Daily Devotions - Oswald Chambers (1 views) Subscribe   
  From:  David (DavidABrown)    9/19/2001 9:35 am  
To:  ALL   (1 of 163)  
 
  204.1  
 
Following are some of the Daily Devotions from Oswald Chambers.

 

Oswald Chambers was a man who worked for the YMCA organization with the British Army, Stationed along the Suez Canal in Egypt. Oswald furnished an activity tent for the army it was an R&R place where solders could get away from their duties and stress to relax, read, play sports and games and enjoy tea and snacks and most of all Oswald taught Bible studies and constantly encouraged and built up the solders in the Christian faith.

 

Oswald died during his duty in Egypt. His widow compiled the notes of Oswald and released them as published books. Today Oswald Chambers is perhaps the most popular source for Daily Devotional reading. His comments are widely accepted and read by every Christian denomination.

---

Source http://www.gospelcom.net/rbc/utmost/

More about Oswald Chambers 
Oswald Chambers (1874-1917) was born July 24, 1874, in Aberdeen, Scotland. Converted in his teen years under the ministry of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, he studied art and archaeology at the University of Edinburgh before answering a call from God to the Christian ministry. He then studied theology at Dunoon College. From 1906-1910 he conducted an itinerant Bible-teaching ministry in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan.

In 1910, Chambers married Gertrude Hobbs. They had one daughter, Kathleen.

In 1911 he founded and became principal of the Bible Training College in Clapham, London, where he lectured until the school was closed in 1915 because of World War I. In October 1915 he sailed for Zeitoun, Egypt (near Cairo), where he ministered to Australian and New Zealand troops as a YMCA chaplain. He died there November 15, 1917, following surgery for a ruptured appendix.

Although Oswald Chambers wrote only one book, Baffled to Fight Better, more than thirty titles bear his name. With this one exception, published works were compiled by Mrs. Chambers, a court stenographer, from her verbatim shorthand notes of his messages taken during their seven years of marriage. For half a century following her husband's death she labored to give his words to the world.

My Utmost For His Highest , his best-known book, has been continuously in print in the United States since 1935 and in this, the last decade of the century, remains in the top ten titles of the religious book bestseller list with millions of copies in print. It has become a Christian classic. 

 



David A. Brown
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Edited 9/19/01 1:26:25 PM ET by DAVIDABROWN 
  
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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    9/19/2001 9:40 am  
To:  ALL   (2 of 163)  
 
  204.2 in reply to 204.1  
 
Source to Suscribe www.Heartlight.org/

MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST - by Oswald Chambers
   
"What's 'the Good Of 'temptation?"  

     There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common
     to man. 1st Corinthians 10:13

The word "temptation" has come down in the world; we are apt to use
it wrongly. Temptation is not sin, it is the thing we are bound to
meet if we are men. Not to be tempted would be to be beneath
contempt. Many of us, however, suffer from temptations from which we
have no business to suffer, simply because we have refused to let God
lift us to a higher plane where we would face temptations of another
order.

A man's disposition on the inside, i.e., what he possesses in his
personality, determines what he is tempted by on the outside. The
temptation fits the nature of the one tempted, and reveals the
possibilities of the nature. Every man has the setting of his own
temptation, and the temptation will come along the line of the ruling
disposition.

Temptation is a suggested short cut to the realization of the highest
at which I aim - not towards what I understand as evil, but towards
what I understand as good. Temptation is something that completely
baffles me for a while, I do not know whether the thing is right or
wrong. Temptation yielded to is lust deified, and is a proof that it
was timidity that prevented the sin before.

Temptation is not something we may escape, it is essential to the
full-orbed life of a man. Beware lest you think you are tempted as no
one else is tempted; what you go through is the common inheritance of
the race, not something no one ever went through before. God does not
save us from temptations; He succours us in the midst of them (Heb.
2:18).

 MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST - by Oswald Chambers                
 http://www.heartlight.org/ 






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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    9/19/2001 9:43 am  
To:  ALL   (3 of 163)  
 
  204.3 in reply to 204.2  
 
DO YOU CONTINUE 'TO GO WITH JESUS?

     Ye are they which have continued with Me in My
     temptations. Luke 22:28

It is true that Jesus Christ is with us in our temptations, but are
we going with Him in His temptations? Many of us cease to go with
Jesus from the moment we have an experience of what He can do. Watch
when God shifts your circumstances, and see whether you are going
with Jesus, or siding with the world, the flesh and the devil. We
wear His badge, but are we going with Him? "From that time many of
His disciples went back and walked no more with Him."
The temptations of Jesus continued throughout His earthly life, and
they will continue throughout the life of the Son of God in us. Are
we going with Jesus in the life we are living now?

We have the idea that we ought to shield our selves from some of the
things God brings round us. Never! God engineers circumstances and
what ever they may be like we have to see that we face them while
abiding continually with Him in His temptations. They are His
temptations, not temptations to us, but temptations to the life of
the Son of God in us. The honour of Jesus Christ is at stake in your
bodily life. Are you remaining loyal to the Son of God in the things
which beset His life in you?
Do you continue to go with Jesus? The way lies through Gethsemane,
through the city gate, outside the camp; the way lies alone, and the
way lies until there is no trace of a footstep left, only the voice,
"Follow Me."


 MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST - by Oswald Chambers                /\/\
===============================================================\  /===
 http://www.heartlight.org/devotionals/my_utmost                     \/
 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    9/20/2001 8:51 am  
To:  ALL   (4 of 163)  
 
  204.4 in reply to 204.2  
 
THE DIVINE RULE OF LIFE

     Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven
     is perfect.Matthew 5:48

Our Lord's exhortation in these verses is to be generous in our
behaviour to all men. In the spiritual life beware of walking
according to natural affinities. Everyone has natural affinities;
some people we like and others we do not like. We must never let
those likes and dislikes rule in our Christian life. "If we walk in
the light as God is in the light," God will give us communion with
people for whom we have no natural affinity.

The Example Our Lord gives us is not that of a good man, or even of a
good Christian, but of God Himself. "Be ye therefore perfect even as
your Father in heaven is perfect," show to the other man what God has
shown to you; and God will give us ample opportunities in actual life
to prove whether we are perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect.
To be a disciple means that we deliberately identify ourselves with
God's interests in other people. "That ye love one another; as I have
loved you . . ."

The expression of Christian character is not good doing, but
God-likeness. If the Spirit of God has transformed you within, you
will exhibit Divine characteristics in your life, not good human
characteristics. God's life in us expresses itself as God's life, not
as human life trying to be godly. The secret of a Christian is that
the supernatural is made natural in him by the grace of God, and the
experience of this works out in the practical details of life, not in
times of communion with God. When we come in contact with things that
create a buzz, we find to our amazement that we have power to keep
wonderfully poised in the centre of it all.

 

 MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST - by Oswald Chambers                /\/\
===============================================================\  /===
 http://www.heartlight.org/devotionals/my_utmost                \/


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This devotional is copyright Oswald Chambers Publications,
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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    9/21/2001 9:05 am  
To:  ALL   (5 of 163)  
 
  204.5 in reply to 204.1  
 
MISSIONARY PREDESTINATIONS

     And now, saith the Lord, that formed me from the womb to
     be His servant.  Isaiah 49:5

The first thing that happens after we have realized our election to
God in Christ Jesus is the destruction of our prejudices and our
parochial notions and our patriotisms; we are turned into servants of
God's own purpose. The whole human race was created to glorify God
and enjoy Him for ever. Sin has switched the human race on to an
other tack, but it has not altered God's purpose in the tiniest
degree; and when we are born again we are brought into the
realization of God's great purpose for the human race, viz., I am
created for God, He made me. This realization of the election of God
is the most joyful realization on earth, and we have to learn to rely
on the tremendous creative purpose of God. The first thing God will
do with us is to "force through the channels of a single heart" the
interests of the whole world. The love of God, the very nature of
God, is introduced into us, and the nature of Almighty God is focused
in John 3:16 - "God so loved the world. . ."

We have to maintain our soul open to the fact of God's creative
purpose, and not muddle it with our own intentions. If we do, God
will have to crush our intentions on one side however much it may
hurt. The purpose for which the missionary is created is that he may
be God's servant, one in whom God is glorified. When once we realize
that through the salvation of Jesus Christ we are made perfectly fit
for God, we shall understand why Jesus Christ is so ruthless in His
demands. He demands absolute rectitude from His servants, because He
has put into them the very nature of God.

Beware lest you forget God's purpose for your life.


 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    9/22/2001 8:39 am  
To:  ALL   (6 of 163)  
 
  204.6 in reply to 204.2  
 
'THE MISSIONARY'S MASTER

     Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I
     am. John 13:13

To have a master and to be mastered is not the same thing. To have a
master means that there is one who knows me better than I know
myself, one who is closer than a friend, one who fathoms the remotest
abyss of my heart and satisfies it, one who has brought me into the
secure sense that he has met and solved every perplexity and problem
of my mind. To have a master is this and nothing less - "One is your
Master, even Christ."

Our Lord never enforces obedience; He does not take means to make me
do what He wants. At certain times I wish God would master me and
make me do the thing, but He will not; in other moods I wish He would
leave me alone, but He does not.

"Ye call me Master and Lord" - but is He? Master and Lord have little
place in our vocabulary, we prefer the words Saviour, Sanctifier,
Healer. The only word to describe mastership in experience is love
and we know very little about love as God reveals it. This is proved
by the way we use the word obey. In the Bible obedience is based on
the relationship of equals, that of a son with his father. Our Lord
was not God's servant, He was His Son. "Though He were a Son, yet
learned He obedience . . ." If our idea is that we are being
mastered, it is a proof that we have no master; if that is our
attitude to Jesus, we are far away from the relationship He wants. He
wants us in the relationship in which He is easily Master without our
conscious knowledge of it, all we know is that we are His to obey.






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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    9/23/2001 6:39 pm  
To:  ALL   (7 of 163)  
 
  204.7 in reply to 204.1  
 
THE MISSIONARY'S GOAL

     Behold, we go up to Jerusalem.
     Luke 18:31

In the natural life our ambitions alter as we develop; in the
Christian life the goal is given at the beginning, the beginning and
the end are the same, viz., Our Lord Himself. We start with Christ
and we end with Him - "until we all attain to the stature of the
manhood of Christ Jesus," not to our idea of what the Christian life
should be. The aim of the missionary is to do God's will, not to be
useful, not to win the heathen; he is useful and he does win the
heathen, but that is not his aim. His aim is to do the will of his
Lord.

In Our Lord's life Jerusalem was the place where He reached the
climax of His Father's will upon the Cross, and unless we go with
Jesus there we will have no companionship with Him. Nothing ever
discouraged Our Lord on His way to Jerusalem. He never hurried
through certain villages where He was persecuted, or lingered in
others where He was blessed. Neither gratitude nor ingratitude turned
Our Lord one hair's breadth away from His purpose to go up to
Jerusalem.

"The disciple is not above his Master." The same things will happen
to us on our way to our Jerusalem. There will be the works of God
manifested through us, people will get blessed, and one or two will
show gratitude and the rest will show gross ingratitude, but nothing
must deflect us from going up to our Jerusalem.

"There they crucified Him." That is what happened when Our Lord
reached Jerusalem, and that happening is the gateway to our
salvation. The saints do not end in crucifixion: by the Lord's grace
they end in glory. In the meantime our watchword is - I, too, go up
to Jerusalem.

 

 MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST - by Oswald Chambers





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    9/26/2001 8:36 am  
To:  ALL   (8 of 163)  
 
  204.8 in reply to 204.1  
 
THE "GO" OF PREPARATION

     Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there
     thou rememberest that thy brother hath ought against
     thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy
     way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come
     and offer thy gift. Matthew 5:23,2

It is easy to imagine that we will get to a place where we are
complete and ready, but preparation is not suddenly accomplished, it
is a process steadily maintained. It is dangerous to get into a
settled state of experience. It is preparation and preparation.

The sense of sacrifice appeals readily to a young Christian. Humanly
speaking, the one thing that attracts to Jesus Christ is our sense of
the heroic, and the scrutiny of Our Lord's words suddenly brings this
tide of enthusiasm to the test. "First be reconciled to thy brother."
The "go" of preparation is to let the word of God scrutinize. The
sense of heroic sacrifice is not good enough. The thing the Holy
Spirit is detecting in you is the disposition that will never work in
His service. No one but God can detect that disposition in you. Have
you anything to hide from God? If you have, then let God search you
with His light. If there is sin, confess it, not admit it. Are you
willing to obey your Lord and Master whatever the humiliation to your
right to yourself may be?

Never discard a conviction. If it is important enough for the Spirit
of God to have brought it to your mind, it is that thing He is
detecting. You were looking for a great thing to give up. God is
telling you of some tiny thing; but at the back of it there lies the
central citadel of obstinacy: I will not give up my right to myself -
the thing God intends you to give up if ever you are going to be a
disciple of Jesus Christ.

 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    9/26/2001 8:45 am  
To:  ALL   (9 of 163)  
 
  204.9 in reply to 204.8  
 
THE "GO" OF RELATIONSHIP

     And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with
     him twain. Matthew 5:41

The summing up of Our Lord's teaching is that the relationship which
He demands is an impossible one unless He has done a supernatural
work in us. Jesus Christ demands that there be not the slightest
trace of resentment even suppressed in the heart of a disciple when
he meets with tyranny and injustice. No enthusiasm will ever stand
the strain that Jesus Christ will put upon His worker, only one thing
will, and that is a personal relationship to Himself which has gone
through the mill of His spring-cleaning until there is only one
purpose left - I am here for God to send me where He will. Every
other thing may get fogged, but this relationship to Jesus Christ
must never be.

The Sermon on the Mount is not an ideal, it is a statement of what
will happen in me when Jesus Christ has altered my disposition and
put in a disposition like His own. Jesus Christ is the only One Who
can fulfil the Sermon on the Mount.

If we are to be disciples of Jesus, we must he made disciples
supernaturally; as long as we have the dead set purpose of being
disciples we may be sure we are not. "I have chosen you." That is the
way the grace of God begins. It is a constraint we cannot get away
from; we can disobey it, but we cannot generate it. The drawing is
done by the supernatural grace of God, and we never can trace where
His work begins. Our Lord's making of a disciple is supernatural. He
does not build on any natural capacity at all. God does not ask us to
do the things that are easy to us naturally; He only asks us to do
the things we are perfectly fitted to do by His grace, and the cross
will come along that line always.
 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    9/26/2001 8:47 am  
To:  ALL   (10 of 163)  
 
  204.10 in reply to 204.8  
 
THE UNBLAMEABLE ATTITUDE

     If . . thou rememberest that thy brother hath ought
     against thee... Matthew 5:23

If when you come to the altar, there you remember that your brother
has anything against you, not - If you rake up something by a morbid
sensitiveness, but - "If thou rememberest," that is, if it is brought
to your conscious mind by the Spirit of God: "first be reconciled to
thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift." Never object to the
intense sensitiveness of the Spirit of God in you when He is
educating you down to the scruple.

"First be reconciled to thy brother . . ." Our Lord's direction is
simple, "first be reconciled." Go back the way you came, go the way
indicated to you by the conviction given at the altar; have an,
attitude of mind and a temper of soul to the one who has something
against you that makes reconciliation as natural as breathing. Jesus
does not mention the other person, He says - you go. There is no
question of your rights. The stamp of the saint is that he can waive
his own rights and obey the Lord Jesus.

"And then come and offer thy gift." The process is clearly marked.
First, the heroic spirit of self-sacrifice, then the sudden checking
by the sensitiveness of the Holy Spirit, and the stoppage at the
point of conviction, then the way of obedience to the word of God,
constructing an unblameable attitude of mind and temper to the one
with whom you have been in the wrong; then the glad, simple,
unhindered offering of your gift to God.
 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    9/27/2001 8:59 am  
To:  ALL   (11 of 163)  
 
  204.11 in reply to 204.1  
 
THE "GO" OF RENUNCIATION

     Lord, I will follow Thee whithersoever Thou goest.
     Luke 9:57

Our Lord's attitude to this man is one of severe discouragement
because He knew what was in man. We would have said - "Fancy losing
the opportunity of winning that man!" Fancy bringing about him a
north wind that froze him and "turned him away discouraged!" Never
apologize for your Lord. The words of the Lord hurt and offend until
there is nothing left to hurt or offend. Jesus Christ has no
tenderness whatever toward anything that is ultimately going to ruin
a man in the service of God. Our Lord's answers are based not on
caprice, but on a knowledge of what is in man. If the Spirit of God
brings to your mind a word of the Lord that hurts you, you may be
sure that there is something He wants to hurt to death.

V. 58. These words knock the heart out of serving Jesus Christ
because it is pleasing to me. The rigour of rejection leaves nothing
but my Lord, and myself, and a forlorn hope. "Let the hundredfold
come or go, your lodestar must be your relationship to Me, and I have
nowhere to lay My head."

v. 59. This man did not want to disappoint Jesus, nor to hurt his
father. We put sensitive loyalty to relatives in place of loyalty to
Jesus Christ and Jesus has to take the last place. In a conflict of
loyalty, obey Jesus Christ at all costs.

V. 61. The one who says - "Yes, Lord, but . . ." is the one who is
fiercely ready, but never goes. This man had one or two reservations.
The exacting call of Jesus Christ has no margin of good-byes, because
good-bye, as it is often used, is pagan, not Christian. When once the
call of God comes, begin to go and never stop going.

 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    9/28/2001 7:58 am  
To:  ALL   (12 of 163)  
 
  204.12 in reply to 204.1  
 
THE "GO" OF UNCONDITIONAL IDENTIFICATION

     One thing thou lackest: . . come, take up the cross, and
     follow Me. Mark 10:21


The rich young ruler had the master passion to he perfect. When he
saw Jesus Christ, he wanted to be like Him. Our Lord never puts
personal holiness to the fore when He calls a disciple; He puts
absolute annihilation of my right to myself and identification with
Himself - a relationship with Himself in which there is no other
relationship. Luke 14:26 has nothing to do with salvation or
sanctification, but with unconditional identification with Jesus
Christ. Very few of us know the absolute "go" of abandonment to
Jesus.

"Then Jesus beholding him loved him." The look of Jesus will mean a
heart broken for ever from allegiance to any other person or thing.
Has Jesus ever looked at you? The look of Jesus transforms and
transfixes. Where you are "soft" with God is where the Lord has
looked at you. If you are hard and vindictive, insistent on your own
way, certain that the other person is more likely to be in the wrong
than you are, it is an indication that there are whole tracts of your
nature that have never been transformed by His gaze.

"One thing thou lackest . . ." The only "good thing" from Jesus
Christ's point of view is union with Himself and nothing in between.

"Sell whatsoever thou hast . ." I must reduce myself until I am a
mere conscious man, I must fundamentally renounce possessions of all
kinds, not to save by soul (only one thing saves a man - absolute
reliance upon Jesus Christ) - but in order to follow Jesus. "Come,
and follow Me." And the road is the way He went.


 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    9/29/2001 7:04 pm  
To:  ALL   (13 of 163)  
 
  204.13 in reply to 204.1  
 
THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF 'THE CALL

     For necessity is laid upon me: yea, woe is unto me, if I
     preach not the gospel! 1ST Corinthians 9:16

We are apt to forget the mystical, supernatural touch of God. If you
can tell where you got the call of God and all about it, I question
whether you have ever had a call. The call of God does not come like
that, it is much more supernatural. The realization of it in a man's
life may come with a sudden thunder-clap or with a gradual dawning,
but in whatever way it comes, it comes with the undercurrent of the
supernatural, something that cannot be put into words, it is always
accompanied with a glow. At any moment there may break the sudden
consciousness of this incalculable, supernatural, surprising call
that has taken hold of your life - "I have chosen you." The call of
God has nothing to do with salvation and sanctification. It is not
because you are sanctified that you are therefore called to preach
the gospel; the call to preach the gospel is infinitely different.
Paul describes it as a necessity laid upon him.

If you have been obliterating the great super natural call of God in
your life, take a review of your circumstances and see where God has
not been first, but your ideas of service, or your temperamental
abilities. Paul said - "Woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!"
He had realized the call of God, and there was no competitor for his
strength.

If a man or woman is called of God, it does not matter how untoward
circumstances are, every force that has been at work will tell for
God's purpose in the end. If you agree with God's purpose He will
bring not only your conscious life, but all the deeper regions of
your life which you cannot get at, into harmony.

 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/3/2001 8:17 am  
To:  ALL   (14 of 163)  
 
  204.14 in reply to 204.13  
 
THE COMMISSION OF 'THE CALL

     Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up
     that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my
     flesh for His body's sake. Colossians 1:24


We make calls out of our own spiritual consecration, but when we get
right with God He brushes all these aside, and rivets us with a pain
that is terrific to one thing we never dreamed of, and for one
radiant flashing moment we see what He is after, and we say - "Here
am I, send me."

