And Moses said to God, “If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here…For is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?”
Exodus 33:15-16
While I was in service on Sunday at church, this verse was read, and immediately the Holy Spirit provoked my heart with some thoughts.
The word that He kept pressing on my spirit was the word “naked’.
Naked, Phil! Naked is what Christians are without my presence!
He reminded me of the passage in Revelation, when Jesus is writing to the church of Laodicea when he rebukes them for their self-sufficiency: You say that I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked.”
There it is, that word: naked.
Nakedness is a condition that all of us have. It’s also a condition also that all of us hide. We hide it because, when we’re naked, our shame and barrenness are exposed.
And as the Holy Spirit was giving me this word about nakedness, He was reminding me that as much as naked people are barren without clothes on, so Christians are barren without the Holy Spirit.
You see, Christ meant what he said in John 15 when he said, “Apart from me, you can do nothing.” Yet, observe our daily attitudes and you will find that the way we live each day is governed more by our need to appear all together, than our dependency on the Holy Spirit.
Each morning, we are more concerned about eating breakfast, more concerned about dressing up, more concerned about having gas in our car, more concerned about money in our wallets, than we are on getting on our knees and waiting to be filled with the Holy Spirit. All of those are important, but none of them will enable Christians with the power to living that day for Christ. Only the manifest power of the Holy Spirit will do that.
And as I was reminded again this Sunday, and as I rethink about how I spend my mornings, that is what Christians are without Him: naked.
