put another way, all my efforts were as useless, dirty rags (Isa. 64:6). I became very tired, and my Christian walk became difficult and burdensome. During this difficulty, God helped me to realize what I believe few people realize: He wants to give His children the desire and the ability to walk according to His good purpose. Realizing that makes things a lot easier.

Simply trying harder is not the answer. There is no life in religious formula. It is a mistake to try to reduce the Christian life to a formula. The imitation of Jesus is not the imitation of routine or ritual but obedience to the Heavenly Father. This requires a fresh perspective. You cannot just duplicate Jesus’s behavior—because He only did that which He saw the Father do and only said that which He heard the Father say (John 5:19; 8:28). With new eyes, you and I must see what the Father is doing and hear what the Father is saying. This requires an organic relationship in which we spend time with God—seeking, waiting, praising, worshipping, and listening.

The Christian walk becomes a burden when it develops into a set of dead rituals applied to a dead heart in hopes of reaching a dead world. We need life, and the only place to find it is in communion with God. God wants to help us to accomplish His will.

God is the life-spring. Your life is meant to be an overflow of what God has poured into you. Living from the overflow means that all you say and do is the direct result of what God has said or done in your life. This requires self-sacrifice. It also requires cooperation with God’s efforts, and less human effort.

God created you for a purpose. Whatever that individual purpose may be, it requires that you cooperate with the work of God. We must then ask, How do we cooperate with God in the work that He desires to do in us, and in the world around us? In the first half of this book, we will look into God’s working in. I will give you four principles that I believe will help you to understand God’s working in. These principles are not meant to be a to-do list, but hopefully they will give you an understanding of how we partner with God in representing His value system on earth.

Once we have an understanding of the hows and whys God uses when He is working in us to will and to act in order to fulfill His good purpose, we will move on to discuss a few more principles aimed at the working out of our salvation—expressing our salvation in a way that accurately expresses what God is doing in our lives (Phil. 2:13).

The salvation that God aims to work in each person is the same.

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.

—ROMANS 8:28–29

The all things is different for each person, but the goal for which each was predestined is the same: to be conformed to the image of his Son. There is only one image, one Jesus, so we will address some of the issues that cause dissidence between what God is working in us through the Holy Spirit and what is actually produced in our lives.

Working out what God has worked in is a call to yield to the Holy One of heaven. You were meant to live out of an overflow of what God pours into your life in communion. God desires to work in the lives of His children. He wants to mold and form us all into the image of His Son Jesus. You don’t need to be strong enough, wise enough, or good enough. Just surrender! God is totally committed to the process of working in you and helping you to be the expression of His greatness and goodness on this earth. Whatever your past shortcomings or failures may be, I can confidently say, God still wants to work in your life! Are you ready to surrender all, cooperate with the work God wants to do, and express externally what God is doing internally? If so, let’s get started.

Chapter 1

IT ALL BEGINS HERE

Principle #1: Be Rightly Related to God

Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.

—JOHN 3:18

COMING TO FAITH in Jesus Christ is a unique experience for each person who has ever come to trust in the Savior. Yet, each individual begins this journey in the very same place: lost and separated from God. This is because sin, which was introduced in the Garden of Eden, has created infinite distance between God and man. Over the generations, sin has taken many forms; however, the root cause of sin has remained the same. As we will discuss, the root cause of sin is distrust in the character of God, and the result of distrust is rebellion against God, which is sin.

Through the infection of sin, man has become a sinner