This call has nothing to do with personal sanctification, but with
being made broken bread and poured-out wine. God can never make us
wine if we object to the fingers He uses to crush us with. If God
would only use His own fingers, and make me broken bread and
poured-out wine in a special way! But when He uses someone whom we
dislike, or some set of circumstances to which we said we would never
submit, and makes those the crushers, we object. We must never choose
the scene of our own martyrdom. If ever we are going to be made into
wine, we will have to be crushed; you cannot drink grapes. Grapes
become wine only when they have been squeezed.

I wonder what kind of finger and thumb God has been using to squeeze
you, and you have been like a marble and escaped? You are not ripe
yet, and if God had squeezed you, the wine would have been remarkably
bitter. To be a sacramental personality means that the elements of
the natural life are presenced by God as they are broken
providentially in His service. We have to be adjusted into God before
we can be broken bread in His hands. Keep right with God and let Him
do what He likes, and you will find that He is producing the kind of
bread and wine that will benefit His other children.

 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/3/2001 8:18 am  
To:  ALL   (15 of 163)  
 
  204.15 in reply to 204.13  
 
THE SPHERE OF EXALTATION

     Jesus leadeth them up into a high mountain apart by
     themselves.  Mark 9:2


We have all had times on the mount, when we have seen things from
God's standpoint and have wanted to stay there; but God will never
allow us to stay there. The test of our spiritual life is the power
to descend; if we have power to rise only, something is wrong. It is
a great thing to be on the mount with God, but a man only gets there
in order that afterwards he may get down among the devil-possessed
and lift them up. We are not built for the mountains and the dawns
and aesthetic affinities, those are for moments of inspiration, that
is all. We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff we are
in, and that is where we have to prove our mettle. Spiritual
selfishness always wants repeated moments on the mount. We feel we
could talk like angels and live like angels, if only we could stay on
the mount. The times of exaltation are exceptional, they have their
meaning in our life with God, but we must beware lest our spiritual
selfishness wants to make them the only time.

We are apt to think that everything that happens is to be turned into
useful teaching, it is to be turned into something better than
teaching, viz., into character. The mount is not meant to teach us
anything, it is meant to make us something. There is a great snare in
asking - What is the use of it? In spiritual matters we can never
calculate on that line. The moments on the mountain tops are rare
moments, and they are meant for something in God's purpose.

 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/3/2001 8:19 am  
To:  ALL   (16 of 163)  
 
  204.16 in reply to 204.13  
 
THE SPHERE OF HUMILIATION

     If Thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us, and
     help us.  Mark 9:22


After every time of exaltation we are brought down with a sudden rush
into things as they are where it is neither beautiful nor poetic nor
thrilling. The height of the mountain top is measured by the drab
drudgery of the valley; but it is in the valley that we have to live
for the glory of God. We see His glory on the mount, but we never
live for His glory there. It is in the sphere of humiliation that we
find our true worth to God, that is where our faithfulness is
revealed. Most of us can do things if we are always at the heroic
pitch because of the natural selfishness of our hearts, but God wants
us at the drab commonplace pitch, where we live in the valley
according to our personal relationship to Him. Peter thought it would
be a fine thing for them to remain on the mount, but Jesus Christ
took the disciples down from the mount into the valley, the place
where the meaning of the vision is explained.

"If Thou canst do any thing . . ." It takes the valley of humiliation
to root the scepticism out of us. Look back at your own experience,
and you will find that until you learned Who Jesus was, you were a
cunning sceptic about His power. When you were on the mount, you
could believe anything, but what about the time when you were up
against facts in the valley? You may be able to give a testimony to
sanctification, but what about the thing that is a humiliation to you
just now? The last time you were on the mount with God, you saw that
all power in heaven and in earth be longed to Jesus - will you be
sceptical now in the valley of humiliation?

 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/3/2001 8:21 am  
To:  ALL   (17 of 163)  
 
  204.17 in reply to 204.13  
 
THE SPHERE OF MINISTRATION

     This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and
     fasting.  Mark 9:29


"Why could not we cast him out?" The answer lies in a personal
relationship to Jesus Christ. This kind can come forth by nothing but
by concentration and redoubled concentration on Him. We can ever
remain powerless, as were the disciples, by trying to do God's work
not in concentration on His power, but by ideas drawn from our own
temperament. We slander God by our very eagerness to work for Him
without knowing Him.

You are brought face to face with a difficult case and nothing
happens externally, and yet you know that emancipation will be given
because you are concentrated on Jesus Christ. This is your line of
service - to see that there is nothing between Jesus and yourself. Is
there? If there is, you must get through it, not by ignoring it in
irritation, or by mounting up, but by facing it and getting through
it into the presence of Jesus Christ, then that very thing, and all
you have been through in connection with it, will glorify Jesus
Christ in a way you will never know till you see Him face to face.

We must be able to mount up with wings as eagles; but we must also
know how to come down. The power of the saint lies in the coming down
and the living down. "I can do all things through Christ which
strengtheneth me," said Paul, and the things he referred to were
mostly humiliating things. It is in our power to refuse to be
humiliated and to say - "No, thank you, I much prefer to be on the
mountain top with God." Can I face things as they actually are in the
light of the reality of Jesus Christ, or do things as they are efface
altogether my faith in Him, and put me into a panic?

 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/4/2001 12:19 pm  
To:  ALL   (18 of 163)  
 
  204.18 in reply to 204.2  
 
THE VISION AND 'THE VERITY

     Called to be saints. 1st Corinthians 1:2


Thank God for the sight of all you have never yet been. You have had
the vision, but you are not there yet by any means. It is when we are
in the valley, where we prove whether we will be the choice ones,
that most of us turn back. We are not quite prepared for the blows
which must come if we are going to be turned into the shape of the
vision. We have seen what we are not, and what God wants us to be,
but are we willing to have the vision "batter'd to shape and use" by
God? The batterings always come in commonplace ways and through
commonplace people.

There are times when we do know what God's purpose is; whether we
will let the vision be turned into actual character depends upon us,
not upon God. If we prefer to loll on the mount and live in the
memory of the vision, we will be of no use actually in the ordinary
stuff of which human life is made up. We have to learn to live in
reliance on what we saw in the vision, not in ecstasies and conscious
contemplation of God, but to live in actualities in the light of the
vision until we get to the veritable reality. Every bit of our
training is in that direction. Learn to thank God for making known
His demands.

The little "I am" always sulks when God says do. Let the little "I
am" be shrivelled up in God's indignation - "I AM THAT I AM hath sent
thee." He must dominate. Is it not penetrating to realize that God
knows where we live, and the kennels we crawl into! He will hunt us
up like a lightning flash. No human being knows human beings as God
does.






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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/7/2001 11:22 pm  
To:  ALL   (19 of 163)  
 
  204.19 in reply to 204.1  
 
THE BIAS OF DEGENERATION

     Wherefore as by one man sin entered into the world, and
     death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that
     all have sinned. Romans 5:12

The Bible does not say that God punished the human race for one man's
sin; but that the disposition of sin, viz., my claim to my right to
myself, entered into the human race by one man, and that another Man
took on Him the sin of the human race and put it away (Heb. 9:26) -
an infinitely profounder revelation. The disposition of sin is not
immorality and wrong-doing, but the disposition of self-realization -
I am my own god. This disposition may work out in decorous morality
or in indecorous immorality, but it has the one basis, my claim to my
right to myself. When Our Lord faced men with all the forces of evil
in them, and men who were clean living and moral and up right, He did
not pay any attention to the moral degradation of the one or to the
moral attainment of the other; He looked at something we do not see,
viz., the disposition.

Sin is a thing I am born with and I cannot touch it; God touches sin
in Redemption. In the Cross of Jesus Christ God redeemed the whole
human race from the possibility of damnation through the heredity of
sin. God nowhere holds a man responsible for having the heredity of
sin. The condemnation is not that I am born with a heredity of sin,
but if when I realize Jesus Christ came to deliver me from it, I
refuse to let Him do so, from that moment I begin to get the seal of
damnation. "And this is the judgment" (the critical moment), "that
the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather
than the light."






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   From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/7/2001 11:25 pm  
To:  ALL   (20 of 163)  
 
  204.20 in reply to 204.1  
 
THE BENT OF REGENERATION

     When it pleased God . . to reveal His Son in me.
     Galatians 1:15,16

If Jesus Christ is to regenerate me, what is the problem He is up
against? I have a heredity I had no say in; I am not holy, nor likely
to be; and if all Jesus Christ can do is to tell me I must he holy,
His teaching plants despair. But if Jesus Christ is a Regenerator,
One Who can put into me His own heredity of holiness, then I begin to
see what He is driving at when He says that I have to be holy.
Redemption means that Jesus Christ can put into any man the
hereditary disposition that was in Himself, and all the standards He
gives are based on that disposition: His teaching is for the life He
puts in. The moral transaction on my part is agreement with God's
verdict on sin in the Cross of Jesus Christ.

The New Testament teaching about regeneration is that when a man is
struck by a sense of need, God will put the Holy Spirit into his
spirit, and his personal spirit will be energized by the Spirit of
the Son of God, "until Christ be formed in you." The moral miracle of
Redemption is that God can put into me a new disposition whereby I
can live a totally new life. When I reach the frontier of need and
know my limitations, Jesus says - "Blessed are you." But I have to
get there. God cannot put into me, a responsible moral being, the
disposition that was in Jesus Christ unless I am conscious I need it.

Just as the disposition of sin entered into the human race by one
man, so the Holy Spirit entered the human race by another Man; and
Redemption means that I can be delivered from the heredity of sin and
through Jesus Christ can receive an unsullied heredity, viz., the
Holy Spirit.

 





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From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/7/2001 11:28 pm  
To:  ALL   (21 of 163)  
 
  204.21 in reply to 204.1  
 
RECONCILIATION

     For He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin;
     that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.
     2ndCorinthians 5:21

Sin is a fundamental relationship; it is not wrong doing, it is wrong
being, deliberate and emphatic independence of God. The Christian
religion bases everything on the positive, radical nature of sin.
Other religions deal with sins; the Bible alone deals with sin. The
first thing Jesus Christ faced in men was the heredity of sin, and it
is because we have ignored this in our presentation of the Gospel
that the message of the Gospel has lost its sting and its blasting
power.

The revelation of the Bible is not that Jesus Christ took upon
Himself our fleshly sins, but that He took upon Himself the heredity
of sin which no man can touch. God made His own Son to be sin that He
might make the sinner a saint. All through the Bible it is revealed
that Our Lord bore the sin of the world by identification, not by
sympathy. He deliberately took upon His own shoulders, and bore in
His own Person, the whole massed sin of the human race - "He hath
made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin," and by so doing He put
the whole human race on the basis of Redemption. Jesus Christ
rehabilitated the human race; He put it back to where God designed it
to be, and anyone can enter into union with God on the ground of what
Our Lord has done on the Cross.

A man cannot redeem himself; Redemption is God's "bit," it is
absolutely finished and complete; its reference to individual men is
a question of their individual action. A distinction must always be
made between the revelation of Redemption and the conscious
experience of salvation in a man's life.

 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/12/2001 10:50 am  
To:  ALL   (22 of 163)  
 
  204.22 in reply to 204.8  
 
PULL YOURSELF 'TOGETHER

     Yield your members servants to righteousness unto
     holiness. Romans 6:13-22

I cannot save and sanctify myself; I cannot atone for sin; I cannot
redeem the world; I can not make right what is wrong, pure what is
impure, holy what is unholy. That is all the sovereign work of God.
Have I faith in what Jesus Christ has done? He has made a perfect
Atonement, am I in the habit of constantly realizing it? The great
need is not to do things, but to believe things. The Redemption of
Christ is not an experience, it is the great act of God which He has
performed through Christ, and I have to build my faith upon it. If I
construct my faith on my experience, I produce that most unscriptural
type, an isolated life, my eyes fixed on my own whiteness. Beware of
the piety that has no pre-supposition in the Atonement of the Lord.
It is of no use for anything but a sequestered life; it is useless to
God and a nuisance to man. Measure every type of experience by our
Lord Himself. We cannot do anything pleasing to God unless we
deliberately build on the pre-supposition of the Atonement.

The Atonement of Jesus has to work out in practical, unobtrusive ways
in my life. Every time I obey, absolute Deity is on my side, so that
the grace of God and natural obedience coincide. Obedience means that
I have banked everything on the Atonement, and my obedience is met
immediately by the delight of the supernatural grace of God.

Beware of the piety that denies the natural life, it is a fraud.
Continually bring yourself to the bar of the Atonement - where is the
discernment of the Atonement in this thing, and in that?

 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/12/2001 10:51 am  
To:  ALL   (23 of 163)  
 
  204.23 in reply to 204.9  
 
WHEREBY SHALL I KNOW?

     I thank Thee, O Father ... because Thou hast hid these
     things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them
     unto babes. Matthew 11:25

In spiritual relationship we do not grow step by step; we are either
there or we are not. God does not cleanse us more and more from sin,
but when we are in the light, walking in the light, we are cleansed
from all sin. It is a question of obedience, and instantly the
relationship is perfected. Turn away for one second out of obedience,
and darkness and death are at work at once.

All God's revelations are sealed until they are opened to us by
obedience. You will never get them open by philosophy or thinking.
Immediately you obey, a flash of light comes. Let God's truth work in
you by soaking in it, not by worrying into it. The only way you can
get to know is to stop trying to find out and by being born again.
Obey God in the thing He shows you, and instantly the next thing is
opened up. One reads tomes on the work of the Holy Spirit, when one
five minutes of drastic obedience would make things as clear as a
sunbeam. "I suppose I shall understand these things some day!" You
can understand them now. It is not study that does it, but obedience.
The tiniest fragment of obedience, and heaven opens and the
profoundest truths of God are yours straight away. God will never
reveal more truth about Himself until you have obeyed what you know
already. Beware of becoming "wise and prudent."






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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/12/2001 10:52 am  
To:  ALL   (24 of 163)  
 
  204.24 in reply to 204.9  
 
AFTER GOD'S SILENCE - WHAT?

     When He had heard therefore that he was sick, He abode
     two days in the same place where he was. John 11:6

Has God trusted you with a silence - a silence that is big with
meaning? God's silences are His answers. Think of those days of
absolute silence in the home at Bethany! Is there anything analogous
to those days in your life? Can God trust you like that, or are you
still asking for a visible answer? God will give you the blessings
you ask if you will not go any further without them; but His silence
is the sign that He is bringing you into a marvellous understanding
of Himself. Are you mourning before God because you have not had an
audible response? You will find that God has trusted you in the most
intimate way possible, with an absolute silence, not of despair, but
of pleasure, because He saw that you could stand a bigger revelation.
If God has given you a silence, praise Him, He is bringing you into
the great run of His purposes. The manifestation of the answer in
time is a matter of God's sovereignty. Time is nothing to God. For a
while you said - "I asked God to give me bread, and He gave me a
stone." He did not, and to-day you find He gave you the bread of
life.

A wonderful thing about God's silence is that the contagion of His
stillness gets into you and you become perfectly confident - "I know
God has heard me." His silence is the proof that He has. As long as
you have the idea that God will bless you in answer to prayer, He
will do it, but He will never give you the grace of silence. If Jesus
Christ is bringing you into the understanding that prayer is for the
glorifying of His Father, He will give you the first sign of His
intimacy - silence.






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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/12/2001 10:54 am  
To:  ALL   (25 of 163)  
 
  204.25 in reply to 204.9  
 
GETTING INTO GOD'S STRIDE

     Enoch walked with God. Genesis 5:24

The test of a man's religious life and character is not what he does
in the exceptional moments of life, but what he does in the ordinary
times, when there is nothing tremendous or exciting on. The worth of
a man is revealed in his attitude to ordinary things when he is not
before the footlights (cf. John 1:36). It is a painful business to
get through into the stride of God, it means getting your second wind
spiritually. In learning to walk with God there is always the
difficulty of getting into His stride; but when we have got into it,
the only characteristic that manifests itself is the life of God. The
individual man is lost sight of in his personal union with God, and
the stride and the power of God alone are manifested.

It is difficult to get into stride with God, because when we start
walking with Him we find He has outstripped us before we have taken
three steps. He has different ways of doing things, and we have to be
trained and disciplined into His ways. It was said of Jesus - "He
shall not fail nor be discouraged," because He never worked from His
own individual standpoint but always from the standpoint of His
Father, and we have to learn to do the same. Spiritual truth is
learned by atmosphere, not by intellectual reasoning. God's Spirit
alters the atmosphere of our way of looking at things, and things
begin to be possible which never were possible before. Getting into
the stride of God means nothing less than union with Himself. It
takes a long time to get there, but keep at it. Don't give in because
the pain is bad just now, get on with it, and before long you will
find you have a new vision and a new purpose.


 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/16/2001 10:06 am  
To:  ALL   (26 of 163)  
 
  204.26 in reply to 204.3  
 
INDIVIDUAL DISCOURAGEMENT AND PERSONAL ENLARGEMENT

     Moses went out unto his brethren, and looked on their
     burdens. Exodus 2:11

Moses saw the oppression of his people and felt certain that he was
the one to deliver them, and in the righteous indignation of his own
spirit he started to right their wrongs. After the first strike for
God and for the right, God allowed Moses to be driven into blank
discouragement, He sent him into the desert to feed sheep for forty
years. At the end of that time, God appeared and told Moses to go and
bring forth His people, and Moses said - "Who am I, that I should
go?" In the beginning Moses realized that he was the man to deliver
the people, but he had to be trained and disciplined by God first. He
was right in the individual aspect, but he was not the man for the
work until he had learned communion with God.

We may have the vision of God and a very clear understanding of what
God wants, and we start to do the thing, then comes something
equivalent to the forty years in the wilderness, as if God had
ignored the whole thing, and when we are thoroughly discouraged God
comes back and revives the call, and we get the quaver in and say -
"Oh, who am I?" We have to learn the first great stride of God - "I
AM THAT I AM hath sent thee." We have to learn that our individual
effort for God is an impertinence; our individuality is to be
rendered incandescent by a personal relationship to God (see Matthew
3:17). We fix on the individual aspect of things; we have the vision
- "This is what God wants me to do;" but we have not got into God's
stride. If you are going through a time of discouragement, there is a
big personal enlargement ahead.


 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/16/2001 10:09 am  
To:  ALL   (27 of 163)  
 
  204.27 in reply to 204.4  
 
THE KEY TO THE MISSIONARY

     All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth. Go ye
     therefore, and teach all nations. Matthew 28:18-20

The basis of missionary appeals is the authority of Jesus Christ, not
the needs of the heathen. We are apt to look upon Our Lord as One Who
assists us in our enterprises for God. Our Lord puts Himself as the
absolute sovereign supreme Lord over His disciples. He does not say
the heathen will be lost if we do not go; He simply says - "Go ye
therefore and teach all nations." Go on the revelation of My
sovereignty; teach and preach out of a living experience of Me.

"Then the eleven disciples went . . unto a mountain where Jesus had
appointed them." v. 16. If I want to know the universal sovereignty
of Christ, I must know Him for myself, and how to get alone with Him;
I must take time to worship the Being Whose Name I bear. "Come unto
Me" - that is the place to meet Jesus. Are you weary and heavy laden?
How many missionaries are! We banish those marvellous words of the
universal Sovereign of the world to the threshold of an
after-meeting; they are the words of Jesus to His disciples.

"Go ye therefore. . . ." Go simply means live. Acts 1:8 is the
description of how to go. Jesus did not say - Go into Jerusalem and
Judea and Samaria, but, "Ye shall be witnesses unto Me" in all these
places. He undertakes to establish the goings.

"If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you. . . " - that is the
way to keep going in our personal lives. Where we are placed is a
matter of indifference; God engineers the goings.

"None of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto
myself . . ." That is how to keep going till we're gone.


 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/16/2001 10:11 am  
To:  ALL   (28 of 163)  
 
  204.28 in reply to 204.4  
 
THE KEY TO THE MISSIONARY MESSAGE

     And He is the propitiation for our sins: and not for
     ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.
     1st John 2:2

The key to the missionary message is the propitiation of Christ
Jesus. Take any phase of Christ's work - the healing phase, the
saving and sanctifying phase; there is nothing limitless about those.
"The Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world! " - that is
limitless. The missionary message is the limitless significance of
Jesus Christ as the propitiation for our sins, and a missionary is
one who is soaked in that revelation.

The key to the missionary message is the remissionary aspect of
Christ's life, not His kindness and His goodness, and His revealing
of the Fatherhood of God; the great limitless significance is that He
is the propitiation for our sins. The missionary message is not
patriotic, it is irrespective of nations and of individuals, it is
for the whole world. When the Holy Ghost comes in He does not
consider my predilections, He brings me into union with the Lord
Jesus.

A missionary is one who is wedded to the charter of his Lord and
Master, he has not to proclaim his own point of view, but to proclaim
the Lamb of God. It is easier to belong to a coterie which tells what
Jesus Christ has done for me, easier to become a devotee to Divine
healing, or to a special type of sanctification, or to the baptism of
the Holy Ghost. Paul did not say - "Woe is unto me, if I do not
preach what Christ has done for me," but - "Woe is unto me, if I
preach not the gospel." This is the Gospel - "The Lamb of God, which
taketh away the sin of the world!"

