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Tag: Morning Devotions
Among Christians of all ages and of varying shades of doctrinal emphasis there has been fairly full agreement on one thing: They all believed that it was important that the Christian with serious spiritual aspirations should learn to meditate long and often on God.
Henceforth, let a Christian insist upon rising above the poor average of current religious experience and he will soon come up against the need to know God Himself as the ultimate goal of all Christian doctrine. Let him seek to explore the sacred wonders of the Triune Godhead and he will discover that sustained and intelligently directed meditation on the Person of God is imperative.
Furthermore, to know God well he must think on Him unceasingly. Nothing that man has discovered about himself or God has revealed any shortcut to pure spirituality. It is still free, but tremendously costly. Of course this presupposes at least a fair amount of sound theological knowledge. To seek God apart from His own self-disclosure in the inspired Scriptures is not only futile, but dangerous.
Lastly, there must be also a knowledge of and complete trust in Jesus Christ as Lord and Redeemer. Christ is not one of many ways to approach God, nor is He the best of several ways; He is the only way. “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). To believe otherwise is to be something less than a Christian.
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Psalm 85:6 New International Version
6 Will you not revive(A) us again,
that your people may rejoice(B) in you?
Our mistake is that we want God to send revival on our terms. We want to get the power of God into our hands, to call it to us that it may work for us in promoting and furthering our kind of Christianity. We want to still be in charge, guiding the chariot through the religious sky in the direction we want it to go, shouting “Glory to God,” it is true, but modestly accepting a share of the glory for ourselves in a nice inoffensive sort of way.
Henceforth, we are calling on God to send fire on our altars, completely ignoring the fact that they are our altars and not God’s. And like the prophets of Baal we are working ourselves into a frenzy as if we could by violence command the arm of the Almighty.
Furthermore, the whole error results from a confused notion of revival and a failure to recognize the moral laws that underlie the kingdom of God. God never moves whimsically; His ways are never impulsive or erratic. He never sends judgment unless there has been a violation of His laws, nor does He send blessing apart from obedience to those laws.
So precise are His movements both in justice and in mercy that an intelligent observer, aware of the circumstances, could predict with complete accuracy any visitation of judgment or grace God might send to a nation, a church or an individual.
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The cure for superstition is an increased appreciation of the being of God: not names only, but character and being. The idea that the devil is afraid of a word or a gesture is pure superstition. He is not afraid of any name, not even the name Jesus.
Henceforth, there are thousands of little boys in Latin America who bear that name, and surely Satan does not stand in fear of them. No, it is not a combination of letters that strikes terror to the heart of Satan. It is the glorious Person who bears the name Jesus whom he fears.
To pour my heart out, to the name Jesus God has added the titles ‘Lord and Christ,’ and this means that all power has been given unto Him in heaven and in earth. Back of the name is the sovereign Person of God’s Son, our Savior. From this Person Satan flees, but it is a waste of time and effort to try to impress him with mere words and phrases.
In conclusion, within the degree that we know God Himself, we shall be free from superstitious fears; and in the degree that we are affected by signs, gestures, phrases and ‘religious objects’ (as they are naively called), we are in the bonds and snares of superstition.
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No Choice Is An Option
Our Lord Jesus looked after the rich young ruler as he walked away, but He did not follow him or attempt to coerce him. The dignity of the young man’s humanity forbade that his choices should be made for him by another.
Henceforth, to remain a man he must make his own moral choices; and Christ knew this and permitted him to go his own chosen way. If his human choice took him at last to hell, at least he went there a man; and it is better for the moral universe that he should do so than that he should be jockeyed to a heaven he did not choose, a soulless, will-less automaton.
Furthermore, God will take nine steps toward us, but He will not take the tenth. He will incline us to repent, but He cannot do our repenting for us. It is of the essence of repentance that it can only be done by the one who committed the act to be repented of. God can wait on the sinning man; He can withhold judgment; He can exercise long-suffering to the point where He appears “lax” in His judicial administration; but He cannot force a man to repent.
Last, but not least, to do this would be to violate the man’s freedom and void the gift God originally bestowed upon him. Where there is no freedom of choice there can be neither sin nor righteousness, because it is of the nature of both that they be voluntary. However, good an act may be, it is not good if it is imposed from without. The act of imposition destroys the moral content of the act and renders it null and void.
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The Apostle Paul wrote, “We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves” (Romans 15:1). He thus plainly accepts the fact that there will be infirm persons among the believing members of the spiritual community we call the local church. He tells us to bear them, or bear with them in their weakness.
Now who are the infirm persons in the church? How can we identify them? Not how can we find them, for they are sure to be easiest of all persons to find. Their very infirmities make them conspicuous. The infirm brother is the one who has painful conscientious scruples about foods (Romans 14:1-2); or he has deep convictions about certain holy days (Romans 14:5-6); or his grasp of gospel truth is weak, and he is forced to support himself by various crutches which he may have found in some religious attic.
