Receptivity

Jesus stood a little child before His disciples and said to them,
“Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

Why? Because with children, everything must be simple. Children are humble. They simply receive. It’s pretty much all they do. And they are perfectly happy doing it. That’s what we are designed to do: be like a child. Just receive.

All of life involves receiving. In the natural realm, plants receive energy from the sun, water from the sky, and nourishment from the soil. Animals receive the food God provides them. We receive the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. All of creation functions by receptivity.

The same applies in the spiritual realm. We simply receive. Receptivity is the most child-like function we can have, and the most natural. It is not one of our functions. It is our function. All of our other functions are by-products of this one. Children are wonderful receivers. We are our Heavenly Father’s children, remember?

When we receive, our focus is on what is being received. If we’re being thrown a baseball, our focus isn’t on the perfection of our glove; it’s on the baseball coming at us — or at least, it needs to be! If we are sitting down to eat, our focus isn’t on the complexity of our digestive system. It’s on the food we are receiving.

Because we are one with Jesus, it’s not our activity that is key in our union. It’s our receptivity. That’s how Jesus lives His life through us — through our receptivity. That’s how we entered into a one-spirit union. We received Jesus. That is still our role: to receive.

What is it, then, that we receive? Do we receive Jesus’ help? No, He didn’t come to help us live the life. Jesus came to live it in us. Do we receive the love, the patience, the power? No, Jesus doesn’t have those things to give us. Jesus only has Himself to give us.

And that’s exactly what we receive. We receive Jesus, living His life in us and through us. He’s already in us, living through us. Jesus simply wants us to receive more fully the reality of Him living in us.

And how, we may ask, do we receive? By faith. Remember what the Bible’s word for receptivity is? Faith. It is not striving hard after anything. It’s simply receiving what already is. In truth, it is simply recognizing what already is.

What already is, is Jesus, living His life in us and through us. We simply accept that as the present-tense reality. It doesn’t become the reality when we believe hard enough. It is the reality. Right now.

All of life is lived by faith, even in the physical realm. We are invited to someone’s home. We are given an address. We’ve never been there. We don’t even know if there is a house at that address. But we have faith that what our hosts have told us is true.

So we go in faith, trusting that when we arrive, a house will be there. Once there, we go in. We’re invited to have a seat. We spot a wooden chair. We have no idea if the chair will hold us. But we trust our hosts won’t put a chair out that is going to collapse.

By faith, we sit. Dinner is served. We’ve never eaten anything at this home before. Do you see? We are operating entirely on faith in someone, and what someone has told us. Our faith doesn’t create the reality. The house was already there. The chair that would hold us was already there.

Through faith we simply recognized the reality that already was. We could have said, “I don’t believe that chair will hold me,” and walked out.

It is no different in the spiritual realm. Faith doesn’t create the reality. Faith is simply recognizing what is already there. It is continually recognizing the life of Jesus in us.

We trust in Jesus, and what He tells us:
“I am in you; you are in me; I am living my life through you. I am speaking, acting, loving through you. It is no longer you who live. It is me living through you, expressing all that I am through you.”

We relax into this reality. That is our divinely-ordained role. We are the container. We are the ones trusting Jesus, depending on Him each moment to make it a reality. Ours is a union in which Jesus produces the fruit, and we manifest it. We can’t produce it.

But we allow it to be expressed through us. That happens through faith.

But that’s too simple, you may object. Yes, it is simple. I told you that this life is simple.

It has to be if you are to receive it like a child. I am inviting you to enter my rest, in the here and now. How else are you going to be at rest other than by simply receiving?

The wonderful thing is that we don’t even have to work up this faith that Jesus is the one living in us. We live by Jesus’ faith. He is the Believer in us. We lean on Him to have sufficient faith. We depend on Him for our faith, just as we depend on Him for everything else.

He is our faith. He is the One living in us, and through us. Right now.

— (This article is excerpted from David Gregory’s book If Jesus Loves Me Why Isn’t This Working?)