 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/16/2001 10:13 am  
To:  ALL   (29 of 163)  
 
  204.29 in reply to 204.4  
 
THE KEY TO THE MASTER'S ORDERS

     Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that He will
     send forth labourers into His harvest. Matthew 9:38

The key to the missionary problem is in the hand of God, and that key
is prayer not work, that is, not work as the word is popularly
understood to-day because that may mean the evasion of concentration
on God. The key to the missionary problem is not the key of common
sense, nor the medical key, nor the key of civilization or education
or even evangelization. The key is prayer. "Pray ye therefore the
Lord of the harvest." Naturally, prayer is not practical, it is
absurd; we have to realize that prayer is stupid from the ordinary
common-sense point of view.

There are no nations in Jesus Christ's outlook, but the world. How
many of us pray with out respect of persons, and with respect to only
one Person, Jesus Christ? He owns the harvest that is produced by
distress and conviction of sin, and this is the harvest we have to
pray that labourers may be thrust out to reap. We are taken up with
active work while people all round are ripe to harvest, and we do not
reap one of them, but waste our Lord's time in over-energized
activities. Suppose the crisis comes in your father's life, in your
brother's life, are you there as a labourer to reap the harvest for
Jesus Christ? "Oh, but I have a special work to do!" No Christian has
a special work to do. A Christian is called to be Jesus Christ's own,
one who is not above his Master, one who does not dictate to Jesus
Christ what he intends to do. Our Lord calls to no special work: He
calls to Himself. "Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest," and He
will engineer circumstances and thrust you out.

 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/19/2001 7:49 am  
To:  ALL   (30 of 163)  
 
  204.30 in reply to 204.1  
 
GREATER WORKS

     And greater works than these shall he do; because I go
     unto My Father. John 14:12

Prayer does not fit us for the greater works; prayer is the greater
work. We think of prayer as a common-sense exercise of our higher
powers in order to prepare us for God's work. In the teaching of
Jesus Christ prayer is the working of the miracle of Redemption in me
which produces the miracle of Redemption in others by the power of
God. The way fruit remains is by prayer, but remember it is prayer
based on the agony of Redemption, not on my agony. Only a child gets
prayer answered; a wise man does not.

Prayer is the battle; it is a matter of indifference where you are.
Whichever way God engineers circumstances, the duty is to pray. Never
allow the thought - "I am of no use where I am;" because you
certainly can be of no use where you are not. Wherever God has dumped
you down in circumstances pray, ejaculate to Him all the time.
"Whatsoever ye ask in My name, that will I do." We won't pray unless
we get thrills, that is the intensest form of spiritual selfishness.
We have to labour along the line of God's direction, and He says
pray. "Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that He will send
forth labourers into His harvest."

There is nothing thrilling about a labouring man's work, but it is
the labouring man who makes the conceptions of the genius possible;
and it is the labouring saint who makes the conceptions of his Master
possible. You labour at prayer and results happen all the time from
His standpoint. What an astonishment it will be to find, when the
veil is lifted, the souls that have been reaped by you, simply
because you had been in the habit of taking your orders from Jesus
Christ.






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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/19/2001 7:51 am  
To:  ALL   (31 of 163)  
 
  204.31 in reply to 204.1  
 
THE KEY TO MISSIONARY DEVOTION

     For His name's sake they went forth.
     3rd John 1:7
     
Our Lord has told us how love to Him is to manifest itself. "Lovest
thou Me?" "Feed My sheep" - identify yourself with My interests in
other people, not, identify Me with your interests in other people. 1
Corinthians 8:4-8 gives the character of this love, it is the love of
God expressing itself. The test of my love for Jesus is the practical
one, all the rest is sentimental jargon.

Loyalty to Jesus Christ is the supernatural work of Redemption
wrought in me by the Holy Ghost Who sheds abroad the love of God in
my heart, and that love works efficaciously through me in contact
with everyone I meet. I remain loyal to His Name although every
common-sense fact gives the lie to Him, and declares that He has no
more power than a morning mist.

The key to missionary devotion means being attached to nothing and no
one saving Our Lord Himself, not being detached from things
externally. Our Lord was amazingly in and out among ordinary things;
His detachment was on the inside towards God. External detachment is
often an indication of a secret vital attachment to the things we
keep away from externally.

The loyalty of a missionary is to keep his soul concentratedly open
to the nature of the Lord Jesus Christ. The men and women Our Lord
sends out on His enterprises are the ordinary human stuff, plus
dominating devotion to Himself wrought by the Holy Ghost.

 





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/19/2001 7:52 am  
To:  ALL   (32 of 163)  
 
  204.32 in reply to 204.1  
 
THE UNHEEDED SECRET

     My kingdom is not of this world.
     John 18:36

The great enemy to the Lord Jesus Christ in the present day is the
conception of practical work that has not come from the New
Testament, but from the Systems of the world in which endless energy
and activities are insisted upon, but no private life with God. The
emphasis is put on the wrong thing. Jesus said, "The kingdom of God
cometh not with observation, for lo the kingdom of God is within
you," a hidden, obscure thing. An active Christian worker too often
lives in the shop window. It is the innermost of the innermost that
reveals the power of the life.

We have to get rid of the plague of the spirit of the religious age
in which we live. In Our Lord's life there was none of the press and
rush of tremendous activity that we regard so highly, and the
disciple is to be as His Master. The central thing about the kingdom
of Jesus Christ is a personal relationship to Himself, not public
usefulness to men.

It is not its practical activities that are the strength of this
Bible Training College, its whole strength lies in the fact that here
you are put into soak before God. You have no idea of where God is
going to engineer your circumstances, no knowledge of what strain is
going to be put on you either at home or abroad, and if you waste
your time in over-active energies instead of getting into soak on the
great fundamental truths of God's Redemption, you will snap when the
strain comes; but if this time of soaking before God is being spent
in getting rooted and grounded in God on the unpractical line, you
will remain true to Him what ever happens.






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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/29/2001 7:23 am  
To:  ALL   (33 of 163)  
 
  204.33 in reply to 204.13  
 
IS GOD'S WILL MY WILL?

     This is the will of God, even your sanctification.
     1st Thessalonians 4:3

It is not a question of whether God is willing to sanctify me; is it
my will? Am I willing to let God do in me all that has been made
possible by the Atonement? Am I willing to let Jesus be made
sanctification to me, and to let the life of Jesus be manifested in
my mortal flesh? Beware of saying - Oh, I am longing to be
sanctified. You are not, stop longing and make it a matter of
transaction - "Nothing in my hands I bring." Receive Jesus Christ to
be made sanctification to you in implicit faith, and the great marvel
of the Atonement of Jesus will be made real in you. All that Jesus
made possible is made mine by the free loving gift of God on the
ground of what He performed, my attitude as a saved and sanctified
soul is that of profound humble holiness (there is no such thing as
proud holiness), a holiness based on agonizing repentance and a sense
of unspeakable shame and degradation; and also on the amazing
realization that the love of God commended itself to me in that while
I cared nothing about Him, He completed everything for my salvation
and sanctification (see Rom. 5:8. R.V.). No wonder Paul says nothing
is "able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ
Jesus our Lord."

Sanctification makes me one with Jesus Christ, and in Him one with
God, and it is done only through the superb Atonement of Christ.
Never put the effect as the cause. The effect in me is obedience and
service and prayer, and is the out come of speechless thanks and
adoration for the marvellous sanctification wrought out in me because
of the Atonement.





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/29/2001 7:25 am  
To:  ALL   (34 of 163)  
 
  204.34 in reply to 204.13  
 
DIRECTION BY IMPULSE

     Building up yourselves on your most holy faith.
     Jude 20

There was nothing either of the nature of impulse or of
cold-bloodedness about Our Lord, but only a calm strength that never
got into panic. Most of us develop our Christianity along the line of
our temperament, not along the line of God. Impulse is a trait in
natural life, but Our Lord always ignores it, because it hinders the
development of the life of a disciple. Watch how the Spirit of God
checks impulse, His checks bring a rush of self-conscious foolishness
which makes us instantly want to vindicate ourselves. Impulse is all
right in a child, but it is disastrous in a man or woman; an
impulsive man is always a petted man. Impulse has to be trained into
intuition by discipline.

Discipleship is built entirely on the supernatural grace of God.
Walking on the water is easy to impulsive pluck, but walking on dry
land as a disciple of Jesus Christ is a different thing. Peter walked
on the water to go to Jesus, but he followed Him afar off on the
land. We do not need the grace of God to stand crises, human nature
and pride are sufficient, we can face the strain magnificently; but
it does require the supernatural grace of God to live twenty-four
hours in every day as a saint, to go through drudgery as a disciple,
to live an ordinary, unobserved, ignored existence as a disciple of
Jesus. It is inbred in us that we have to do exceptional things for
God; but we have not. We have to be exceptional in the ordinary
things, to be holy in mean streets, among mean people, and this is
not learned in five minutes.





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/29/2001 7:26 am  
To:  ALL   (35 of 163)  
 
  204.35 in reply to 204.13  
 
THE WITNESS OF THE SPIRIT

     The Spirit Himself beareth witness with our spirit...
     Romans 8:16

We are in danger of getting the barter spirit when we come to God, we
want the witness before we have done what God tells us to do. "Why
does not God reveal Himself to me?" He cannot, it is not that He will
not, but He cannot, because you are in the road as long as you won't
abandon absolutely to Him. Immediately you do, God witnesses to
Himself, He cannot witness to you, but He witnesses instantly to His
own nature in you. If you had the witness before the reality, it
would end in sentimental emotion. Immediately you transact on the
Redemption, and stop the impertinence of debate, God gives on the
witness. As soon as you abandon reasoning and argument, God witnesses
to what He has done, and we are amazed at our impertinence in having
kept Him waiting. If you are in debate as to whether God can deliver
from sin, either let Him do it, or tell Him He cannot. Do not quote
this and that person, try Matthew 11:28 - "Come unto Me." Come, if
you are weary and heavy laden; ask, if you know you are evil (Luke
11:13).

The Spirit of God witnesses to the Redemption of Our Lord, He does
not witness to anything else; He cannot witness to our reason. The
simplicity that comes from our natural common-sense decisions is apt
to be mistaken for the witness of the Spirit, but the Spirit
witnesses only to His own nature, and to the work of Redemption,
never to our reason. If we try to make Him witness to our reason, it
is no wonder we are in darkness and perplexity. Fling it all
overboard, trust in Him, and He will give the witness.






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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/29/2001 7:29 am  
To:  ALL   (36 of 163)  
 
  204.36 in reply to 204.13  
 
NOT A BIT OF IT!

     If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old
     things are passed away. 2nd Corinthians 5:17

Our Lord never nurses our prejudices, He mortifies them, runs clean
athwart them. We imagine that God has a special interest in our
particular prejudices; we are quite sure that God will never deal
with us as He has to deal with other people. "God must deal with
other people in a very stern way, but of course He knows that my
prejudices are all right." We have to learn - "Not a bit of it!"
Instead of God being on the side of our prejudices, He is
deliberately wiping them out. It is part of our moral education to
have our prejudices run straight across by His providence, and to
watch how He does it. God pays no respect to anything we bring to
Him. There is only one thing God wants of us, and that is our
unconditional surrender.

When we are born again, the Holy Spirit begins to work His new
creation in us, and there will come a time when there is not a bit of
the old order left, the old solemnity goes, the old attitude to
things goes, and "all things are of God." How are we going to get the
life that has no lust, no self-interest, no sensitiveness to pokes,
the love that is not provoked, that thinketh no evil, that is always
kind? The only way is by allowing not a bit of the old life to be
left; but only simple perfect trust in God, such trust that we no
longer want God's blessings, but only want Himself. Have we come to
the place where God can withdraw His blessings and it does not affect
our trust in Him? When once we see God at work, we will never bother
our heads about things that happen, because we are actually trusting
in our Father in Heaven Whom the world cannot see.






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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/29/2001 7:31 am  
To:  ALL   (37 of 163)  
 
  204.37 in reply to 204.13  
 
THE VIEWPOINT

     Now thanks be to God, which always causeth us to triumph
     in Christ. 2nd Corinthians 2:14

The viewpoint of a worker for God must not be as near the highest as
he can get, it must be the highest. Be careful to maintain
strenuously God's point of view, it has to be done every day, bit by
bit; don't think on the finite. No outside power can touch the
viewpoint.

The viewpoint to maintain is that we are here for one purpose only,
viz., to be captives in the train of Christ's triumphs. We are not in
God's showroom, we are here to exhibit one thing - the absolute
captivity of our lives to Jesus Christ. How small the other points of
view are - I am standing alone battling for Jesus; I have to maintain
the cause of Christ and hold this fort for Him. Paul says - I am in
the train of a conqueror, and it does not matter what the
difficulties are, I am always led in triumph. Is this idea being
worked out practically in us? Paul's secret joy was that God took
him, a red-handed rebel against Jesus Christ, and made him a captive,
and now that is all he is here for. Paul's joy was to be a captive of
the Lord, he had no other interest in heaven or in earth. It is a
shameful thing for a Christian to talk about getting the victory. The
Victor ought to have got us so completely that it is His victory all
the time, and we are more than conquerors through Him.

"For we are unto God a sweet saviour of Christ." We are enwheeled
with the odour of Jesus, and wherever we go we are a wonderful
refreshment to God.






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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/29/2001 7:33 am  
To:  ALL   (38 of 163)  
 
  204.38 in reply to 204.13  
 
THE ETERNAL CRUSH OF THINGS

     I am made all things to all men, that I might by all
     means save some. 1st Corinthians 9:22-

A Christian worker has to learn how to be God's noble man or woman
amid a crowd of ignoble things. Never make this plea - If only I were
somewhere else! All God's men are ordinary men made extraordinary by
the matter He has given them. Unless we have the right matter in our
minds intellectually and in our hearts affectionately, we will be
hustled out of usefulness to God. We are not workers for God by
choice. Many people deliberately choose to be workers, but they have
no matter in them of God's almighty grace, no matter of His mighty
word. Paul's whole heart and mind and soul were taken up with the
great matter of what Jesus Christ came to do, he never lost sight of
that one thing. We have to face ourselves with the one central fact -
Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

"I have chosen you." Keep that note of greatness in your creed. It is
not that you have got God but that He has got you. Here, in this
College, God is at work, bending, breaking, moulding, doing just as
He chooses. Why He is doing it, we do not know; He is doing it for
one purpose only - that He may be able to say, This is My man, My
woman. We have to be in God's hand so that He can plant men on the
Rock as He has planted us.

Never choose to be a worker, but when God has put His call on you,
woe be to you if you turn to the right hand or to the left. He will
do with you what He never did with you before the call came He will
do with you what He is not doing with other people. Let Him have His
way.





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/29/2001 7:34 am  
To:  ALL   (39 of 163)  
 
  204.39 in reply to 204.13  
 
WHAT IS A MISSIONARY?

     As My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you.
     John 20:21

A missionary is one sent by Jesus Christ as He was sent by God. The
great dominant note is not the needs of men, but the command of
Jesus. The source of our inspiration in work for God is behind, not
before. The tendency to-day is to put the inspiration ahead, to sweep
everything in front of us and bring it all out to our conception of
success. In the New Testament the inspiration is put behind us, the
Lord Jesus. The ideal is to be true to Him, to carry out His
enterprises.

Personal attachment to the Lord Jesus and His point of view is the
one thing that must not be overlooked. In missionary enterprise the
great danger is that God's call is effaced by the needs of the people
until human sympathy absolutely overwhelms the meaning of being sent
by Jesus. The needs are so enormous, the conditions so perplexing,
that every power of mind falters and fails. We forget that the one
great reason underneath all missionary enterprise is not first the
elevation of the people, nor the education of the people, nor their
needs; but first and foremost the command of Jesus Christ - "Go ye
therefore, and teach all nations."

When looking back on the lives of men and women of God the tendency
is to say - What wonderfully astute wisdom they had! How perfectly
they understood all God wanted! The astute mind behind is the Mind of
God, not human wisdom at all. We give credit to human wisdom when we
should give credit to the Divine guidance of God through childlike
people who were foolish enough to trust God's wisdom and the
supernatural equipment of God.






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   From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/29/2001 7:37 am  
To:  ALL   (40 of 163)  
 
  204.40 in reply to 204.33  
 
THE METHOD OF MISSIONS

     Go ye therefore, and teach (disciple) all nations.
     Matthew 28:19

Jesus Christ did not say - Go and save souls (the salvation of souls
is the supernatural work of God), but - "Go and teach," i.e.,
disciple, "all nations," and you cannot make disciples unless you are
a disciple yourself. When the disciples came back from their first
mission they were filled with joy because the devils were subject to
them, and Jesus said - Don't rejoice in successful service; the great
secret of joy is that you are rightly related to Me. The great
essential of the missionary is that he remains true to the call of
God, and realizes that his one purpose is to disciple men and women
to Jesus. There is a passion for souls that does not spring from God,
but from the desire to make converts to our point of view.

The challenge to the missionary does not come on the line that people
are difficult to get saved, that backsliders are difficult to
reclaim, that there is a wadge of callous indifference; but along the
line of his own personal relationship to Jesus Christ. "Believe ye
that I am able to do this?" Our Lord puts that question steadily, it
faces us in every individual case we meet. The one great challenge is
- Do I know my Risen Lord? Do I know the power of His indwelling
Spirit? Am I wise enough in God's sight, and foolish enough according
to the world, to bank on what Jesus Christ has said, or am I
abandoning the great supernatural position, which is the only call
for a missionary, viz., bound less confidence in Christ Jesus? If I
take up any other method I depart altogether from the methods laid
down by Our Lord - "All power is given unto Me . . , therefore go
ye."





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From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/29/2001 7:39 am  
To:  ALL   (41 of 163)  
 
  204.41 in reply to 204.33  
 
JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH

     For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God
     by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we
     shall be saved by His life. Romans 5:10

I am not saved by believing; I realize I am saved by believing. It is
not repentance that saves me, repentance is the sign that I realize
what God has done in Christ Jesus. The danger is to put the emphasis
on the effect instead of on the cause. It is my obedience that puts
me right with God, my consecration. Never! I am put right with God
because prior to all, Christ died. When I turn to God and by belief
accept what God reveals I can accept, instantly the stupendous
Atonement of Jesus Christ rushes me into a right relationship with
God; and by the supernatural miracle of God's grace I stand
justified, not because I am sorry for my sin, not because I have
repented, but because of what Jesus has done. The Spirit of God
brings it with a breaking, all-over light, and I know, though I do
not know how, that I am saved.

The salvation of God does not stand on human logic, it stands on the
sacrificial Death of Jesus. We can be born again because of the
Atonement of Our Lord. Sinful men and women can be changed into new
creatures, not by their repentance or their belief, but by the
marvellous work of God in Christ Jesus which is prior to all
experience. The impregnable safety of justification and
sanctification is God Himself. We have not to work out these things
ourselves; they have been worked out by the Atonement. The
supernatural becomes natural by the miracle of God; there is the
realization of what Jesus Christ has already done - "It is finished."





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    10/29/2001 7:42 am  
To:  ALL   (42 of 163)  
 
  204.42 in reply to 204.33  
 
SUBSTITUTION

     He hath made Him to be sin for us ... that we might be
     made the righteousness of God... 2 ndCorinthians 5:21

The modern view of the death of Jesus is that He died for our sins
out of sympathy. The New Testament view is that He bore our sin not
by sympathy, but by identification. He was made to be sin. Our sins
are removed because of the death of Jesus, and the explanation of His
death is His obedience to His Father, not His sympathy with us. We
are acceptable with God not because we have obeyed, or because we
have promised to give up things, but because of the death of Christ,
and in no other way. We say that Jesus Christ came to reveal the
Fatherhood of God, the loving-kind ness of God; the New Testament
says He came to bear away the sin of the world. The revelation of His
Father is to those to whom He has been introduced as Saviour. Jesus
Christ never spoke of Himself to the world as one Who revealed the
Father, but as a stumbling block (see John 15:22- 24). John 14:9 was
spoken to His disciples.

That Christ died for me, therefore I go scot free, is never taught in
the New Testament. What is taught in the New Testament is that "He
died for all" (not - He died my death), and that by identification
with His death I can be freed from sin, and have imparted to me His
very righteousness. The substitution taught in the New Testament is
twofold: "He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we
might be made the righteous ness of God in Him." It is not Christ for
me un less I am determined to have Christ formed in me.





