I have Oswald Chamber's "My Utmost For His Highest". I picked it up to read last week and wanted to share the devotional from April 12.
"Death hath no more dominion over Him...in that He liveth, He liveth unto God. Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God." Romans 6:9-11
"Co-eternal Life. Eternal life was the life which Jesus Christ exhibited on the human plane, and it is the same life, not a copy of it, which is manifested in our mortal flesh when we are born of God. Eternal life is not a gift from God, eternal life is the gift OF GOD. The energy and power which was manifested in Jesus will be manifested in us by the sheer sovereign grace of God when once we have made the moral decision about sin. 'Ye shall receive power of the Holy Ghost' - not power as a gift from the Holy Ghost; the power IS the Holy Ghost, not something which He imparts. The life that was in Jesus is made ours by means of His Cross when once we make the decision to be identified with Him. If it is difficult to get right with God, it is because we will not decide definitely about sin. Immediately we do decide, the full life of God comes in. Jesus came to give us endless supplies of life: 'that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.' Eternal Life has nothing to do with Time, it is the life which Jesus lived when He was down here. The only source of Life is the Lord Jesus Christ. The weakest saint can experience the power of the Deity of the Son of God if once he is willing to 'let go'. Any strand of our own energy will blur the life of Jesus. We have to keep letting go, and slowly and surely the great full life of God will invade us in every part, and men will take knowledge of us that we have been with Jesus."
That statement "eternal life is not a gift from God, eternal life is the gift OF GOD" has stopped me in my tracks this last week. God doesn't give us heaven, He gives us Himself. That is a powerful statement. I think we tend to fall into the thinking that Heaven is a place for good people. We would never admit to believing this, but this is how we live our lives. We have not made the moral decision about sin - instead we try to cover up our bad deeds with good ones, or try to "get away with something". Very few make the decision to be identified with Jesus because Jesus was never a very popular person. Instead we hide behind what we call "Christian love" (although very few know what love is) and become luke warm instead of allowing Christ to love through us as the situation dictates. Have you experienced the "power of the Deity of the Son of God" by "letting go"? This has been a very convicting read for me because I know how much I love to try to keep one foot in the world and one foot in heaven, but Jesus doesn't allow for this.
2 comments:
You say we hide behind Christian love and become lukewarm instead of allowing Christ to love through us. I'm not sure what that means. Could you explain a little more or give an example? Thanks.
G. read I Cor. 13 tonight and I was struck immediately with "love does not rejoice in wrong doing, but rejoices in the truth." I may be reading too much into this, but the first thought that jumped in my mind is that this means we must confront sin when appropriate and necessary. i.e. let's say a fellow believer is struggling with alcholol, or to use the same illustration I spoke of last week in Bible study, a friend confides in me that she is going to have an affair. Is love saying nothing and allowing her to continue on a path that you know will end up destroying her and robbing her of her joy, or is love saying the hard thing?
A lot of what I read from post-modern churches is that they become wishy washy when it comes to black and white issues because they want to "love" people and accept them as they are - am I making sense? Instead sometimes love is hard. I remember Keith Green once saying on a CD, "I would rather people hate me in the knowledge that I tried to save them, than love me and say nothing." This is probably not the exact wording, hopefully you are getting the idea.
I guess what I'm trying to say is very few of us really get it when it comes to love. Love looks different in different situations. I think we have over-romanticized the notion. If we are truly allowing Christ to love through us, we won't be worrrying so much about what people think.
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