Week Thirty-four Question

Do we so appreciate the marvelous salvation of Jesus Christ that we are our utmost for His highest?

“His salvation is a glad thing, but it is also a heroic, holy thing. It tests us for all we are worth. God’s grace turns out men and women with a strong family likeness to Jesus Christ, not milk-sops. The Christian life is gloriously difficult, but the difficulty of it does not make us faint and cave in, it rouses us up to overcome” – Chambers  July 7

My Response:

Am I an overcomer or am I a “milk-sop” - someone who retreats rather than charges? To live my “utmost for His highest” means that I need to live a fully hope-full life in Christ. Living in the Truth, not in my feelings.

          “Living hope means to live in the depths with God, to seek out His will, His heart, and His love. It means to live in the hope-full reality of God’s Truth, not in hope-less misleading circumstances.

What is the Truth? You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you; you are loved; you are provided for; you are rescued. The Truth is you are protected, redeemed, forgiven, restored, chosen, and you have been given beauty for ashes.

To live hope means to daily take a stand to remember not only who God is, but who you are in Christ.

To live hope means to speak the Word of God, the Word of life, His breath of life into situations that the world would consider hopeless. The bones are dry and dead, but the breath of God restores.

To live hope is to live in truth, to live in Christ because He is the truth that covers and revives us.

To live hope is to live daily in the promises of God, not in circumstances or worldly standards and judgments.

To live hope is to be attached and nourished and sustained by the very hand of God, to be cradled in His embrace, free to take flight like the eagles, to stand on the heights like the deer, and to dance like the angels.” – from The Human Hope Shift – Zilske

Father-God, when I rise up on the wings of Your strength and love, I will not faint or grow weary – that is the Truth.

Week Thirty-three Question:

Is the Son of God getting His chance in me? Is the direct simplicity of the life of God’s Son being worked out exactly as it was worked out in His historic life? Is the Lord Jesus Christ being abundantly satisfied in your life or have you got a spiritual strut on? As we living in such human dependence upon Jesus Christy that His life is being manifested moment by moment?

“Common sense is a gift which God gave to human nature; but common sense is not the gift of His Son. Supernatural sense is the gift of His Son; never enthrone common sense. Our ordinary wits never worship God unless they are transfigured by the indwelling Son of God” - Chambers August 9

My Response:

“You say that you may not be living up to your beliefs, but by definition, this is impossible. We always live up or down to our beliefs. Beliefs are the rails which govern our lives. Our trains roll on them whether we like it or not. If your train is not rolling on the set of rails which you claim are yours, it’s because you have diverted your train to another set of rails-these are your true beliefs now, not the rails you left. Unless you first understand this, you can never find what you seek…It’s the greatest misconception in Christianity today. That what you once believed, you will always believe. That to profess is the same as to believe. That a profession made twenty years ago somehow trumps what you really believe today…To believe in Christ is to follow him. To be his apprentice with full intention of living as he lived…Casting all aside for the sake of the treasure” (139-140) from A Man Called Blessed by Ted Dekker and Bill Bright

Father-God, I ask that the direct simplicity of Jesus’ life be made manifest in my life. Transfigure me.

Are you rightly related to your wife, to your husband, to your children, to your fellow-students – are you a “good child” there? Have I been asking God to give me money for something I want when there is something I have not paid for?

“I am a child of God only by regeneration, and as a child of God I am good only as I walk in the light. Prayer with most of us is turned into pious platitude, it is a matter of emotion, mystical communion with God. Spiritually we are all good at producing fogs.  We talk about prayer as if God heard us irrespective of the fact of our relationship to Him. Never say it is not God’s will to give you what you ask, don’t sit down and faint, but find out the reason, turn up the index.” – Chambers August 24

My Response:

What can I say? Lord, help me to “turn up the index.”

Week Thirty-one Question

Do I believe I need to be holy? Do I believe God can come into me and make me holy?

“The destined end of man is not happiness, nor health, but holiness. The preaching of the gospel awakens an intense resentment because it must reveal that I am unholy; but it also awakens an intense craving. God is not an eternal blessing-machine for men; He did not to save men out of pity: He came to save men because He created them to be holy. The Atonement means that God can put me back into perfect union with Himself, without a shadow between, through the Death of Jesus Christ” - Chambers September 1

My Response:

I remember the first time I read the words in 1 Peter 1:16: “Be holy because I am holy” (originally from Leviticus). Growing up as I did attending church every Sunday, holiness was a word used to describe God, Jesus and the Saints. But me? I was to be holy?

Not until I came into a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ and understood the meaning behind His sacrifice on the cross did I accept it was not what I did that made me holy – but what He did.

Do I have an intense craving for God’s holiness?

Week Thirty Question:

Is Jesus Christ Lord of your experiences, or do you try to hold it over Him? Is any experience dearer to you than your Lord?

“When I am born again, the Spirit of God takes me right out of myself and my experiences, and identifies me with Jesus Christ. If I am left with my experiences, my experiences have not been produced by Redemption. The proof that they are produced by Redemption is that I am led out of myself all the time. I no longer pay any attention to my experiences as the ground of Reality, but only to the Reality which produced the experiences. Never nourish an experience which has not God as its Source and faith in God as its result” - Chambers December 21

My Response:

There is a tendency to seek out, elevate and then immortalize the experiences we have. Even those we have with the Lord can displace Him as the center. If I say that something is real because I have had an experience is to teeter on the edge of existentialism.