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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/2/2001 7:19 am  
To:  ALL   (43 of 163)  
 
  204.43 in reply to 204.14  
 
FAITH

     Without faith it is impossible to please Him. Hebrews 11:6

Faith in antagonism to common sense is fanaticism, and common sense
in antagonism to faith is rationalism. The life of faith brings the
two into a right relation. Common sense is not faith, and faith is
not common sense; they stand in the relation of the natural and the
spiritual; of impulse and inspiration. Nothing Jesus Christ ever said
is common sense, it is revelation sense, and it reaches the shores
where common sense fails. Faith must be tried before the reality of
faith is actual. "We know that all things work together for good,"
then no matter what happens, the alchemy of God's providence
transfigures the ideal faith into actual reality. Faith always works
on the personal line, the whole purpose of God being to see that the
ideal faith is made real in His children.

For every detail of the common-sense life, there is a revelation fact
of God whereby we can prove in practical experience what we believe
God to be. Faith is a tremendously active principle which always puts
Jesus Christ first - Lord, Thou hast said so and so (e.g., Matthew
6:33), it looks mad, but I am going to venture on Thy word. To turn
head faith into a personal possession is a fight always, not
sometimes. God brings us into circumstances in order to educate our
faith, because the nature of faith is to make its object real. Until
we know Jesus, God is a mere abstraction, we can not have faith in
Him; but immediately we hear Jesus say - "He that hath seen Me hath
seen the Father," we have something that is real, and faith is
boundless. Faith is the whole man rightly related to God by the power
of the Spirit of Jesus Christ.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/2/2001 7:20 am  
To:  ALL   (44 of 163)  
 
  204.44 in reply to 204.14  
 
DISCERNMENT OF FAITH

     Faith as a grain of mustard seed... Matthew 17:20

We have the idea that God rewards us for our faith, it may he so in
the initial stages; but we do not earn anything by faith, faith
brings us into right relationship with God and gives God His
opportunity. God has frequently to knock the bottom board out of your
experience if you are a saint in order to get you into contact with
Himself. God wants you to understand that it is a life of faith, not
a life of sentimental enjoyment of His blessings. Your earlier life
of faith was narrow and intense, settled around a little sun-spot of
experience that had as much of sense as of faith in it, full of light
and sweetness; then God withdrew His conscious blessings in order to
teach you to walk by faith. You are worth far more to Him now than
you were in your days of conscious delight and thrilling testimony.

Faith by its very nature must be tried, and the real trial of faith
is not that we find it difficult to trust God, but that God's
character has to be cleared in our own minds. Faith in its actual
working out has to go through spells of unsyllabled isolation. Never
confound the trial of faith with the ordinary discipline of life,
much that we call the trial of faith is the inevitable result of
being alive. Faith in the Bible is faith in God against everything
that contradicts Him - I will remain true to God's character whatever
He may do. "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him" - this is the
most sublime utterance of faith in the whole of the Bible.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/2/2001 7:22 am  
To:  ALL   (45 of 163)  
 
  204.45 in reply to 204.14  
 
YE ARE NOT YOUR OWN

     Know ye not that . . ye are not your own? 1st Corinthians 6:19

There is no such things as a private life - "a world within the
world" - for a man or woman who is brought into fellowship with Jesus
Christ's sufferings. God breaks up the private life of His saints,
and makes it a thoroughfare for the world on the one hand and for
Himself on the other. No human being can stand that unless he is
identified with Jesus Christ. We are not sanctified for our selves,
we are called into the fellowship of the Gospel, and things happen
which have nothing to do with us, God is getting us into fellowship
with Himself. Let Him have His way, if you do not, instead of being
of the slightest use to God in His Redemptive work in the world, you
will be a hindrance and a clog.

The first thing God does with us is to get us based on rugged Reality
until we do not care what becomes of us individually as long as He
gets His way for the purpose of His Redemption. Why shouldn't we go
through heartbreaks? Through those doorways God is opening up ways of
fellow ship with His Son. Most of us fall and collapse at the first
grip of pain; we sit down on the threshold of God's purpose and die
away of self-pity, and all so called Christian sympathy will aid us
to our death bed. But God will not. He comes with the grip of the
pierced hand of His Son, and says - "Enter into fellowship with Me;
arise and shine." If through a broken heart God can bring His
purposes to pass in the world, then thank Him for breaking your
heart.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/2/2001 7:24 am  
To:  ALL   (46 of 163)  
 
  204.46 in reply to 204.14  
 
AUTHORITY AND INDEPENDENCE

     If ye love Me, ye will keep My commandments. John 14:15

Our Lord never insists upon obedience; He tells us very emphatically
what we ought to do, but He never takes means to make us do it. We
have to obey Him out of a oneness of spirit. That is why whenever Our
Lord talked about discipleship, He prefaced it with an IF - you do
not need to unless you like. "If any man will be My disciple, let him
deny himself," let him give up his right to himself to Me. Our Lord
is not talking of eternal positions, but of being of value to Himself
in this order of things, that is why He sounds so stern (cf. Luke
14:26). Never interpret these words apart from the One Who uttered
them.

The Lord does not give me rules, He makes His standard very clear,
and if my relationship to Him is that of love, I will do what He says
without any hesitation. If I hesitate, it is because I love some one
else in competition with Him, viz., myself. Jesus Christ will not
help me to obey Him, I must obey Him; and when I do obey Him, I
fulfil my spiritual destiny. My personal life may be crowded with
small petty incidents, altogether unnoticeable and mean; but if I
obey Jesus Christ in the haphazard circumstances, they become
pinholes through which I see the face of God, and when I stand face
to face with God I will discover that through my obedience thousands
were blessed. When once God's Redemption comes to the point of
obedience in a human soul, it always creates. If I obey Jesus Christ,
the Redemption of God will rush through me to other lives, because
behind the deed of obedience is the Reality of Almighty God.




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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/5/2001 6:58 am  
To:  ALL   (47 of 163)  
 
  204.47 in reply to 204.1  
 
A BOND-SLAVE OF JESUS

     I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not
     I, but Christ liveth in me. Galatians 2:20

These words mean the breaking of my independence with my own band and
surrendering to the supremacy of the Lord Jesus. No one can do this
for me, I must do it myself. God may bring me up to the point three
hundred and sixty-five times a year, but He cannot put me through it.
It means breaking the husk of my individual in dependence of God, and
the emancipating of my personality into oneness with Himself, not for
my own ideas, but for absolute loyalty to Jesus. There is no
possibility of dispute when once I am there. Very few of us know
anything about loyalty to Christ - "For My sake." It is that which
makes the iron saint.

Has that break come? All the rest is pious fraud. The one point to
decide is - Will I give up, will I surrender to Jesus Christ, and
make no conditions whatever as to how the break comes? I must be
broken from my self-realization, and immediately that point is
reached, the reality of the supernatural identification takes place
at once, and the witness of the Spirit of God is unmistakable - "I
have been crucified with Christ."
The passion of Christianity is that I deliberately sign away my own
rights and become a bond-slave of Jesus Christ. Until I do that, I do
not begin to be a saint.

One student a year who hears God's call would be sufficient for God
to have called this College into existence. This College as an
organization is not worth anything, it is not academic; it is for
nothing else but for God to help Himself to lives. Is He going to
help Himself to us, or are we taken up with our conception of what we
are going to be?



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/5/2001 7:00 am  
To:  ALL   (48 of 163)  
 
  204.48 in reply to 204.1  
 
THE AUTHORITY OF REALITY

     Draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you.
     James 4:8

It is essential to give people a chance of acting on the truth of
God. The responsibility must be left with the individual, you cannot
act for him, it must be his own deliberate act, but the evangelical
message ought always to lead a man to act. The paralysis of refusing
to act leaves a man exactly where he was before; when once he acts,
he is never the same. It is the foolishness of it that stands in the
way of hundreds who have been convicted by the Spirit of God.
Immediately I precipitate myself over into an act, that second I
live; all the rest is existence. The moments when I truly live are
the moments when I act with my whole will.

Never allow a truth of God that is brought home to your soul to pass
without acting on it, not necessarily physically, but in will. Record
it, with ink or with blood. The feeblest saint who transacts business
with Jesus Christ is emancipated the second he acts; all the almighty
power of God is on his behalf. We come up to the truth of God, we
confess we are wrong, but go back again; then we come up to it again,
and go back; until we learn that we have no business to go back. We
have to go clean over on some word of our redeeming Lord and transact
business with Him. His word "come" means "transact." "Come unto Me."
The last thing we do is to come; but everyone who does come knows
that that second the supernatural rush of the life of God invades him
instantly. The dominating power of the world, the flesh and the devil
is paralysed, not by your act, but because your act has linked you on
to God and His redemptive power.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/5/2001 7:04 am  
To:  ALL   (49 of 163)  
 
  204.49 in reply to 204.1  
 
PARTAKERS OF HIS SUFFERINGS

     Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's
     sufferings.1st Peter 4:13

If you are going to be used by God, He will take you through a
multitude of experiences that are not meant for you at all, they are
meant to make you useful in His hands, and to enable you to
understand what transpires in other souls so that you will never be
surprised at what you come across. Oh, I can't deal with that person.
Why not? God gave you ample opportunity to soak before Him on that
line, and you barged off because it seemed stupid to spend time in
that way.

The sufferings of Christ are not those of ordinary men. He suffered
"according to the will of God," not from the point of view we suffer
from as individuals. It is only when we are related to Jesus Christ
that we can understand what God is after in His dealings with us. It
is part of Christian culture to know what God's aim is. In the
history of the Christian Church the tendency has been to evade being
identified with the sufferings of Jesus Christ; men have sought to
procure the carrying out of God's order by a short cut of their own.
God's way is always the way of suffering, the way of the "long, long
trail."

Are we partakers of Christ's sufferings? Are we prepared for God to
stamp our personal ambitions right out? Are we prepared for God to
destroy by transfiguration our individual determinations? It will not
mean that we know exactly why God is taking us that way, that would
make us spiritual prigs. We never realize at the time what God is
putting us through; we go through it more or less misunderstandingly;
then we come to a luminous place, and say - ' 'Why, God has girded
me, though I did not know it!"



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/13/2001 8:27 am  
To:  ALL   (50 of 163)  
 
  204.50 in reply to 204.22  
 
PROGRAMME OF BELIEF

     Believest thou this?  John 11:26

Martha believed in the power at the disposal of Jesus Christ, she
believed that if He had been present He could have healed her
brother; she also believed that Jesus had a peculiar intimacy with
God and that whatever He asked of God, God would do; but she needed a
closer personal intimacy with Jesus. Martha's programme of belief had
its fulfilment in the future; Jesus led her on until her belief
became a personal possession, and then slowly emerged into a
particular inheritance - "Yea, Lord, I believe that Thou art the
Christ. . . "

Is there something like that in the Lord's dealings with you? Is
Jesus educating you into a personal intimacy with Himself? Let Him
press home His question to you - "Believest thou this?" What is your
ordeal of doubt? Have you come, like Martha, to some overwhelming
passage in your circumstances where your programme of belief is about
to emerge into a personal belief? This can never be until a personal
need arises out of a personal problem.

To believe is to commit. In the programme of mental belief I commit
myself, and abandon all that is not related to that commitment. In
personal belief I commit myself morally to this way of confidence and
refuse to compromise with any other; and in particular belief I
commit myself spiritually to Jesus Christ, and determine in that
thing to be dominated by the Lord alone.

When I stand face to face with Jesus Christ and He says to me -
"Believest thou this?" I find that faith is as natural as breathing,
and I am staggered that I was so stupid as not to trust Him before.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/13/2001 8:29 am  
To:  ALL   (51 of 163)  
 
  204.51 in reply to 204.22  
 
THE UNDETECTED SACREDNESS OF CIRCUMSTANCES

     All things work together for good to them that love God.
     Romans 8:28

The circumstances of a saint's life are ordained of God. In the life
of a saint there is no such thing as chance. God by His providence
brings you into circumstances that you cannot understand at all, but
the Spirit of God understands. God is bringing you into places and
among people and into conditions in order that the intercession of
the Spirit in you may take a particular line. Never put your hand in
front of the circumstances and say - I am going to be my own
providence here, I must watch this, and guard that. All your
circumstances are in the hand of God, therefore never think it
strange concerning the circumstances you are in. Your part in
intercessory prayer is not to enter into the agony of intercession,
but to utilize the common-sense circumstances God puts you in, and
the common-sense people He puts you amongst by His providence, to
bring them before God's throne and give the Spirit in you a chance to
intercede for them. In this way God is going to sweep the whole world
with His saints.

Am I making the Holy Spirit's work difficult by being indefinite, or
by trying to do His work for Him? I must do the human side of
intercession, and the human side is the circumstances I am in and the
people I am in contact with. I have to keep my conscious life as a
shrine of the Holy Ghost, then as I bring the different ones before
God, the Holy Spirit makes intercession for them.

Your intercessions can never be mine, and my intercessions can never
be yours, but the Holy Ghost makes intercession in our particular
lives, without which intercession someone will be impoverished.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/13/2001 8:31 am  
To:  ALL   (52 of 163)  
 
  204.52 in reply to 204.22  
 
THE UNRIVALLED POWER OF PRAYER

     We know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the
     Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings
     which cannot be uttered. Romans 8:26

We realize that we are energized by the Holy Spirit for prayer; we
know what it is to pray in the Spirit; but we do not so often realize
that the Holy Spirit Himself prays in us prayers which we cannot
utter. When we are born again of God and are indwelt by the Spirit of
God, He expresses for us the unutterable.

"He," the Spirit in you, "maketh intercession for the saints
according to the will of God," and God searches your heart not to
know what your conscious prayers are, but to find out what is the
prayer of the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit of God needs the nature of the believer as a shrine in
which to offer His intercession. "Your body is the temple of the Holy
Ghost." When Jesus Christ cleansed the temple, He "would not suffer
that any man should carry any vessel through the temple." The Spirit
of God will not allow you to use your body for your own convenience.
Jesus ruthlessly cast out all them that sold and bought in the
temple, and said - "My house shall be called the house of prayer; but
ye have made it a den of thieves."

Have we recognized that our body is the temple of the Holy Ghost? If
so, we must be careful to keep it undefiled for Him. We have to
remember that our conscious life, though it is only a tiny bit of our
personality, is to be regarded by us as a shrine of the Holy Ghost.
He will look atter the unconscious part that we know nothing of; but
we must see that we guard the conscious part for which we are
responsible.




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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/13/2001 8:32 am  
To:  ALL   (53 of 163)  
 
  204.53 in reply to 204.22  
 
SACRAMENTAL SERVICE

     Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up
     that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ... .
     Colossians 1:2

The Christian worker has to be a sacramental "go-between," to be so
identified with his Lord and the reality of His Redemption that He
can continually bring His creating life through him. It is not the
strength of one man's personality being superimposed on another, but
the real presence of Christ coming through the elements of the
worker's life. When we preach the historic facts of the life and
death of Our Lord as they are conveyed in the New Testament, our
words are made sacramental, God uses them on the ground of His
Redemption to create in those who listen that which is not created
otherwise. If we preach the effects of Redemption in human life
instead of the revelation regarding Jesus, the result in those who
listen is not new birth, but refined spiritual culture, and the
Spirit of God cannot witness to it because such preaching is in
another domain. We have to see that we are in such living sympathy
with God that as we proclaim His truth He can create in souls the
things which He alone can do.

What a wonderful personality! What a fascinating man! Such marvellous
insight! What chance has the Gospel of God through all that? It
cannot get through, because the line of attraction is always the line
of appeal. If a man attracts by his personality, his appeal is along
that line; if he is identified with his Lord's personality, then the
appeal is along the line of what Jesus Christ can do. The danger is
to glory in men; Jesus says we are to lift Him up.




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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/13/2001 8:34 am  
To:  ALL   (54 of 163)  
 
  204.54 in reply to 204.22  
 
FELLOWSHIP IN THE GOSPEL

     Fellow labourer in the gospel of Christ.
     1st Thessalonians 3:2

After sanctification it is difficult to state what your aim in life
is, because God has taken you up into His purpose by the Holy Ghost;
He is using you now for His purposes throughout the world as He used
His Son for the purpose of our salvation. If you seek great things
for yourself - God has called me for this and that; you are putting a
barrier to God's use of you. As long as you have a personal interest
in your own character, or any set ambition, you cannot get through
into identification with God's interests. You can only get there by
losing for ever any idea of yourself and by letting God take you
right out into His purpose for the world, and because your goings are
of the Lord, you can never understand your ways.

I have to learn that the aim in life is God's, not mine. God is using
me from His great personal standpoint, and all He asks of me is that
I trust Him, and never say - Lord, this gives me such heart-ache. To
talk in that way makes me a clog. When I stop telling God what I
want, He can catch me up for what He wants without let or hindrance.
He can crumple me up or exalt me, He can do any thing He chooses. He
simply asks me to have implicit faith in Himself and in His goodness.
Self pity is of the devil, if I go off on that line I cannot be used
by God for His purpose in the world. I have "a world within the
world" in which I live, and God will never be able to get me outside
it because I am afraid of being frost-bitten.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/13/2001 8:36 am  
To:  ALL   (55 of 163)  
 
  204.55 in reply to 204.22  
 
THE SUPREME CLIMB

     Take now thy son.  Genesis 22:2

God's command is - Take now, not presently. It is extraordinary how
we debate! We know a thing is right, but we try to find excuses for
not doing it at once. To climb to the height God shows can never be
done presently, it must be done now. The sacrifice is gone through in
will before it is performed actually.

"And Abraham rose up early in the morning and went unto the place of
which God had told him" (v. 3). The wonderful simplicity of Abraham!
When God spoke, he did not confer with flesh and blood. Beware when
you want to confer with flesh and blood, i.e., your own sympathies,
your own insight, anything that is not based on your personal
relationship to God. These are the things that compete with and
hinder obedience to God.

Abraham did not choose the sacrifice. Always guard against
self-chosen service for God; self-sacrifice may be a disease. If God
has made your cup sweet, drink it with grace; if He has made it
bitter, drink it in communion with Him. If the providential order of
God for you is a hard time of difficulty, go through with it, but
never choose the scene of your martyrdom. God chose the crucible for
Abraham, and Abraham made no demur; he went steadily through. If you
are not living in touch with Him, it is easy to pass a crude verdict
on God. You must go through the crucible before you have any right to
pronounce a verdict, because in the crucible you learn to know God
better. God is working for His highest ends until His purpose and
man's purpose become one.




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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/13/2001 8:38 am  
To:  ALL   (56 of 163)  
 
  204.56 in reply to 204.22  
 
THE TRANSFIGURED LIFE

     If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old
     things are passed away; behold, all things are become
     new. 2nd Corinthians 5:17
     
What idea have you of the salvation of your soul? The experience of
salvation means that in your actual life things are really altered,
you no longer look at things as you used to; your desires are new,
old things have lost their power. One of the touchstones of
experience is - Has God altered the thing that matters? If you still
hanker after the old things, it is absurd to talk about being born
from above, you are juggling with yourself. If you are born again,
the Spirit of God makes the alteration manifest in your actual life
and reasoning, and when the crisis comes you are the most amazed
person on earth at the wonderful difference there is in you. There is
no possibility of imagining that you did it. It is this complete and
amazing alteration that is the evidence that you are a saved soul.

What difference has my salvation and sanctification made? For
instance, can I stand in the light of 1 Corinthians 13, or do I have
to shuffle? The salvation that is worked out in me by the Holy Ghost
emancipates me entirely, and as long as I walk in the light as God is
in the light, He sees nothing to censure because His life is working
out in every particular, not to my consciousness, but deeper than my
consciousness.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/13/2001 8:40 am  
To:  ALL   (57 of 163)  
 
  204.57 in reply to 204.22  
 
FAITH AND EXPERIENCE

     The Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.
     Galatians 2:20

We have to battle through our moods into absolute devotion to the
Lord Jesus, to get out of the hole-and-corner business of our
experience into abandoned devotion to Him. Think Who the New
Testament says that Jesus Christ is, and then think of the despicable
meanness of the miserable faith we have - I haven't had this and that
experience! Think what faith in Jesus Christ claims - that He can
present us faultless before the throne of God, unutterably pure,
absolutely rectified and profoundly justified. Stand in implicit
adoring faith in Him, He  is made unto us "wisdom, and righteousness,
and sanctification, and redemption." How can we talk of making a
sacrifice for the Son of God! Our salvation is from hell and
perdition, and then we talk about making sacrifices!

We have to get out into faith in Jesus Christ continually; not a
prayer meeting Jesus Christ, nor a book Jesus Christ, but the New
Testament Jesus Christ, Who is God Incarnate, and Who ought to strike
us to His feet as dead. Our faith must be in the One from Whom our
experience springs. Jesus Christ wants our absolute abandon of
devotion to Himself. We never can experience Jesus Christ, nor ever
hold Him within the compass of our own hearts, but our faith must be
built in strong emphatic confidence in Him.