Henceforth, to him these scruples are sacred; consequently, he is likely to try to force them upon everyone else, and in doing so he is pretty sure to make very much of a nuisance of himself. That is where the “strong” Christian gets opportunity to give his patience a workout. He dare not dismiss the overheated brother; he must bear with him in love, knowing that he too is of the company of the redeemed.
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The Fallacy of “Insignificant Sin”
Persons out of Christ often try to comfort themselves with the remembrance that they have never in their lives committed any really great sin. Little trifling acts of wrongdoing perhaps, but nothing of any consequence, so surely God will overlook their rather insignificant transgressions when He settles their accounts.
In the first place, a man’s status before God is decided not by the number and enormity of his sins, but by whether those sins have or have not been forgiven, whether he is on God’s side or the side of the devil.
The soldier who mutinies is held responsible for his mutiny, even if he does nothing more than stand up and let himself be counted among the rebels. His crime lies in his break with his superiors and his willingness to go along with the enemies of his country. That he performs no extraordinary feats of violence may mean no more than that he is an ordinary fellow incapable of great deeds of any sort for or against his country.
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A Proof Of Faith Is Obedience
The second question is: How many are worthy to hear His voice? In Acts 13:46b Paul and Barnabas told the people, “Since you reject it . . . we now turn to the Gentiles.” This is a terrible judgment. But here is the gist of what I want to say: A radical and sweeping reformation is imperative among the people called Christians–Protestants generally and evangelicals in particular.
What is meant by reformation? Some may recoil from that word; I have heard people say, “I do not believe in reformation–I believe in regeneration.” That sounds good and it gets some amens, but the fact is, if you do not have reformation you cannot have regeneration.
Henceforth, the Holy Spirit will not come and regenerate carnal, stubborn people who will not obey Him. First there must be a reformation. Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight! Stop doing wrong, learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed.
Last, but not least, defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow. “Come now, let us reason together,” says the LORD. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool” (Isaiah 1:16-18).
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Standing For Truth
We have developed in recent times a peace-loving, soft-spoken, tame and harmless brand of Christian of whom the world has no fear and for whom it has little respect.
We are careful, for instance, never to speak in public against any of the false cults lest we be thought intolerant. We fear to talk against the destructive sins of modern civilization for fear someone will brand us as bigoted and narrow. Little by little we have been forced off the hard earth into a religious cloud-land where we are permitted to wing our harmless way around, like swallows at sundown, saying nothing that might stir the ire of the sons of this world.
Henceforth, that Neo-Christianity, which seems for the time to be the most popular (and is certainly the most aggressive), is very careful not to oppose sin. It wins its crowds by amusing them and it converts by hiding from the full implications of the Christian message.
Whilst, it carries on its projects after the ballyhoo methods of American business. Well might we paraphrase Wordsworth and cry, “Elijah, thou shouldst be living at this hour; America has need of thee.” We stand in desperate need of a few men like Elijah who will dare to face up to the brazen sinners who dictate our every way of life. Sin in the full proportions of a revolution or a plague has all but destroyed our civilization while church people have played like children in the marketplace.
What has happened to the spirit of the American Christian? Has our gold become dim? Have we lost the spirit of discernment till we can no longer recognize our captors? How much longer will we hide in caves while Ahab and Jezebel continue to pollute the temple and ravage the land? Surely we should give this some serious thought and prayer before it is too late–if indeed it is not too late already.
#nojezebelspirit #Ahab #captors #caves #ravage #prayer #stoppollution #revolution #sin #AmericanBusiness #civilization #Elijah #Africa #NeoChristianity #sinners #proportions #bigoted #narrow #church #churchpeople #peaceloving #softspoken #harmlessbrand
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Psalms 131:3
O Israel, put your hope in the Lord—
now and always.
Most people put their hopes in various material things and other people. They trust people to the state where their God is put as the other options with no knowledge that if the God is put first, everything will be sorted to the extend that it has the perfect view of no obstacles. They rum around until they decide to hope in God instead of relying on Him alone for everything.
Henceforth, the moment one reposition their priorities of whom to put first and in whom to hope in with everything in their life and surroundings. It is the moment where there will be a huge turn-over. For one will lack no more, peace will be their portion. However, not that there will not be problems anymore, but the way of handling oneself during the obstacles will be way different than while led by people’s ideas and opinions. Solutions will be easier to be found.
To break the huge shiny ice, trusting and hoping in the Lord is the best decision ever. For everything is no longer in your hands to handle nor in your mind to try to come up with various solutions to fix. However, you let God reign in your everything and by His will evetything get sorted with any pressure.
So to cut to the chase, decide to hope and trust only in the Lord. For everyone who hopes and trusts in the Lord, live the non-stress lifestyles with everything in God’s hands and happening with His only will for good things in their lives. So child of God, live with purpose.
#hopeintheLord #bestlifewithChrist #ChildofGod #psalm131:3 #morningdevotion #dailydevotion #stresslesslife #Godswill #Godspurpose
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