And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Genesis 1:2
The big sawmill employed several of the men in the rural community in which I grew up. Every day, trucks hauled logs into the mill yard, where they were piled high around the periphery. Every day, trucks hauled away the sawn lumber, and the big pile of sawdust where we boys often played grew higher and wider. Every morning, several old cars were parked in the yard as men arrived for their day’s employment. Until the day the big diesel engine that ran the mill broke down and was hauled away for repairs. The trucks stopped hauling, the workers stopped arriving, and the activity around the big mill disappeared. For the week or more that it took to repair the engine, nothing worthwhile happened. Then the repaired engine arrived and was reinstalled. Within an hour, the busy activity of the Murdock brothers’ mill was restored. Just like the earth in the first part of today’s text, the mill was empty and useless until the source of power was provided.
Our lives are like that mill: empty and useless until the Holy Spirit moves. We know this to be true of our lives in our unsaved days. But it is also true today. Unless we surrender ourselves to the moving of the Holy Spirit, we accomplish nothing useful or meaningful. But if we do yield to Him, we can be like the earth at the end of the days of creation, when God was able to declare that it was good. As we conform to God’s word in our behaviour, as we direct our energies toward the furtherance of the Gospel, as we direct our thoughts into worship for the One who died on the cross to save us from our sins, we find ourselves under the powerful moving of the Holy Spirit.
The day is coming when creation itself will be burned up. The earth on which we dwell in time will no longer need the moving of the Holy Spirit to produce that which is good, because it will be no more. But while we are here, He desires of us permission to move. And as we allow Him to do so, He replaces the emptiness, the darkness, and the uselessness with all that is good for us. -Jim MacIntosh