It is along this line that we see the rugged impatience of the Holy
Ghost against unbelief. All our fears are wicked, and we fear because
we will not nourish ourselves in our faith. How can any one who is
identified with Jesus Christ suffer from doubt or fear! It ought to
be an absolute pan of perfectly irrepressible, triumphant belief.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/19/2001 8:37 am  
To:  ALL   (58 of 163)  
 
  204.58 in reply to 204.46  
 
DISCOVERING DIVINE DESIGNS

     I being in the way, the Lord led me...
     Genesis 24:27

We have to be so one with God that we do not continually need to ask
for guidance. Sanctification means that we are made the children of
God, and the natural life of a child is obedience - until he wishes
to be disobedient, then instantly there is the intuitive jar. In the
spiritual domain the intuitive jar is the monition of the Spirit of
God. When He gives the check, we have to stop at once and be renewed
in the spirit of our mind in order to make out what God's will is. If
we are born again of the Spirit of God, it is the abortion of piety
to ask God to guide us here and there. "The Lord led me," and on
looking back we see the presence of an amazing design, which, if we
are born of God, we will credit to God.

We can all see God in exceptional things, but it requires the culture
of spiritual discipline to see God in every detail. Never allow that
the haphazard is anything less than God's appointed order, and be
ready to discover the Divine designs any where.

Beware of making a fetish of consistency to your convictions instead
of being devoted to God. I shall never do that - in all probability
you will have to, if you are a saint. There never was a more
inconsistent Being on this earth than Our Lord, but He was never
inconsistent to His Father. The one consistency of the saint is not
to a principle, but to the Divine life. It is the Divine life which
continually makes more and more discoveries about the Divine mind. It
is easier to be a fanatic than a faithful soul, because there is
something amazingly humbling, particularly to our religious conceit,
in being loyal to God.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/19/2001 8:38 am  
To:  ALL   (59 of 163)  
 
  204.59 in reply to 204.46  
 
WHAT IS THAT TO THEE?

     Lord, what shall this man do? . . What is that to thee?
     Follow thou Me. John 21:21,2

One of our severest lessons comes from the stubborn refusal to see
that we must not interfere in other people's lives. It takes a long
time to realize the danger of being an amateur providence, that is,
interfering with God's order for others. You see a certain person
suffering, and you say - He shall not suffer, and I will see that he
does not. You put your band straight in front of God's permissive
will to prevent it, and God says - "What is that to thee?" If there
is stagnation spiritually, never allow it to go on, but get into
God's presence and find out the reason for it. Possibly you will find
it is because you have been interfering in the life of another;
proposing things you had no right to propose; advising when you had
no right to advise. When you do have to give advice to another, God
will advise through you with the direct understanding of His Spirit;
your part is to be so rightly related to God that His discernment
comes through you all the time for the blessing of another soul.

Most of us live on the borders of consciousness - consciously
serving, consciously devoted to God. All this is immature, it is not
the real life yet. The mature stage is the life of a child which is
never conscious; we become so abandoned to God that the consciousness
of being used never enters in. When we are consciously being used as
broken bread and poured-out wine, there is another stage to be
reached, where all consciousness of ourselves and of what God is
doing through us is eliminated. A saint is never consciously a saint;
a saint is consciously dependent on God.



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   From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/19/2001 8:40 am  
To:  ALL   (60 of 163)  
 
  204.60 in reply to 204.47  
 
STILL HUMAN!

     Whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.
     1st Corinthians 10:31
     
The great marvel of the Incarnation slips into ordinary childhood's
life; the great marvel of the Transfiguration vanishes in the
devil-possessed valley; the glory of the Resurrection descends into a
breakfast on the sea-shore. This is not an anti-climax, but a great
revelation of God.

The tendency is to look for the marvellous in our experience; we
mistake the sense of the heroic for being heroes. It is one thing to
go through a crisis grandly, but another thing to go through every
day glorifying God when there is no witness, no limelight, no one
paying the remotest attention to us. If we do not want mediaeval
haloes, we want something that will make people say - What a
wonderful man of prayer he is! What a pious devoted woman she is! If
you are rightly devoted to the Lord Jesus, you have reached the
sublime height where no one ever thinks of noticing you, all that is
noticed is that the power of God comes through you all the time.

Oh, I have had a wonderful call from God! It takes Almighty God
Incarnate in us to do the meanest duty to the glory of God. It takes
God's Spirit in us to make us so absolutely humanly His that we are
utterly unnoticeable. The test of the life of a saint is not success,
but faithfulness in human life as it actually is. We will set up
success in Christian work as the aim; the aim is to manifest the
glory of God in human life, to live the life hid with Christ in God
in human conditions. Our human relationships are the actual
conditions in which the ideal life of God is to be exhibited.



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From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/19/2001 8:42 am  
To:  ALL   (61 of 163)  
 
  204.61 in reply to 204.48  
 
THE ETERNAL GOAL

     By Myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou
     hast done this thing ... that in blessing I will bless
     thee... Genesis 22:15-19

Abraham has reached the place where he is in touch with the very
nature of God, he understands now the Reality of God.

"My goal is God Himself . . .
At any cost, dear Lord, by any road."

"At any cost, by any road" means nothing self-chosen in the way God
brings us to the goal.

There is no possibility of questioning when God speaks if He speaks
to His own nature in me; prompt obedience is the only result. When
Jesus say - "Come," I simply come; when He says - "Let go," I let go;
when He says - "Trust in God in this matter," I do trust. The whole
working out is the evidence that the nature of God is in me.

God's revelation of Himself to me is determined by my character, not
by God's character.

"'Tis because I am mean,
Thy ways so oft look mean to me."

By the discipline of obedience I get to the place where Abraham was
and I see Who God is. I never have a real God until I have come face
to face with Him in Jesus Christ, then I know that "in all the world,
my God, there is none but Thee, there is none but Thee." The promises
of God are of no value to us until by obedience we understand the
nature of God. We read some things in the Bible three hundred and
sixty-five times and they mean nothing to us, then all of a sudden we
see what God means, because in some particular we have obeyed God,
and instantly His nature is opened up. "All the promises of God in
Him are yea, and in Him Amen." The "yea" must be born of obedience;
when by the obedience of our lives we say "Amen" to a promise, then
that promise is ours.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/19/2001 8:44 am  
To:  ALL   (62 of 163)  
 
  204.62 in reply to 204.48  
 
WINNING INTO FREEDOM

     If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be
     free indeed.  John 8:36

If there is any remnant of individual conceit left, it always says "I
can't." Personality never says "I can't," but simply absorbs and
absorbs. Personality always wants more and more. It is the way we are
built. We are designed with a great capacity for God; and sin and our
individuality are the things that keep us from getting at God. God
delivers us from sin: we have to deliver our selves from
individuality, i.e., to present our natural life to God and sacrifice
it until it is transformed into a spiritual life by obedience.

God does not pay any attention to our natural individuality in the
development of our spiritual life. His order runs right across the
natural life, and we have to see that we aid and abet God, not stand
against Him and say - I can't do that. God will not discipline us, we
must discipline ourselves. God will not bring every thought and
imagination into captivity; we have to do it. Do not say - O Lord, I
suffer from wandering thoughts. Don't suffer from wandering thoughts.
Stop listening to the tyranny of your individuality and get
emancipated out into personality.

"If the Son shall make you free . ." Do not substitute 'Saviour' for
'Son.' The Saviour sets us free from sin; this is the freedom of
being set free by the Son. It is what Paul means in Gal. 2:20 - "I
have been crucified with Christ," his natural individuality has been
broken and his personality united with his Lord, not merged but
united. "Ye shall be free indeed," free in essence, free from the
inside. We will insist on energy, instead of being energized into
identification with Jesus.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/19/2001 8:47 am  
To:  ALL   (63 of 163)  
 
  204.63 in reply to 204.48  
 
WHEN HE IS COME

     And when He is come, He will convict the world of sin...
     John 16:8
     
Very few of us know anything about conviction of sin; we know the
experience of being disturbed because of having done wrong things;
but conviction of sin by the Holy Ghost blots out every relationship
on earth and leaves one relationship only - "Against Thee, Thee only,
have I sinned!" When a man is convicted of sin in this way, he knows
with every power of his conscience that God dare not forgive him; if
God did forgive him, the man would have a stronger sense of justice
than God. God does forgive, but it cost the rending of His heart in
the Death of Christ to enable Him to do so. The great miracle of the
grace of God is that He forgives sin, and it is the death of Jesus
Christ alone that enables the Divine nature to for give and to remain
true to itself in doing so. It is shallow nonsense to say that God
forgives us because He is love. When we have been convicted of sin we
will never say this again. The love of God means Calvary, and nothing
less; the love of God is spelt on the Cross and nowhere else. The
only ground on which God can forgive me is through the Cross of my
Lord. There, His conscience is satisfied.

Forgiveness means not merely that I am saved from hell and made right
for heaven (no man would accept forgiveness on such a level);
forgiveness means that I am forgiven into a recreated relationship,
into identification with God in Christ. The miracle of Redemption is
that God turns me, the unholy one, into the standard of Himself, the
Holy One, by putting into me a new disposition, the disposition of
Jesus Christ.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/21/2001 7:40 am  
To:  ALL   (64 of 163)  
 
  204.64 in reply to 204.33  
 
THE FORGIVENESS OF GOD

     In whom we have ... the forgiveness of sins.
     Ephesians 1:7

Beware of the pleasant view of the Fatherhood of God - God is so kind
and loving that of course He will forgive us. That sentiment has no
place whatever in the New Testament. The only ground on which God can
forgive us is the tremendous tragedy of the Cross of Christ; to put
forgiveness on any other ground is unconscious blasphemy. The only
ground on which God can forgive sin and reinstate us in His favour is
through the Cross of Christ, and in no other way. Forgiveness, which
is so easy for us to accept, cost the agony of Calvary. It is
possible to take the forgiveness of sin, the gift of the Holy Ghost,
and our sanctification with the simplicity of faith, and to forget at
what enormous cost to God it was all made ours.

Forgiveness is the divine miracle of grace; it cost God the Cross of
Jesus Christ before He could forgive sin and remain a holy God. Never
accept a view of the Fatherhood of God if it blots out the Atonement.
The revelation of God is that He cannot forgive; He would contradict
His nature if He did. The only way we can be forgiven is by being
brought back to God by the Atonement. God's forgiveness is only
natural in the supernatural domain.

Compared with the miracle of the forgiveness of sin, the experience
of sanctification is slight. Sanctification is simply the marvellous
expression of the forgiveness of sins in a human life, but the thing
that awakens the deepest well of gratitude in a human being is that
God has forgiven sin. Paul never got away from this. When once you
realize all that it cost God to forgive you, you will be held as in a
vice, constrained by the love of God.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/21/2001 7:42 am  
To:  ALL   (65 of 163)  
 
  204.65 in reply to 204.64  
 
IT IS FINISHED

     I have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do.
     John 17:4

The Death of Jesus Christ is the performance in history of the very
Mind of God. There is no room for looking on Jesus Christ as a
martyr; His death was not something that happened to Him which might
have been prevented: His death was the very reason why He came.

Never build your preaching of forgiveness on the fact that God is our
Father and He will forgive us because He loves us. It is untrue to
Jesus Christ's revelation of God; it makes the Cross unnecessary, and
the Redemption "much ado about nothing." If God does forgive sin, it
is because of the Death of Christ. God could forgive men in no other
way than by the death of His Son, and Jesus is exalted to be Saviour
because of His death. "We see Jesus because of the suffering of
death, crowned with glory and honour." The greatest note of triumph
that ever sounded in the ears of a startled universe was that sounded
on the Cross of Christ - "It is finished." That is the last word in
the Redemption of man.

Anything that belittles or obliterates the holiness of God by a false
view of the love of God, is untrue to the revelation of God given by
Jesus Christ. Never allow the thought that Jesus Christ stands with
us against God out of pity and compassion; that He became a curse for
us out of sympathy with us. Jesus Christ became a curse for us by the
Divine decree. Our portion of realizing the terrific meaning of the
curse is conviction of sin, the gift of shame and penitence is given
us - this is the great mercy of God. Jesus Christ hates the wrong in
man, and Calvary is the estimate of His hatred.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/27/2001 7:21 am  
To:  ALL   (66 of 163)  
 
  204.66 in reply to 204.33  
 
SHALLOW AND PROFOUND

     Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do,
     do all to the glory of God. 1st Corinthians 10:31

Beware of allowing yourself to think that the shallow concerns of
life are not ordained of God; they are as much of God as the
profound. It is not your devotion to God that makes you refuse to be
shallow, but your wish to impress other people with the fact that you
are not shallow, which is a sure sign that you are a spiritual prig.
Be careful of the production of contempt in yourself, it always comes
along this line, and causes you to go about as a walking rebuke to
other people because they are more shallow than you are. Beware of
posing as a profound person; God became a Baby.

To be shallow is not a sign of being wicked, nor is shallowness a
sign that there are no deeps: the ocean has a shore. The shallow
amenities of life, eating and drinking, walking and talking, are all
ordained by God. These are the things in which Our Lord lived. He
lived in them as the Son of God, and He said that "the disciple is
not above his Master."

Our safeguard is in the shallow things. We have to live the surface
common-sense life in a common-sense way; when the deeper things come,
God gives them to us apart from the shallow concerns. Never show the
deeps to anyone but God. We are so abominably serious, so desperately
interested in our own characters, that we refuse to behave like
Christians in the shallow concerns of life.

Determinedly take no one seriously but God, and the first person you
find you have to leave severely alone as being the greatest fraud you
have ever known, is yourself.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/27/2001 7:23 am  
To:  ALL   (67 of 163)  
 
  204.67 in reply to 204.33  
 
DISTRACTION OF ANTIPATHY

     Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us: for we
     are exceedingly piled with contempt. Psalms 123:3

The thing of which we have to beware is not so much damage to our
belief in God as damage to our Christian temper. "Therefore take heed
to thy spirit, that ye deal not treacherously." The temper of mind is
tremendous in its effects, it is the enemy that penetrates right into
the soul and distracts the mind from God. There are certain tempers
of mind in which we never dare indulge; if we do, we find they have
distracted us from faith in God, and until we get back to the quiet
mood before God, our faith in Him is nil, and our confidence in the
flesh and in human ingenuity is the thing that rules.

Beware of "the cares of this world," because they are the things that
produce a wrong temper of soul. It is extraordinary what an enormous
power there is in simple things to distract our attention from God.
Refuse to be swamped with the cares of this life.

Another thing that distracts us is the lust of vindication. St.
Augustine prayed - "O Lord, deliver me from this lust of always
vindicating myself." That temper of mind destroys the soul's faith in
God. "I must explain myself; I must get people to understand." Our
Lord never explained anything; He left mistakes to correct
themselves.

When we discern that people are not going on spiritually and allow
the discernment to turn to criticism, we block our way to God. God
never gives us discernment in order that we may criticize, but that
we may intercede.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/27/2001 7:24 am  
To:  ALL   (68 of 163)  
 
  204.68 in reply to 204.33  
 
DIRECTION OF ASPIRATION

     Behold, as the eyes of servants look unto the hand of
     their masters ... so our eyes wait upon the Lord our
     God. Psalms 123:2

This verse is a description of entire reliance upon God. Just as the
eyes of the servant are riveted on his master, so our eyes are up
unto God and our knowledge of His countenance is gained (cf. Isaiah
53:1. R.V). Spiritual leakage begins when we cease to lift up our
eyes unto Him. The leakage comes not so much through trouble on the
outside as in the imagination; when we begin to say - "I expect I
have been stretching myself a bit too much, standing on tiptoe and
trying to look like God in stead of being an ordinary humble person."
We have to realize that no effort can be too high.

For instance, you came to a crisis when you made a stand for God and
had the witness of the Spirit that all was right, but the weeks have
gone by, and the years maybe, and you are slowly coming to the
conclusion - 'Well, after all, was I not a bit too pretentious? Was I
not taking a stand a bit too high?' Your rational friends come and
say - Don't be a fool, we knew when you talked about this spiritual
awakening, that it was a passing impulse, you can't keep up the
strain, God does not expect you to. And you say - Well, I suppose I
was expecting too much. It sounds humble to say it, but it means that
reliance on God has gone and reliance on worldly opinion has come in.
The danger is lest no longer relying on God you ignore the lifting up
of your eyes to Him. Only when God brings you to a sudden halt, will
you realize how you have been losing out. Whenever there is a
leakage, remedy it immediately. Recognize that something has been
coming between you and God, and get it readjusted at once.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/27/2001 7:26 am  
To:  ALL   (69 of 163)  
 
  204.69 in reply to 204.33  
 
THE SECRET OF SPIRITUAL COHERENCE

     But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of
     our Lord Jesus Christ."  Galatians 6:14

When a man is first born again, he becomes incoherent, there is an
amount of unrelated emotion about him, unrelated phases of external
things. In the apostle Paul there was a strong steady coherence
underneath, consequently he could let his external life change as it
liked and it did not distress him because he was rooted and grounded
in God. Most of us are not spiritually coherent because we are more
concerned about being coherent externally. Paul lived in the
basement; the coherent critics live in the upper storey of the
external statement of things, and the two do not begin to touch each
other. Paul's consistency was down in the fundamentals. The great
basis of his coherence was the agony of God in the Redemption of the
world, viz., the Cross of Jesus Christ.

Re-state to yourself what you believe, then do away with as much of
it as possible, and get back to the bedrock of the Cross of Christ.
In external history the Cross is an infinitesimal thing; from the
Bible point of view it is of more importance than all the empires of
the world. If we get away from brooding on the tragedy of God upon
the Cross in our preaching, it produces nothing. It does not convey
the energy of God to man; it may be interesting but it has no power.
But preach the Cross, and the energy of God is let loose. "It pleased
God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe." "We
preach Christ crucified."



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/27/2001 7:28 am  
To:  ALL   (70 of 163)  
 
  204.70 in reply to 204.33  
 
THE CONCENTRATION OF SPIRITUAL ENERGY

     ... save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.
     Galatians 6:14

If you want to know the energy of God (i.e., the resurrection life of
Jesus) in your mortal flesh, you must brood on the tragedy of God.
Cut yourself off from prying personal interest in your own spiritual
symptoms and consider bare-spirited the tragedy of God, and instantly
the energy of God will be in you. "Look unto Me," pay attention to
the objective Source and the subjective energy will be there. We lose
power if we do not concentrate on the right thing. The effect of the
Cross is salvation, sanctification, healing, etc., but we are not to
preach any of these, we are to preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified.
The proclaiming of Jesus will do its own work. Concentrate on God's
centre in your preaching, and though your crowd may apparently pay no
attention, they can never be the same again. If I talk my own talk,
it is of no more importance to you than your talk is to me; but if I
talk the truth of God, you will meet it again and so will I. We have
to concentrate on the great point of spiritual energy - the Cross, to
keep in contact with that centre where all the power lies, and the
energy will be let loose. In holiness movements and spiritual
experience meetings the concentration is apt to be put not on the
Cross of Christ, but on the effects of the Cross.

The feebleness of the churches is being criticized to-day, and the
criticism is justified. One reason for the feebleness is that there
has not been this concentration of spiritual energy; we have not
brooded enough on the tragedy of Calvary or on the meaning of
Redemption.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    11/27/2001 7:31 am  
To:  ALL   (71 of 163)  
 
  204.71 in reply to 204.33  
 
THE CONSECRATION OF SPIRITUAL ENERGY

     By whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the
     world. Galatians 6:14

If I brood on the Cross of Christ, I do not become a subjective
pietist, interested in my own whiteness; I become dominantly
concentrated on Jesus Christ's interests. Our Lord was not a recluse
nor an ascetic, He did not cut Himself off from society, but He was
inwardly disconnected all the time. He was not aloof, but He lived in
an other world. He was so much in the ordinary world that the
religious people of His day called Him a glutton and a wine-bibber.
Our Lord never allowed anything to interfere with His consecration of
spiritual energy.

The counterfeit of consecration is the conscious cutting off of
things with the idea of storing spiritual power for use later on, but
that is a hopeless mistake. The Spirit of God has spoiled the sin of
a great many, yet there is no emancipation, no fullness in their
lives. The kind of religious life we see abroad to-day is entirely
different from the robust holiness of the life of Jesus Christ. "I
pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that
Thou shouldest keep them from the evil." We are to be in the world
but not of it; to he disconnected fundamentally, not externally.

We must never allow anything to interfere with the consecration of
our spiritual energy. Consecration is our part, sanctification is
God's part; and we have deliberately to determine to be interested
only in that in which God is interested. The way to solve perplexing
problems is to ask - Is this the kind of thing in which Jesus Christ
is interested, or the kind of thing in which the spirit that is the
antipodes of Jesus is interested?



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/7/2001 7:32 am  
To:  ALL   (72 of 163)  
 
  204.72 in reply to 204.43  
 
THE BOUNTY OF THE DESTITUTE

     Being justified freely by His grace...
     Romans 3:24

The Gospel of the grace of God awakens an intense longing in human
souls and an equally intense resentment, because the revelation which
it brings is not palatable. There is a certain pride in man that will
give and give, but to come and accept is another thing. I will give
my life to martyrdom, I will give myself in consecration, I will do
anything, but do not humiliate me to the level of the most
hell-deserving sinner and tell me that all I have to do is to accept
the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ.

