Rabbi Schneider - One Important Spiritual Discipline to Master
John 8:28, "When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and I do nothing on my own initiative, but I speak these things as the father taught me".
What I love about this is that Jesus did not live by his own initiative, he wasn't governed by his own impulses. And I think this is such a discipleship moment, because how often times are you and I acting not because we're being inspired by the father, but because we're being inspired by our own impulses?
I mean, have you ever heard of impulse buying? Oh, bam, bam, bam... but it's the same thing with a lot of things in life: impulse speaking, impulse acting. Many of us are living too much in our impulses, and we need to learn how to separate our own impulses, which are from the natural realm, from divine impulses, so that we can restrict ourselves, so that we can restrict the flesh, so that we're not living by the energy of the flesh, but only living by the initiation of the holy Ruach, the spirit that lives inside us.
This is the answer: Jesus said the miracles he was doing were not through his own initiative, that he only did what the father was doing, he said. And so, you and I need to learn how to separate the flesh from the spirit. In our own lives, a lot of walking in a way that's spiritually mature, is being able to separate in our own awareness, the difference between our fleshly impulses, and the impulses of the Holy Spirit.
I mean sometimes it's as simple as if you listen to some people talk. They talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk... I mean they talk for 30 minutes straight, and they only should have talked for 60 seconds, because they don't have control over their impulses, and they're not aware. But it goes so deep what I'm saying, the principle that I'm trying to communicate, beloved, it it's so deep. Like always I'm asking myself, "Lord, what do you want me to do"? Jesus lived only by the impulse, by the initiation of the father.