Father-God, may I never replace or confuse You with the experience.

Week Twenty-nine Question:

Is there anything between you and Jesus Christ? Is there anything that hinders your belief in Him?

“We are to be centres through which Jesus can flow as rivers of living water in blessing to everyone. Some of us are like the Dead Sea, always taking in but never giving out, because we are not rightly related to the Lord Jesus. Never look at yourself from the standpoint of –Who am I? In the history of God’s work you will nearly always find that it has started from the obscure, the unknown, the ignored but the steadfastly true to Jesus Christ” - Chambers September 7

My Response:

Am I a “centre”? What are the central desires of my heart? What areas of my life are affected by that craving?

I’ve been thinking a lot about what intimacy is. Being an English teacher, I did what all good English teachers do and looked it up in a thesaurus to get a better sense of related words. What I found began to give me a deeper sense of the meaning: acquaintance, affection, communion, confidence, friendship, inwardness, and understanding.

So how does that translate to being intimate with God? Being a “centre through which Jesus can flow”? Here are some things I thought about:

* Intimacy with God is to know Him as He desires to be known. It means communing with Him and having confidence in His character, so much so that your relationship exists deep within your inner man.

It means that I live daily in His presence, yearning for Him and His word so that it becomes impossible to exist without them. What do you yearn for? What does it even really mean to yearn? It means to feel a deep desire or longing for. Usually we think about yearning for that special loved one or perhaps for that elusive, distant dream. It is something that consumes us.

To yearn also means to pine. This means to become sick gradually from sorrow or loneliness. Do you pine for God? Every day you do not meet with Him and commune with His Spirit do you grow sick and lonely? Are you lonely for God? Is He that real to you? Or is he just a notion - a nameless, abstract higher power that has no identity or intention?

* Intimacy also has the connotation of being filled with pity or compassion. It seems that when we have an inward, deep relationship with God, a compassion for others springs forth. We give out to others what we have received from God.

Imagine a river building in depth and height, straining against its borders. It will eventually spill out and over to flood the surrounding areas. It is similar when the love and mercy of God builds within you. This river of grace cannot and should not stay hidden or contained. Its merciful current needs to flow to a hurting, lonely world, bringing healing and compassion to all who stand in its wake.

* Another aspect of intimacy is acknowledging God for who He is. Who is God? Here are just a few of the ways God reveals Himself in His Word:

God is a creator.

God is a father and a mother.

God is a judge.

God is a warrior.

God is a husband and a wife.

God is light.

Who do you think God is? What evidence is there in His Word of this perception? When we allow our notions and traditions, which have been formed by our experiences to infiltrate what God says about Himself, we are actually fabricating and fashioning an idol. God is who He is whether we agree with Him or not. He is either God as He reveals Himself in His Word, or He is anything I make Him up to be. The trouble with this is that He is no longer God. He is just a figment of my imagination that not only has no power to redeem, but has no interest in my heart. I cannot be intimate with someone I do not truly know.

* Intimacy is to desire service at an ever increasing level. Out of a full inner man comes the desire to fully serve.

* Intimacy leads to fulfillment spiritually, personally, creatively, intellectually, relationally, and emotionally.

* Intimacy is to no longer be satisfied to exist on the surface, but to consistently dive deeper and deeper into your relationship with the Lord. We need to ask if we have compartmentalized God? Does He only exist on Sundays and holidays in a particular building? Is He just a name we call out when we are in crisis? Has he infiltrated all the areas of our life? Intimate means deep, essential and innermost. Does that describe the way I see God?

* Intimacy is to allow the Spirit into your inner man to cleanse you from your secret sin, to release you from your life-controlling strongholds, to fill you with sustaining peace, and to inhabit you in increasing measure forever.

* Intimacy is hope fulfilled, passion expressed, and joy unleashed.

Merciful Father, I am sorry for the distance that I have put between us. You desire closeness and truth in my inward parts. You are my hope, my passion and my joy.

Check out: I Corinthians 13:4-13

Week Twenty-eight Question:

Are we playing the spiritual amateur providence in other lives? Are we so noisy in our instruction of others that God cannot get anywhere near them?

“We have to keep our mouths shut and our spirits alert. God wants to instruct us in regard to His Son, He wants to turn our times of prayer into mounts of transfiguration, and we will not let Him. He works where He sends us to wait” - Chambers August 1

My Response:

Does my agenda for others’ lives infiltrate my intercession for them? Lord, I need You to search out the deep things of my heart. This is my prayer:

Search me, oh God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious mind.

Search me, oh God, and know my heart. Show me where I'm blind.

Seek out the bitter ways in me that hold my aching heart.

Lead me in Your everlasting ways that lead to where you are.

You know when I rise and when I leave.

You know every time I've been deceived.

Before it began deep in the womb, You loved me even then.

If I should rise upon the wings of dawn or leave and go astray.

I could never run far from Your love or from Your wondrous ways.

Seek out the bitter ways in me that hold my aching heart.

Lead me in Your everlasting ways that lead to where You are.

Search me, oh God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious mind.

Search me, oh God, and know my heart.

Show me where I'm blind.

"For You created my inmost being; You knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful; I know them full well." Ps. 139: 13-14