We have to realize that we cannot earn or win anything from God; we
must either receive it as a gift or do without it. The greatest
blessing spiritually is the knowledge that we are destitute; until we
get there Our Lord is powerless. He can do nothing for us if we think
we are sufficient of ourselves, we have to enter into His Kingdom
through the door of destitution. As long as we are rich, possessed of
anything in the way of pride or independence, God cannot do anything
for us. It is only when we get hungry spiritually that we receive the
Holy Spirit. The gift of the essential nature of God is made
effectual in us by the Holy Spirit, He imparts to us the quickening
life of Jesus, which puts "the beyond" within, and immediately "the
beyond" has come within, it rises up to "the above," and we are
lifted into the domain where Jesus lives. (John 3:5.)



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/7/2001 7:35 am  
To:  ALL   (73 of 163)  
 
  204.73 in reply to 204.43  
 
THE ABSOLUTENESS OF JESUS CHRIST

     He shall glorify Me. John 16:14

The pietistic movements of to-day have none of the rugged reality of
the New Testament about them; there is nothing about them that needs
the Death of Jesus Christ; all that is required is a pious
atmosphere, and prayer and devotion. This type of experience is not
supernatural nor miraculous, it did not cost the passion of God, it
is not dyed in the blood of the Lamb, not stamped with the hall-mark
of the Holy Ghost; it has not that mark on it which makes men say, as
they look with awe and wonder - "That is the work of God Almighty."
That and nothing else is what the New Testament talks about.

The type of Christian experience in the New Testament is that of
personal passionate devotion to the Person of Jesus Christ. Every
other type of Christian experience, so called, is detached from the
Person of Jesus. There is no regeneration, no being born again into
the Kingdom in which Christ lives, but only the idea that He is our
Pattern. In the New Testament Jesus Christ is Saviour long before He
is Pattern. To-day He is being despatched as the Figurehead of a
Religion, a mere Example. He is that, but He is infinitely more; He
is salvation itself, He is the Gospel of God.

Jesus said, "When He the Spirit of truth is come . . . He shall
glorify Me." When I commit myself to the revelation made in the New
Testament, I receive from God the gift of the Holy Spirit Who begins
to interpret to me what Jesus did and does in me subjectively all
that Jesus Christ did for me objectively.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/7/2001 7:45 am  
To:  ALL   (74 of 163)  
 
  204.74 in reply to 204.72  
 
BY THE GRACE OF GOD I AM WHAT I AM

     His grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain.
     1st Corinthians 15:10

The way we continually talk about our own inability is an insult to
the Creator. The deploring of our own incompetence is a slander
against God for having overlooked us. Get into the habit of examining
in the sight of God the things that sound humble before men, and you
will be amazed at how staggeringly impertinent they are. "Oh, I
shouldn't like to say I am sanctified; I'm not a saint." Say that
before God; and it means - "No, Lord, it is impossible for You to
save and sanctify me; there are chances I have not had; so many
imperfections in my brain and body; no, Lord, it isn't possible."
That may sound wonderfully humble before men, but before God it is an
attitude of defiance.

Again, the things that sound humble before God 'may sound the
opposite before men. To say Thank God, I know I am saved and
sanctified is in the sight of God the acme of humility, it means you
have so completely abandoned yourself to God that you know He is
true. Never bother your head as to whether what you say sounds humble
before men or not, but always be humble before God, and let Him be
all in all.

There is only one relationship that matters, and that is your
personal relationship to a personal Redeemer and Lord. Let everything
else go, but maintain that at all costs, and God will fulfil His
purpose through your life. One individual life may be of priceless
value to God's purposes, and yours may be that life.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/7/2001 7:46 am  
To:  ALL   (75 of 163)  
 
  204.75 in reply to 204.72  
 
THE LAW AND THE GOSPEL

     For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend
     in one point, he is guilty of all James 2:10

The moral law does not consider us as weak human beings at all, it
takes no account of our heredity and infirmities, it demands that we
be absolutely moral. The moral law never alters, either for the
noblest or for the weakest, it is eternally and abidingly the same.
The moral law ordained by God does not make itself weak to the weak,
it does not palliate our shortcomings, it remains absolute for all
time and eternity. If we do not realize this, it is because we are
less than alive; immediately we are alive, life becomes a tragedy. "I
was alive without the law once: but when the commandment came, sin
revived, and I died." When we realize this, then the Spirit of God
convicts us of sin. Until a man gets there and sees that there is no
hope, the Cross of Jesus Christ is a farce to him. Conviction of sin
always brings a fearful binding sense of the law, it makes a man
hopeless - "sold under sin." I, a guilty sinner, can never get right
with God, it is impossible. There is only one way in which I can get
right with God, and that is by the Death of Jesus Christ. I must get
rid of the lurking idea that I can ever be right with God because of
my obedience - which of us could ever obey God to absolute
perfection!

We only realize the power of the moral law when it comes with an
"if." God never coerces us. In one mood we wish He would make us do
the thing, and in another mood we wish He would leave us alone.
Whenever God's will is in the ascendant, all compulsion is gone. When
we choose deliberately to obey Him, then He will tax the remotest
star and the last grain of sand to assist us with all His almighty
power.




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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/7/2001 7:48 am  
To:  ALL   (76 of 163)  
 
  204.76 in reply to 204.72  
 
CHRISTIAN PERFECTION

     Not as though I had already attained, either were
     already perfect... .  Philippians 3:1

It is a snare to imagine that God wants to make us perfect specimens
of what He can do; God's purpose is to make us one with Himself. The
emphasis of holiness movements is apt to be that God is producing
specimens of holiness to put in His museum. If you go off on this
idea of personal holiness, the dead-set of your life will not be for
God, but for what you call the manifestation of God in your life. "It
can never be God's will that I should be sick." If it was God's will
to bruise His own Son, why should He not bruise you? The thing that
tells for God is not your relevant consistency to an idea of what a
saint should be, but your real vital relation to Jesus Christ, and
your abandonment to Him whether you are well or ill.

Christian perfection is not, and never can be, human perfection.
Christian perfection is the perfection of a relationship to God which
shows itself amid the irrelevancies of human life. When you obey the
call of Jesus Christ, the first thing that strikes you is the
irrelevancy of the things you have to do, and the next thing that
strikes you is the fact that other people seem to be living perfectly
consistent lives. Such lives are apt to leave you with the idea that
God is unnecessary, by human effort and devotion we can reach the
standard God wants. In a fallen world this can never be done. I am
called to live in perfect relation to God so that my life produces a
longing after God in other lives, not admiration for myself. Thoughts
about myself hinder my usefulness to God. God is not after perfecting
me to be a specimen in His show-room; He is getting me to the place
where He can use me. Let Him do what He likes.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/7/2001 7:50 am  
To:  ALL   (77 of 163)  
 
  204.77 in reply to 204.72  
 
NOT BY MIGHT NOR BY POWER

     And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing
     words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the
     Spirit and of power.  1st Corinthians 2:4

If in preaching the Gospel you substitute your clear knowledge of the
way of salvation for confidence in the power of the Gospel, you
hinder people getting to Reality. You have to see that while you
proclaim your knowledge of the way of salvation, you yourself are
rooted and grounded in faith in God. Never rely on the clearness of
your exposition, but as you give your exposition see that you are
relying on the Holy Spirit. Rely on the certainty of God's redemptive
power, and He will create His own life in souls.

When once you are rooted in Reality, nothing can shake you. If your
faith is in experiences, any thing that happens is likely to upset
that faith; but nothing can ever upset God or the almighty Reality of
Redemption; base your faith on that, and you are as eternally secure
as God. When once you get into personal contact with Jesus Christ,
you will never be moved again. That is the meaning of sanctification.
God puts His disapproval on human experience when we begin to adhere
to the conception that sanctification is merely an experience, and
forget that sanctification itself has to be sanctified (see John
17:19). I have deliberately to give my sanctified life to God for His
service, so that He can use me as His hands and His feet.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/7/2001 7:56 am  
To:  ALL   (78 of 163)  
 
  204.78 in reply to 204.72  
 
THE LAW OF ANTAGONISM

     To him that overcometh... .  Revelation 2:7

Life without war is impossible either in nature or in grace. The
basis of physical, mental, moral, and spiritual life is antagonism.
This is the open fact of life.

Health is the balance between physical life and external nature, and
it is maintained only by sufficient vitality on the inside against
things on the outside. Everything outside my physical life is
designed to put me to death. Things which keep me going when I am
alive, disintegrate me when I am dead. If I have enough fighting
power, I produce the balance of health. The same is true of the
mental life. If I want to maintain a vigorous mental life, I have to
fight, and in that way the mental balance called thought is produced.

Morally it is the same. Everything that does not partake of the
nature of virtue is the enemy of virtue in me, and it depends on what
moral calibre I have whether I overcome and produce virtue.
Immediately I fight, I am moral in that particular. No man is
virtuous because he cannot help it; virtue is acquired.

And spiritually it is the same. Jesus said, "In the world ye shall
have tribulation," i.e., every thing that is not spiritual makes for
my undoing, but - "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world." I
have to learn to score off the things that come against me, and in
that way produce the balance of holiness; then it becomes a delight
to meet opposition.

Holiness is the balance between my disposition and the law of God as
expressed in Jesus Christ.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/7/2001 7:57 am  
To:  ALL   (79 of 163)  
 
  204.79 in reply to 204.72  
 
THE TEMPLE OF THE HOLY GHOST

     Only in the throne will I be greater than thou.
     Genesis 41:40

I have to account to God for the way in which I rule my body under
His domination. Paul said he did not "frustrate the grace of God" -
make it of no effect. The grace of God is absolute, the salvation of
Jesus is perfect, it is done for ever. I am not being saved, I am
saved; salvation is as eternal as God's throne; the thing for me to
do is to work out what God works in. "Work out your own salvation," I
am responsible for doing it. It means that I have to manifest in this
body the life of the Lord Jesus, not mystically, but really and
emphatically. "I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection."
Every saint can have his body under absolute control for God. God has
made us to have government over all the temple of the Holy Spirit,
over imaginations and affections. We are responsible for these, and
we must never give way to inordinate affections. Most of us are much
sterner with others than we are in regard to ourselves; we make
excuses for things in ourselves whilst we condemn in others things to
which we are not naturally inclined.

"I beseech you," says Paul, "present your bodies a living sacrifice."
The point to decide is this - "Do I agree with my Lord and Master
that my body shall be His temple?' If so, then for me the whole of
the law for the body is summed up in this revelation, that my body is
the temple of the Holy Ghost.



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   From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/7/2001 7:59 am  
To:  ALL   (80 of 163)  
 
  204.80 in reply to 204.72  
 
THE BOW IN THE CLOUD

     I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a
     token of a covenant between Me and the earth.
     Genesis 9:13

It is the Will of God that human beings should get into moral
relationship with Him, and His covenants are for this purpose. Why
does not God save me? He has saved me, but I have not entered into
relationship with Him. Why does not God do this and that? He has done
it, the point is - Will I step into covenant relationship? All the
great blessings of God are finished and complete, but they are not
mine until I enter into relationship with Him on the basis of His
covenant.

Waiting for God is incarnate unbelief, it means that I have no faith
in Him; I wait for Him to do something in me that I may trust in
that. God will not do it, because that is not the basis of the
God-and-man relationship. Man has to go out of himself in his
covenant with God as God goes out of Himself in His covenant with
man. It is a question of faith in God - the rarest thing; we have
faith only in our feelings. I do not believe God unless He will give
me something in my hand whereby I may know I have it, then I say -
"Now I believe." There is no faith there. "Look unto Me, and be ye
saved."

When I have really transacted business with God on His covenant and
have let go entirely, there is no sense of merit, no human ingredient
in it at all, but a complete overwhelming sense of being brought into
union with God, and the whole thing is transfigured with peace and
joy.



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From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/7/2001 8:00 am  
To:  ALL   (81 of 163)  
 
  204.81 in reply to 204.72  
 
REPENTANCE

     For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation.
     2nd Corinthians 7:10

Conviction of sin is best portrayed in the words -

"My sins, my sins, my Saviour,
How sad on Thee they fall."

Conviction of sin is one of the rarest things that ever strikes a
man. It is the threshold of an understanding of God. Jesus Christ
said that when the Holy Spirit came He would convict of sin, and when
the Holy Spirit rouses a man's conscience and brings him into the
presence of God, it is not his relationship with men that bothers
him, but his relationship with God - "against Thee, Thee only, have I
sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight." The marvels of conviction
of sin, forgiveness, and holiness are so interwoven that it is only
the forgiven man who is the holy man, he proves he is forgiven by
being the opposite to what he was, by God's grace. Repentance always
brings a man to this point: I have sinned. The surest sign that God
is at work is when a man says that and means it. Anything less than
this is remorse for having made blunders, the reflex action of
disgust at himself.

The entrance into the Kingdom is through the panging pains of
repentance crashing into a man's respectable goodness; then the Holy
Ghost, Who produces these agonies, begins the formation of the Son of
God in the life. The new life will manifest itself in conscious
repentance and unconscious holiness, never the other way about. The
bedrock of Christianity is repentance. Strictly speaking, a man
cannot repent when he chooses; repentance is a gift of God. The old
Puritans used to pray for "the gift of tears." If ever you cease to
know the virtue of repentance, you are in darkness. Examine yourself
and see if you have forgotten how to be sorry.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/23/2001 8:15 pm  
To:  ALL   (82 of 163)  
 
  204.82 in reply to 204.50  
 
THE IMPARTIAL POWER OF GOD

     For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that
     are sanctified. Hebrews 10:1

We trample the blood of the Son of God under foot if we think we are
forgiven because we are sorry for our sins. The only explanation of
the forgiveness of God and of the unfathomable depth of His
forgetting is the Death of Jesus Christ. Our repentance is merely the
outcome of our personal realization of the Atonement which He has
worked out for us. "Christ Jesus...is made unto us wisdom, and
righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption." When we realize
that Christ is made all this to us, the boundless joy of God begins;
wherever the joy of God is not present, the death sentence is at
work.

It does not matter who or what we are, there is absolute
reinstatement into God by the death of Jesus Christ and by no other
way, not because Jesus Christ pleads, but because He died. It is not
earned, but accepted. All the pleading which deliberately refuses to
recognize the Cross is of no avail; it is battering at another door
than the one which Jesus has opened. I don't want to come that way,
it is too humiliating to be received as a sinner. "There is none
other Name . . ." The apparent heartlessness of God is the expression
of His real heart, there is boundless entrance in His way. "We have
forgiveness through His blood." Identification with the death of
Jesus Christ means identification with Him to the death of everything
that never was in Him.

God is justified in saving bad men only as He makes them good. Our
Lord does not pretend we are all right when we are all wrong. The
Atonement is a propitiation whereby God through the death of Jesus
makes an unholy man holy.




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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/23/2001 8:16 pm  
To:  ALL   (83 of 163)  
 
  204.83 in reply to 204.50  
 
THE OFFENCE OF THE NATURAL

     And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with
     the affections and lusts. Galatians 5:2

The natural life is not sinful; we must be apostatized from sin, have
nothing to do with sin in any shape or form. Sin belongs to hell and
the devil; I, as a child of God, belong to heaven and God. It is not
a question of giving up sin, but of giving up my right to myself, my
natural independence and self-assertiveness, and this is where the
battle has to be fought. It is the things that are right and noble
and good from the natural stand point that keep us back from God's
best. To discern that natural virtues antagonize surrender to God, is
to bring our soul into the centre of its greatest battle. Very few of
us debate with the sordid and evil and wrong, but we do debate with
the good. It is the good that hates the best, and the higher up you
get in the scale of the natural virtues, the more intense is the
opposition to Jesus Christ. "They that are Christ's have crucified
the flesh" - it is going to cost the natural in you everything, not
something. Jesus said - "If any man will be My disciple, let him deny
himself," i.e., his right to himself, and a man has to realize Who
Jesus Christ is before he will do it. Beware of refusing to go to the
funeral of your own independence.

The natural life is not spiritual, and it can only be made spiritual
by sacrifice. If we do not resolutely sacrifice the natural, the
supernatural can never become natural in us. There is no royal road
there; each of us has it entirely in his own bands. It is not a
question of praying, but of performing.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/23/2001 8:19 pm  
To:  ALL   (84 of 163)  
 
  204.84 in reply to 204.50  
 
INDIVIDUALITY

     If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself.
     Matthew 16:24

Individuality is the husk of the personal life. Individuality is all
elbows, it separates and isolates. It is the characteristic of the
child and rightly so; but if we mistake individuality for the
personal life, we will remain isolated. The shell of individuality is
God's created natural covering for the protection of the personal
life; but individuality must go in order that the personal life may
come out and be brought into fellowship with God. Individuality
counterfeits personality as lust counterfeits love. God designed
human nature for Himself; individuality debases human nature for
itself.

The characteristics of individuality are independence and
self-assertiveness. It is the continual assertion of individuality
that hinders our spiritual life more than anything else. If you say -
"I cannot believe," it is because individuality is in the road;
individuality never can believe. Personality cannot help believing.
Watch yourself when the Spirit of God is at work. He pushes you to
the margins of your individuality, and you have either to say - "I
shan't," or to surrender, to break the husk of individuality and let
the personal life emerge. The Holy Spirit narrows it down every time
to one thing (cf. Matthew 5:23-24). The thing in you that will not be
reconciled to your brother is your individuality. God wants to bring
you into union with Himself, but unless you are willing to give up
your right to yourself He cannot. "Let him deny himself" - deny his
independent right to himself, then the real life has a chance to
grow.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/23/2001 8:21 pm  
To:  ALL   (85 of 163)  
 
  204.85 in reply to 204.50  
 
PERSONALITY

     That they may be one, even as we are one.
     John 17:22

Personality is that peculiar, incalculable thing that is meant when
we speak of ourselves as distinct from everyone else. Our personality
is always too big for us to grasp. An island in the sea may be but
the top of a great mountain. Personality is like an island, we know
nothing about the great depths underneath, consequently we cannot
estimate ourselves. We begin by thinking that we can, but we come to
realize that there is only one Being Who understands us, and that is
our Creator.

Personality is the characteristic of the spiritual man as
individuality is the characteristic of the natural man. Our Lord can
never be defined in terms of individuality and independence, but only
in terms of personality, "I and My Father are one." Personality
merges, and you only reach your real identity when you are merged
with an other person. When love, or the Spirit of God strikes a man,
he is transformed, he no longer insists upon his separate
individuality. Our Lord never spoke in terms of individuality, of a
man's "elbows" or his isolated position, but in terms of personality
- "that they may be one, even as We are one." If you give up your
right to yourself to God, the real true nature of your personality
answers to God straight away. Jesus Christ emancipates the
personality, and the individuality is transfigured; the transfiguring
element is love, personal devotion to Jesus. Love is the outpouring
of one personality in fellowship with another personality.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/23/2001 8:22 pm  
To:  ALL   (86 of 163)  
 
  204.86 in reply to 204.50  
 
WHAT TO PRAY FOR

     Men ought always to pray, and not to faint
     Luke 18:1

You cannot intercede if you do not believe in the reality of the
Redemption; you will turn intercession into futile sympathy with
human beings which will only increase their submissive content to
being out of touch with God. In intercession you bring the person, or
the circumstance that impinges on you before God until you are moved
by His attitude towards that person or circumstance. Intercession
means filling up "that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ,"
and that is why there are so few intercessors. Intercession is put on
the line of - "Put yourself in his place." Never! Try to put yourself
in God's place.

As a worker, be careful to keep pace with the communications of
reality from God or you will be crushed. If you know too much, more
than God has engineered for you to know, you cannot pray, the
condition of the people is so crushing that you cannot get through to
reality.

Our work lies in coming into definite contact with God about
everything, and we shirk it by becoming active workers. We do the
things that can be tabulated but we will not intercede. Intercession
is the one thing that has no snares, because it keeps our
relationship with God completely open.

The thing to watch in intercession is that no soul is patched up, a
soul must get through into contact with the life of God. Think of the
number of souls God has brought about our path and we have dropped
them! When we pray on the ground of Redemption, God creates something
He can create in no other way than through intercessory prayer.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/23/2001 8:25 pm  
To:  ALL   (87 of 163)  
 
  204.87 in reply to 204.51  
 
THE GREAT LIFE

     Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you: . .
     Let not your heart be troubled.  John 14:27

Whenever a thing becomes difficult in personal experience, we are in
danger of blaming God, but it is we who are in the wrong, not God,
there is some perversity somewhere that we will not let go.
Immediately we do, everything becomes as clear as daylight. As long
as we try to serve two ends, ourselves and God, there is perplexity.
The attitude must be one of complete reliance on God. When once we
get there, there is nothing easier than living the saintly life;
difficulty comes in when we want to usurp the authority of the Holy
Spirit for our own ends.

Whenever you obey God, His seal is always that of peace, the witness
of an unfathomable peace, which is not natural, but the peace of
Jesus. Whenever peace does not come, tarry till it does or find out
the reason why it does not. If you are acting on an impulse, or from
a sense of the heroic, the peace of Jesus will not witness; there is
no simplicity or confidence in God, because the spirit of simplicity
is born of the Holy Ghost, not of your decisions. Every decision
brings a reaction of simplicity.

My questions come whenever I cease to obey. When I have obeyed God,
the problems never come between me and God, they come as probes to
keep the mind going on with amazement at the revelation of God. Any
problem that comes between God and myself springs out of
disobedience; any problem, and there are many, that is alongside me
while I obey God, increases my ecstatic delight, because I know that
my Father knows, and I am going to watch and see how He unravels this
thing.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    12/23/2001 8:28 pm  
To:  ALL   (88 of 163)  
 
  204.88 in reply to 204.51  
 
APPROVED UNTO GOD

     Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that
     needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of
     truth. 2nd Timothy 2:15

If you cannot express yourself on any subject, struggle until you
can. If you do not, someone will be the poorer all the, days of his
life. Struggle to re-express some truth of God to your self, and God
will use that expression to some one else. Go through the winepress
of God where the grapes are crushed. You must struggle to get
expression experimentally, then there will come a time when that
expression will become the very wine of strengthening to someone
else; but if you say lazily - "I am not going to struggle to express
this thing for myself, I will borrow what I say," the expression will
not only be of no use to you, but of no use to anyone. Try to state
to yourself what you feel implicitly to be God's truth, and you give
God a chance to pass it on to someone else through you.

Always make a practice of provoking your own mind to think out what
it accepts easily. Our position is not ours until we make it ours by
suffering. The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells
you something you did not know before, but the one who gives
expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for
utterance.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/13/2002 7:31 pm  
To:  David (DavidABrown)    (89 of 163)  
 
  204.89 in reply to 204.66  
 
WRESTLING BEFORE GOD

     Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God ...
     praying always ...  Ephesians 6:13,18

You have to wrestle against the things that prevent you from getting
to God, and you wrestle in prayer for other souls; but never say that
you wrestle with God in prayer, it is scripturally untrue. If you do
wrestle with God, you will be crippled all the rest of your life. If,
when God comes in some way you do not want, you take hold of Him as
Jacob did and wrestle with Him, you compel Him to put you out of
joint. Don't be a hirpler in God's ways, but be one who wrestles
before God with things, becoming more than conqueror through Him.
Wrestling before God tells in His Kingdom. If you ask me to pray for
you and I am not complete in Christ, I may pray but it avails
nothing; but if I am complete in Christ my prayer prevails all the
time. Prayer is only effective when there is completeness -
"Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God."

Always distinguish between God's order and His permissive will, i.e.,
His providential purpose towards us. God's order is unchangeable; His
permissive will is that with which we must wrestle before Him. It is
our reaction to the permissive will of God that enables us to get at
His order. "All things work together for good to them that love God"
- to those who remain true to God's order, to His calling in Christ
Jesus. God's permissive will is the means whereby His sons and
daughters are to be manifested. We are not to be like jelly-fish
saying, "It's the Lord's will." We have not to put up a fight before
God, not to wrestle with God, but to wrestle before God with things.
Beware of squatting lazily before God in stead of putting up a
glorious fight so that you may lay hold of His strength.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/13/2002 7:38 pm  
To:  ALL   (90 of 163)  
 
  204.90 in reply to 204.66  
 
THE TEST OF LOYALTY

     And we know that all things work together for good to
     them that love God.  Romans 8:28

It is only the loyal soul who believes that God engineers
circumstances. We take such liberty with our circumstances, we do not
believe God engineers them, although we say we do; we treat the
things that happen as if they were engineered by men. To be faithful
in every circumstance means that we have only one loyalty, and that
is to our Lord. Suddenly God breaks up a particular set of
circumstances, and the realization comes that we have been disloyal
to Him by not recognizing that He had ordered them; we never saw what
He was after, and that particular thing will never be repeated all
the days of our life. The test of loyalty always comes just there. If
we learn to worship God in the trying circumstances, He will alter
them in two seconds when He chooses.

Loyalty to Jesus Christ is the thing that we "stick at" to-day. We
will be loyal to work, to service, to anything, but do not ask us to
be loyal to Jesus Christ. Many Christians are intensely impatient of
talking about loyalty to Jesus. Our Lord is dethroned more
emphatically by Christian workers than by the world. God is made a
machine for blessing men, and Jesus Christ is made a Worker among
workers.

The idea is not that we do work for God, but that we are so loyal to
Him that He can do His work through us - "I reckon on you for extreme
service, with no complaining on your part and no explanation on
Mine." God wants to use us as He used His own Son.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/13/2002 7:39 pm  
To:  David (DavidABrown)    (91 of 163)  
 
  204.91 in reply to 204.66  
 
WHAT TO CONCENTRATE ON

     I came not to send peace, but a sword.
     Matthew 10:34

Never be sympathetic with the soul whose case makes you come to the
conclusion that God is hard. God is more tender than we can conceive,
and every now and again He gives us the chance of being the rugged
one that He may be the tender One. If a man cannot get through to God
it is because there is a secret thing he does not intend to give up -
I will admit I have done wrong, but I no more intend to give up that
thing than fly. It is impossible to deal sympathetically with a case
like that: we have to get right deep down to the root until there is
antagonism and resentment against the message. People want the
blessing of God, but they will not stand the thing that goes straight
to the quick.

If God has had His way with you, your message as His servant is
merciless insistence on the one line, cut down to the very root,
otherwise there will be no healing. Drive home the message until
there is no possible refuge from its application. Begin to get at
people where they are until you get them to realize what they lack,
and then erect the standard of Jesus Christ for their lives - "We
never can be that." Then drive it home - "Jesus Christ says you
must." "But how can we be?" "You cannot, unless you have a new
Spirit." (Luke 11:13.)

There must be a sense of need before your message is of any use.
Thousands of people are happy without God in this world. If I was
happy and moral till Jesus came, why did He come? Because that kind
of happiness and peace is on a wrong level; Jesus Christ came to send
a sword through every peace that is not based on a personal
relationship to Himself.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/13/2002 7:41 pm  
To:  ALL   (92 of 163)  
 
  204.92 in reply to 204.66  
 
EXPERIENCE OR REVELATION

     We have received ... the spirit which is of God; that we
     might know the things that are freely given to us of
     God. 1st Corinthians 2:12

Reality is Redemption, not my experience of Redemption; but
Redemption has no meaning for me until it speaks the language of my
conscious life. 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. My experiences
are not worth anything unless they keep me at the Source, Jesus
Christ.

If you try to dam up the Holy Spirit in you to produce subjective
experiences, you will find that He will burst all bounds and take you
back again to the historic Christ. Never nourish an experience which
has not God as its Source and faith in God as its result. If you do,
your experience is anti-Christian, no matter what visions you may
have had. Is Jesus Christ Lord of your experiences, or do you try to
lord it over Him? Is any experience dearer to you than your Lord? He
must be Lord over you, and you must not pay attention to any
experience over which He is not Lord. There comes a time when God
will make you impatient with your own experience - I do not care what
I experience; I am sure of Him.

Be ruthless with yourself if you are given to talking about the
experiences you have had. Faith that is sure of itself is not faith;
faith that is sure of God is the only faith there is.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/13/2002 7:44 pm  
To:  ALL   (93 of 163)  
 
  204.93 in reply to 204.66  
 
HOW CAN I PERSONALLY PARTAKE IN THE ATONEMENT?

     But God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of
     Our Lord Jesus Christ. Galatians 6:14

The Gospel of Jesus Christ always forces an issue of will. Do I
accept God's verdict on sin in the Cross of Christ? Have I the
slightest interest in the death of Jesus? Do I want to be identified
with His death, to be killed right out to all interest in sin, in
worldliness, in self - to be so identified with Jesus that I am
spoilt for every thing else but Him? The great privilege of
discipleship is that I can sign on under His Cross, and that means
death to sin. Get alone with Jesus and either tell Him that you do
not want sin to die out in you; or else tell Him that at all costs
you want to be identified with His death. Immediately you transact in
confident faith in what Our Lord did on the Cross, a supernatural
identification with His death takes place, and you will know with a
knowledge that passeth knowledge that your "old man" is crucified
with Christ. The proof that your old man is crucified with Christ is
the amazing ease with which the life of God in you enables you to
obey the voice of Jesus Christ.

Every now and again, Our Lord lets us see what we would be like if it
were not for Himself; it is a justification of what He said -
"Without Me ye can do nothing." That is why the bedrock of
Christianity is personal, passionate devotion to the Lord Jesus. We
mistake the ecstasy of our first introduction into the Kingdom for
the purpose of God in getting us there; His purpose in getting us
there is that we may realize all that identification with Jesus
Christ means.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/13/2002 7:51 pm  
To:  ALL   (94 of 163)  
 
  204.94 in reply to 204.69  
 
HIS BIRTH AND OUR NEW BIRTH

     Behold, a virgin shall bring forth a son, and they shall
     call His name Emanuel, which being interpreted is, God
     with us.  Isaiah 7:14

His Birth in History. "Therefore also that holy thing which shall be
born of thee shall be called the Son of God." (Luke 1:35.) Jesus
Christ was born into this world, not from it. He did not evolve out
of history; He came into history from the outside. Jesus Christ is
not the best human being, He is a Being Who cannot be accounted for
by the human race at all. He is not man becoming God, but God
Incarnate, God coming into human flesh, coming into it from outside.
His life is the Highest and the Holiest entering in at the Lowliest
door. Our Lord's birth was an advent.

His Birth in Me. "Of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be
formed in you." (Gal. 4:19.) Just as Our Lord came into human history
from outside, so He must come into me from outside. Have I allowed my
personal human life to become a "Bethlehem" for the Son of God? I
cannot enter into the realm of the Kingdom of God unless I am born
from above by a birth totally unlike natural birth. "Ye must be born
again." This is not a command, it is a foundation fact. The
characteristic of the new birth is that I yield myself so completely
to God that Christ is formed in me. Immediately Christ is formed in
me, His nature begins to work through me.

God manifest in the flesh - that is what is made profoundly possible
for you and me by the Redemption.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/13/2002 8:10 pm  
To:  ALL   (95 of 163)  
 
  204.95 in reply to 204.69  
 
PLACED IN THE LIGHT

     If we walk in the light, as He is in the light the blood
     of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin. 1st John 1:7

To mistake conscious freedom from sin for deliverance from sin by the
Atonement is a great error. No man knows what sin is until he is born
again. Sin is what Jesus Christ faced on Calvary. The evidence that I
am delivered from sin is that I know the real nature of sin in me. It
takes the last reach of the Atonement of Jesus Christ, that is, the
impartation of His absolute perfection, to make a man know what sin
is.

The Holy Spirit applies the Atonement to us in the unconscious realm
as well as in the realm of which we are conscious, and it is only
when we get a grasp of the unrivalled power of the Spirit in us that
we understand the meaning of 1 John 1:7, "the blood of Jesus Christ
cleanseth us from all sin." This does not refer to conscious sin
only, but to the tremendously profound understanding of sin which
only the Holy Ghost in me realizes.

If I walk in the light as God is in the light, not in the light of my
conscience, but in the light of God - if I walk there, with nothing
folded up, then there comes the amazing revelation, the blood of
Jesus Christ cleanses me from all sin so that God Almighty can see
nothing to censure in me. In my consciousness it works with a keen
poignant knowledge of what sin is. The love of God at work in me
makes me hate with the hatred of the Holy Ghost all that is not in
keeping with God's holiness. To walk in the light means that
everything that is of the darkness drives me closer into the centre
of the light.



David A. Brown
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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/13/2002 8:13 pm  
To:  ALL   (96 of 163)  
 
  204.96 in reply to 204.70  
 
WHERE THE BATTLE'S LOST AND WON

     If thou wilt return, O Israel, saith the Lord... .
     Jeremiah 4:1

The battle is lost or won in the secret places of the will before
God, never first in the external world. The Spirit of God apprehends
me and I am obliged to get alone with God and fight the battle out
before Him. Until this is done, I lose every time. The battle may
take one minute or a year, that will depend on me, not on God; but it
must be wrestled out alone before God, and I must resolutely go
through the hell of a renunciation before God. Nothing has any power
over the man who has fought out the battle before God and won there.

If I say, "I will wait till I get into the circumstances and then put
God to the test," I shall find I cannot. I must get the thing settled
between my self and God in the secret places of my soul where no
stranger intermeddles, and then I can go forth with the certainty
that the battle is won. Lose it there, and calamity and disaster and
upset are as sure as God's decree. The reason the battle is not won
is because I try to win it in the external world first. Get alone
with God, fight it out before Him, settle the matter there once and
for all.

In dealing with other people, the line to take is to push them to an
issue of will. That is the way abandonment begins. Every now and
again, not often, but sometimes, God brings us to a point of climax.
That is the Great Divide in the life; from that point we either go
towards a more and more dilatory and useless type of Christian life,
or we become more and more ablaze for the glory of God - My Utmost
for His Highest.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/13/2002 8:15 pm  
To:  ALL   (97 of 163)  
 
  204.97 in reply to 204.70  
 
CONTINUOUS CONVERSION

     Except ye be converted, and become as little children...
     Matthew 18:3

These words of Our Lord are true of our initial conversion, but we
have to be continuously converted all the days of our lives,
continually to turn to God as children. If we trust to our wits
instead of to God, we produce consequences for which God will hold us
responsible. Immediately our bodies are brought into new conditions
by the providence of God, we have to see that our natural life obeys
the dictates of the Spirit of God. Because we have done it once is no
proof that we shall do it again. The relation of the natural to the
spiritual is one of continuous conversion, and it is the one thing we
object to. In every setting in which we are put, the Spirit of God
remains unchanged and His salvation unaltered, but we have to "put on
the new man." God holds us responsible every time we refuse to
convert ourselves, our reason for refusing is wilful obstinacy. Our
natural life must not rule, God must rule in us.

The hindrance in our spiritual life is that we will not be
continually converted, there are wadges of obstinacy where our pride
spits at the throne of God and says - I won't. We deify independence
and wilfulness and call them by the wrong name. What God looks on as
obstinate weakness, we call strength. There are whole tracts of our
lives which have not yet been brought into subjection, and it can
only be done by this continuous conversion. Slowly but surely we can
claim the whole territory for the Spirit of God.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/13/2002 8:17 pm  
To:  ALL   (98 of 163)  
 
  204.98 in reply to 204.70  
 
DESERTER OR DISCIPLE?

     From that time many of His disciples went back, and
     walked no more with Him. John 6:66

When God gives a vision by His Spirit through His word of what He
wants, and your mind and soul thrill to it, if you do not walk in the
light of that vision, you will sink into servitude to a point of view
which Our Lord never had. Disobedience in mind to the heavenly vision
will make you a slave to points of view that are alien to Jesus
Christ. Do not look at someone else and say - Well, if he can have
those views and prosper, why cannot I? You have to walk in the light
of the vision that has been given to you and not compare yourself
with others or judge them, that is between them and God. When you
find that a point of view in which you have been delighting clashes
with the heavenly vision and you debate, certain things will begin to
develop in you - a sense of property and a sense of personal right,
things of which Jesus Christ made nothing. He was always against
these things as being the root of everything alien to Himself. "A
man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things that he
possesseth." If we do not recognize this, it is because we are
ignoring the undercurrent of Our Lord's teaching.

We are apt to lie back and bask in the memory of the wonderful
experience we have had. If there is one standard in the New Testament
revealed by the light of God and you do not come up to it, and do not
feel inclined to come up to it, that is the beginning of backsliding,
because it means your conscience does not answer to the truth. You
can never be the same after the unveiling of a truth. That moment
marks you for going on as a more true disciple of Jesus Christ or for
going back as a deserter.



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  From:  123four   1/14/2002 2:40 pm  
To:  David (DavidABrown)    (99 of 163)  
 
  204.99 in reply to 204.92  
 
Faith in faith produces nothing. Faith 
in God brings joy, life, and the wonderful 
surprise revelations we love so much. 
  
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   From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 6:20 pm  
To:  ALL   (100 of 163)  
 
  204.100 in reply to 204.5  
 
"AND EVERY VIRTUE WE POSSESS"

     All my fresh springs shall be in Thee. Psalms 87:7

Our Lord never patches up our natural virtues, He re-makes the whole
man on the inside. "Put on the new man," i.e., see that your natural
human life puts on the garb that is in keeping with the new life. The
life God plants in us develops its own virtues, not the virtues of
Adam but of Jesus Christ. Watch how God will wither up your
confidence in natural virtues after sanctification, and in any power
you have, until you learn to draw your life from the reservoir of the
resurrection life of Jesus. Thank God if you are going through a
drying-up experience!

The sign that God is at work in us is that He corrupts confidence in
the natural virtues, because they are not promises of what we are
going to be, but renmants of what God created man to be. We will
cling to the natural virtues, while all the time God is trying to get
us into contact with the life of Jesus Christ which can never be
described in terms of the natural virtues. It is the saddest thing to
see people in the service of God depending on that which the grace of
God never gave them, depending on what they have by the accident of
heredity. God does not build up our natural virtues and transfigure
them, because our natural virtues can never come anywhere near what
Jesus Christ wants. No natural love, no natural patience, no natural
purity can ever come up to His demands. But as we bring every bit of
our bodily life into harmony with the new life which God has put in
us, He will exhibit in us the virtues that were characteristic of the
Lord Jesus.

"And every virtue we possess
Is His alone."



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From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 6:23 pm  
To:  ALL   (101 of 163)  
 
  204.101 in reply to 204.14  
 
THE RIGHT LINES OF WORK

     I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me. John 12:32

Very few of us have any understanding of the reason why Jesus Christ
died. If sympathy is all that human beings need, then the Cross of
Christ is a farce, there was no need for it. What the world needs is
not "a little bit of love," but a surgical operation.

When you are face to face with a soul in difficulty spiritually,
remind yourself of Jesus Christ on the Cross. If that soul can get to
God on any other line, then the Cross of Jesus Christ is unnecessary.
If you can help others by your sympathy or understanding, you are a
traitor to Jesus Christ. You have to keep your soul rightly related
to God and pour out for others on His line, not pour out on the human
line and ignore God. The great note to-day is amiable religiosity.

The one thing we have to do is to exhibit Jesus Christ crucified, to
lift Him up all the time. Every doctrine that is not imbedded in the
Cross of Jesus will lead astray. If the worker himself believes in
Jesus Christ and is banking on the Reality of Redemption, the people
he talks to must be concerned. The thing that remains and deepens is
the worker's simple relationship to Jesus Christ; his usefulness to
God depends on that and that alone.

The calling of a New Testament worker is to uncover sin and to reveal
Jesus Christ as Saviour, consequently he cannot be poetical, he must
be sternly surgical. We are sent by God to lift up Jesus Christ, not
to give wonderfully beautiful discourses. We have to probe straight
down as deeply as God has probed us, to be keen in sensing the
Scriptures which bring the truth straight home and to apply them
fearlessly.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 6:25 pm  
To:  ALL   (102 of 163)  
 
  204.102 in reply to 204.17  
 
LET US KEEP TO THE POINT

     My eager desire and hope being that I may never feel
     ashamed, but that now as ever I may do honour to Christ
     in my own person by fearless courage. Philippians 1:20

My Utmost for His Highest. "My eager desire and hope being that I may
never feel ashamed." We shall all feel very much ashamed if we do not
yield to Jesus on the point He has asked us to yield to Him. Paul
says - "My determination is to be my utmost for His Highest." To get
there is a question of will, not of debate nor of reasoning, but a
surrender of will, an absolute and irrevocable surrender on that
point. An overweening consideration for ourselves is the thing that
keeps us from that decision, though we put it that we are considering
others. When we consider what it will cost others if we obey the call
of Jesus, we tell God He does not know what our obedience will mean.
Keep to the point; He does know. Shut out every other consideration
and keep yourself before God for this one thing only - My Utmost for
His Highest. I am determined to be absolutely and entirely for Him
and for Him alone.

My Undeterredness for His Holiness. "Whether that means life or
death, no matter!" (v.21.) Paul is determined that nothing shall
deter him from doing exactly what God wants. God's order has to work
up to a crisis in our lives because we will not heed the gentler way.
He brings us to the place where He asks us to be our utmost for Him,
and we begin to debate; then He produces a providential crisis where
we have to decide - for or against, and from that point the "Great
Divide" begins.

If the crisis has come to you on any line, surrender your will to Him
absolutely and irrevocably.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 6:27 pm  
To:  ALL   (103 of 163)  
 
  204.103 in reply to 204.21  
 
WILL YOU GO OUT WITHOUT KNOWING?

     He went out, not knowing whither he went.
     Hebrews 11:8

Have you been "out" in this way? If so, there is no logical statement
possible when anyone asks you what you are doing. One of the
difficulties in Christian work is this question - "What do you expect
to do?" You do not know what you are going to do; the only thing you
know is that God knows what He is doing. Continually revise your
attitude towards God and see if it is a going out of everything,
trusting in God entirely. It is this attitude that keeps you in
perpetual wonder - you do not know what God is going to do next. Each
morning you wake it is to be a "going out," building in confidence on
God. "Take no thought for your life,...nor yet for your body" - take
no thought for the things for which you did take thought before you
"went out."

Have you been asking God what He is going to do? He will never tell
you. God does not tell you what He is going to do; He reveals to you
Who He is. Do you believe in a miracle-working God, and will you go
out in surrender to Him until you are not surprised an atom at
anything He does?

Suppose God is the God you know Him to be when you are nearest to Him
- what an impertinence worry is! Let the attitude of the life be a
continual "going out" in dependence upon God, and your life will have
an ineffable charm about it which is a satisfaction to Jesus. You
have to learn to go out of convictions, out of creeds, out of
experiences, until so far as your faith is concerned, there is
nothing between yourself and God.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 6:29 pm  
To:  ALL   (104 of 163)  
 
  204.104 in reply to 204.22  
 
CLOUDS AND DARKNESS

     Clouds and darkness are round about Him.
     Psalms 97:2

A man who has not been born of the Spirit of God Will tell you that
the teachings of Jesus are simple. But when you are baptized with the
Holy Ghost, you find "clouds and darkness are round about Him." When
we come into close contact with the teachings of Jesus Christ we have
our first insight into this aspect of things. The only possibility of
understanding the teaching of Jesus is by the light of the Spirit of
God on the inside. If we have never had the experience of taking our
commonplace religious shoes off our commonplace religious feet, and
getting rid of all the undue familiarity with which we approach God,
it is questionable whether we have ever stood in His presence. The
people who are flippant and familiar are those who have never yet
been introduced to Jesus Christ. After the amazing delight and
liberty of realizing what Jesus Christ does,   comes the impenetrable
darkness of realizing Who He is.

Jesus said: "The words that I speak unto you," not the words I have
spoken, "they are spirit, and they are life." The Bible has been so
many words to us - clouds and darkness - then all of a sudden the
words become spirit and life because Jesus re-speaks them to us in a
particular condition. That is the way God speaks to us, not by
visions and dreams, but by words. When a man gets to God it is by the
most simple way of words.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 6:32 pm  
To:  ALL   (105 of 163)  
 
  204.105 in reply to 204.104  
 
WHY CANNOT I FOLLOW THEE NOW?

     Peter said unto Him, Lord, why cannot I follow Thee now?
     John 13:37

There are times when you cannot understand why you cannot do what you
want to do. When God brings the blank space, see that you do not fill
it in, but wait. The blank space may come in order to teach you what
sanctification means, or it may come after sanctification to teach
you what service means. Never run before God's guidance. If there is
the slightest doubt, then He is not guiding. Whenever there is doubt
- don't.

In the beginning you may see clearly what God's will is - the
severance of a friendship, the breaking off of a business
relationship, something you feel distinctly before God is His will
for you to do, never do it on the impulse of that feeling. If you do,
you will end in making difficulties that will take years of time to
put right. Wait for God's time to bring it round and He will do it
without any heartbreak or disappointment. When it is a question of
the providential will of God, wait for God to move.

Peter did not wait on God, he forecast in his mind where the test
would come, and the test came where he did not expect it. "I will lay
down my life for Thy sake." Peter's declaration was honest but
ignorant. "Jesus answered him ...The cock shall not crow, till thou
hast denied Me thrice." This was said with a deeper knowledge of
Peter than Peter had of himself. He could not follow Jesus because he
did not know himself, of what he was capable. Natural devotion may be
all very well to attract us to Jesus, to make us feel His
fascination, but it will never make us disciples. Natural devotion
will always deny Jesus somewhere or other.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 6:35 pm  
To:  ALL   (106 of 163)  
 
  204.106 in reply to 204.104  
 
WORSHIP

     And he pitched his tent having Bethel on the west and Ai
     on the east: and there he builded an altar.
     Genesis 12:8

Worship is giving God the best that He has given you. Be careful what
you do with the best you have. Whenever you get a blessing from God,
give it back to Him as a love gift. Take time to meditate before God
and offer the blessing back to Him in a deliberate act of worship. If
you hoard a thing for yourself, it will turn into spiritual dry rot,
as the manna did when it was hoarded. God will never let you hold a
spiritual thing for your self, it has to be given back to Him that He
may make it a blessing to others.

Bethel is the symbol of communion with God; Ai is the symbol of the
world. Abraham pitched his tent between the two. The measure of the
worth of our public activity for God is the private profound
communion we have with Him. Rush is wrong every time, there is always
plenty of time to worship God. Quiet days with God may be a snare. We
have to pitch our tents where we shall always have quiet times with
God, however noisy our times with the world may be. There are not
three stages in spiritual life - worship, waiting and work. Some of
us go in jumps like spiritual frogs, we jump from worship to waiting,
and from waiting to work. God's idea is that the three should go
together. They were always together in the life of Our Lord. He was
unhasting and unresting. It is a discipline, we cannot get into it
all at once.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 6:37 pm  
To:  ALL   (107 of 163)  
 
  204.107 in reply to 204.104  
 
INTIMATE WITH JESUS

     Have I been so long with you, and yet hast thou not
     known Me? John 14:9

These words are not spoken as a rebuke, nor even with surprise; Jesus
is leading Philip on. The last One with whom we get intimate is
Jesus. Before Pentecost the disciples knew Jesus as the One Who gave
them power to conquer demons and to bring about a revival (see Luke
10:18-20). It was a wonderful intimacy, but there was a much closer
intimacy to come - "I have called you friends." Friendship is rare on
earth. It means identity in thought and heart and spirit. The whole
discipline of life is to enable us to enter into this closest
relationship with Jesus Christ. We receive His blessings and know His
word, but do we know Him?

Jesus said, "It is expedient for you that I go away" - in that
relationship, so that He might lead them on. It is a joy to Jesus
when a disciple takes time to step more intimately with Him. Fruit
bearing is always mentioned as the manifestation of an intimate union
with Jesus Christ (John 15:1-4).

When once we get intimate with Jesus we are never lonely, we never
need sympathy, we can pour out all the time without being pathetic.
The saint who is intimate with Jesus will never leave impressions of
himself, but only the impression that Jesus is having unhindered way,
because the last abyss of his nature has been satisfied by Jesus. The
only impression left by such a life is that of the strong calm sanity
that Our Lord gives to those who are intimate with Him.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 6:39 pm  
To:  ALL   (108 of 163)  
 
  204.108 in reply to 204.104  
 
DOES MY SACRIFICE LIVE?

     And Abraham built an altar . . and bound Isaac his son.
     Genesis 22:9

This incident is a picture of the blunder we make in thinking that
the final thing God wants of us is the sacrifice of death. what God
wants is the sac rifice through death which enables us to do what
Jesus did, viz., sacrifice our lives. Not - I am willing to go to
death with Thee, but - I am willing to be identified with Thy death
so that I may sacrifice my life to God. We seem to think that God
wants us to give up things! God purified Abraham from this blunder,
and the same discipline goes on in our lives. God nowhere tells us to
give up things for the sake of giving them up. He tells us to give
them up for the sake of the only thing worth having - viz., life with
Himself. It is a question of loosening the bands that hinder the
life, and immediately those bands are loosened by identification with
the death of Jesus, we enter into a relationship with God whereby we
can sacrifice our lives to Him.

It is of no value to God to give Him your life for death. He wants
you to be a "living sacrifice,"  to let Him have all your powers that
have been saved and sanctified through Jesus. This is the thing that
is acceptable to God.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 7:28 pm  
To:  ALL   (109 of 163)  
 
  204.109 in reply to 204.20  
 
INTERCESSORY INTROSPECTION

     And I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be
     preserved blameless. 1st Thessalonians 5:23

"Your whole spirit. . ." The great mystical work of the Holy Spirit
is in the dim regions of our personality which we cannot get at. Read
the 139th Psalm; the Psalmist implies - "Thou art the God of the
early mornings, the God of the late at nights, the God of the
mountain peaks, and the God of the sea; but, my God, my soul has
further horizons than the early mornings, deeper darkness than the
nights of earth, higher peaks than any mountain peaks, greater depths
than any sea in nature - Thou Who art the God of all these, be my
God. I cannot reach to the heights or to the depths; there are
motives I cannot trace, dreams I cannot get at - my God, search me
out."

Do we believe that God can garrison the imagination far beyond where
we can go? "The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin" - if
that means in conscious experience only, may God have mercy on us.
The man who has been made obtuse by sin will say he is not conscious
of sin. Cleansing from sin is to the very heights and depths of our
spirit if we will keep in the light as God is in the light, and the
very Spirit that fed the life of Jesus Christ will feed the life of
our spirits. It is only when we are garrisoned by God with the
stupendous sanctity of the Holy Spirit, that spirit, soul and body
are preserved in unspotted integrity, undeserving of censure in God's
sight, until Jesus comes.

We do not allow our minds to dwell as they should on these great
massive truths of God.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 7:29 pm  
To:  ALL   (110 of 163)  
 
  204.110 in reply to 204.20  
 
THE OPENED SIGHT

     To open their eyes ... that they may receive ...
     Acts 26:18

This verse is the grandest condensation of the propaganda of a
disciple of Jesus Christ in the whole of the New Testament.

The first sovereign work of grace is summed up in the word - "that
they may receive remission of sins." When a man fails in personal
Christian experience, it is nearly always because he has never
received anything. The only sign that a man is saved is that he has
received something from Jesus Christ. Our part as workers for God is
to open men's eyes that they may turn themselves from darkness to
light; but that is not salvation, that is conversion - the effort of
a roused human being. I do not think it is too sweeping to say that
the majority of nominal Christians are of this order; their eyes are
opened, but they have received nothing. Conversion is not
regeneration. This is one of the neglected factors in our preaching
today. When a man is born again, he knows that it is because he has
received something as a gift from Almighty God and not because of his
own decision. People register their vows, and sign their pledges, and
determine to go through, but none of this is salvation. Salvation
means that we are brought to the place where we are able to receive
something from God on the authority of Jesus Christ, viz., remission
of sins.

Then there follows the second mighty work of grace - "and inheritance
among them which are sanctified." In sanctification the regenerated
soul deliberately gives up his right to himself to Jesus Christ, and
identifies himself entirely with God's interest in other men.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 7:31 pm  
To:  ALL   (111 of 163)  
 
  204.111 in reply to 204.20  
 
WHAT MY OBEDIENCE TO GOD COSTS OTHER PEOPLE

     They laid hold upon one Simon ... and on him they laid
     the cross. Luke 23:2

If we obey God it is going to cost other people more than it costs
us, and that is where the sting comes in. If we are in love with our
Lord, obedience does not cost us anything, it is a delight, but it
costs those who do not love Him a good deal. If we obey God it will
mean that other people's plans are upset, and they will gibe us with
it - "You call this Christianity?" We can prevent the suffering; but
if we are going to obey God, we must not prevent it, we must let the
cost be paid.

Our human pride entrenches itself on this point, and we say - I will
never accept anything from anyone. We shall have to, or disobey God.
We have no right to expect to be in any other relation than our Lord
Himself was in (see Luke 8:2-3).

Stagnation in spiritual life comes when we say we will bear the whole
thing ourselves. We cannot. We are so involved in the universal
purposes of God that immediately we obey God, others are affected.
Are we going to remain loyal in our obedience to God and go through
the humiliation of refusing to be independent, or are we going to
take the other line and say - I will not cost other people suffering?
We can disobey God if we choose, and it will bring immediate relief
to the situation, but we shall be a grief to our Lord. Whereas if we
obey God, He will look after those who have been pressed into the
consequences of our obedience. We have simply to obey and to leave
all consequences with Him.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 7:33 pm  
To:  ALL   (112 of 163)  
 
  204.112 in reply to 204.20  
 
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN ALONE WITH GOD?

     When they were alone, He expounded all things to His
     disciples. Mark 4:34

Our Solitude with Him. Jesus does not take us alone and expound
things to us all the time; He expounds things to us as we can
understand them. Other lives are parables. God is making us spell out
our own souls. It is slow work, so slow that it takes God all time
and eternity to make a man and woman after His own purpose. The only
way we can be of use to God is to let Him take us through the crooks
and crannies of our own characters. It is astounding how ignorant we
are about ourselves! We do not know envy when we see it, or laziness,
or pride. Jesus reveals to us all that this body has been harbouring
before His grace began to work. How many of us have learned to look
in with courage?

We have to get rid of the idea that we understand ourselves, it is
the last conceit to go. The only One Who understands us is God. The
greatest curse in spiritual life is conceit. If we have ever had a
glimpse of what we are like in the sight of God, we shall never say -
"Oh, I am so unworthy," because we shall know we are, beyond the
possibility of stating it. As long as we are not quite sure that we
are unworthy, God will keep narrowing us in until He gets us alone.
Wherever there is any element of pride or of conceit, Jesus cannot
expound a thing. He will take us through the disappointment of a
wounded pride of intellect, through disappointment of heart. He will
reveal inordinate affection - things over which we never thought He
would have to get us alone. We listen to many things in classes, but
they are not an exposition to us yet. They will be when God gets us
alone over them.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 7:37 pm  
To:  ALL   (113 of 163)  
 
  204.113 in reply to 204.112  
 
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN ALONE WITH GOD?

     When He was alone the twelve ... asked of Him ...
     Mark 4:10

His Solitude with Us. When God gets us alone by affliction,
heartbreak, or temptation, by disappointment, sickness, or by
thwarted affection, by a broken friendship, or by a new fnendship -
when He gets us absolutely alone, and we are dumbfounded, and cannot
ask one question, then He begins to expound. Watch Jesus Christ's
training of the twelve. It was the disciples, not the crowd outside,
who were perplexed. They constantly asked Him questions, and He
constantly expounded things to them; but they only understood after
they had received the Holy Spirit (see John 14:26).

If you are going on with God, the only thing that is clear to you,
and the only thing God intends to be clear, is the way He deals with
your own soul. Your brother's sorrows and perplexities are an
absolute confusion to you. We imagine we understand where the other
person is, until God gives us a dose of the plague of our own hearts.
There are whole tracts of stubbornness and ignorance to be revealed
by the Holy Spirit in each one of us, and it can only be done when
Jesus gets us alone. Are we alone with Him now, or are we taken up
with little fussy notions, fussy comradeships in God's service, fussy
ideas about our bodies? Jesus can expound nothing until we get
through all the noisy questions of the head and are alone with Him.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 7:51 pm  
To:  ALL   (114 of 163)  
 
  204.114 in reply to 204.113  
 
CALLED OF GOD

     Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I,
     Here am I; send me. Isaiah 6:8

God did not address the call to Isaiah; Isaiah overheard God saying,
"Who will go for us?" The call of God is not for the special few, it
is for everyone. Whether or not I hear God's call depends upon the
state of my ears; and what I hear depends upon my disposition. "Many
are called but few are chosen," that is, few prove themselves the
chosen ones. The chosen ones are those who have come into a
relationship with God through Jesus Christ whereby their disposition
has been altered and their ears unstopped, and they hear the still
small voice questioning all the time, "Who will go for us?" It is not
a question of God singling out a man and saying, "Now, you go." God
did not lay a strong compulsion on Isaiah; Isaiah was in the presence
of God and he overheard the call, and realized that there was nothing
else for him but to say, in conscious freedom, "Here am I, send me."
Get out of your mind the idea of expecting God to come with
compulsions and pleadings. When our Lord called His disciples there
was no irresistible compulsion from outside. The quiet passionate
insistence of His "Follow Me" was spoken to men with every power wide
awake. If we let the Spirit of God bring us face to face with God, we
too shall hear something akin to what Isaiah heard, the still small
voice of God; and in perfect freedom will say, "Here am I; send me."




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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 8:54 pm  
To:  ALL   (115 of 163)  
 
  204.115 in reply to 204.114  
 
DO YOU WALK IN WHITE?

     Buried with Him ... that ... even so we also should walk
     in newness of life.  Romans 6:4

No one enters into the experience of entire sanctification without
going through a "white funeral" - the burial of the old life. If
there has never been this crisis of death, sanctification is nothing
more than a vision. There must be a "white funeral," - a death that
has only one resurrection - a resurrection into the life of Jesus
Christ. Nothing can upset such a life, it is one with God for one
purpose, to be a witness to Him.

Have you come to your last days really? You have come to them often
in sentiment, but have you come to them really? You cannot go to your
funeral in excitement, or die in excitement. Death means you stop
being. Do you agree with God that you stop being the striving,
earnest kind of Christian you have been? We skirt the cemetery and
all the time refuse to go to death. It is not striving to go to
death, it is dying - "baptized into His death."

Have you had your "white funeral," or are you sacredly playing the
fool with your soul? Is there a place in your life marked as the last
day, a place to which the memory goes back with a chastened and
extraordinarily grateful remembrance - "Yes, it was then, at that
'white funeral,' that I made an agreement with God."

"This is the will of God, even your sanctification." When you realize
what the will of God is, you will enter into sanctification as
naturally as can be. Are you willing to go through that "white
funeral" now? Do you agree with Him that this is your last day on
earth? The moment of agreement depends upon you.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 8:57 pm  
To:  ALL   (116 of 163)  
 
  204.116 in reply to 204.114  
 
DO YOU WALK IN WHITE?

     Buried with Him ... that ... even so we also should walk
     in newness of life.  Romans 6:4

No one enters into the experience of entire sanctification without
going through a "white funeral" - the burial of the old life. If
there has never been this crisis of death, sanctification is nothing
more than a vision. There must be a "white funeral," - a death that
has only one resurrection - a resurrection into the life of Jesus
Christ. Nothing can upset such a life, it is one with God for one
purpose, to be a witness to Him.

Have you come to your last days really? You have come to them often
in sentiment, but have you come to them really? You cannot go to your
funeral in excitement, or die in excitement. Death means you stop
being. Do you agree with God that you stop being the striving,
earnest kind of Christian you have been? We skirt the cemetery and
all the time refuse to go to death. It is not striving to go to
death, it is dying - "baptized into His death."

Have you had your "white funeral," or are you sacredly playing the
fool with your soul? Is there a place in your life marked as the last
day, a place to which the memory goes back with a chastened and
extraordinarily grateful remembrance - "Yes, it was then, at that
'white funeral,' that I made an agreement with God."

"This is the will of God, even your sanctification." When you realize
what the will of God is, you will enter into sanctification as
naturally as can be. Are you willing to go through that "white
funeral" now? Do you agree with Him that this is your last day on
earth? The moment of agreement depends upon you.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 9:02 pm  
To:  ALL   (117 of 163)  
 
  204.117 in reply to 204.114  
 
IT IS THE LORD!

     Thomas answered and said unto Him, My Lord and my God.
     John 20:2

"Give Me to drink." How many of us are set upon Jesus Christ slaking
our thirst when we ought to be satisfying Him? We should be pouring
out now, spending to the last limit, not drawing on Him to satisfy
us. "Ye shall be witnesses unto Me" - that means a life of unsullied,
uncompromising and unbribed devotion to the Lord Jesus, a
satisfaction to Him wherever He places us.

Beware of anything that competes with loyalty to Jesus Christ. The
greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for Him. It is
easier to serve than to be drunk to the dregs. The one aim of the
call of God is the satisfaction of God, not a call to do something
for Him. We are not sent to battle for God, but to be used by God in
His battlings. Are we being more devoted to service than to Jesus
Christ?



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 9:04 pm  
To:  ALL   (118 of 163)  
 
  204.118 in reply to 204.114  
 
VISION AND DARKNESS

     An horror of great darkness fell upon him.
     Genesis 15:1

Whenever God gives a vision to a saint, He puts him, as it were, in
the shadow of His hand, and the saint's duty is to be still and
listen. There is a darkness which comes from excess of light, and
then is the time to listen. Genesis 16 is an illustration of
listening to good advice when it is dark instead of waiting for God
to send the light. When God gives a vision and darkness follows,
wait. God will make you in accordance with the vision He has given if
you will wait His time. Never try and help God fulfil His word.
Abraham went through thirteen years of silence, but in those years
all self-sufficiency was destroyed; there was no possibility left of
relying on common-sense ways. Those years of silence were a time of
discipline, not of displeasure. Never pump up joy and confidence, but
stay upon God (cf. Isaiah 1:10,11).

Have I any confidence in the flesh? Or have I got beyond all
confidence in myself and in men and women of God; in books and
prayers and ecstasies; and is my confidence placed now in God
Himself, not in His blessings? "I am the Almighty God" - El-Shaddai,
the Father-Mother God. The one thing for which we are all being
disciplined is to know that God is real. As soon as God becomes real,
other people become shadows. Nothing that other saints do or say can
ever perturb the one who is built on God.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    1/20/2002 9:05 pm  
To:  ALL   (119 of 163)  
 
  204.119 in reply to 204.114  
 
ARE YOU FRESH FOR EVERYTHING?

     Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of
     God.  John 3:3

Sometimes we are fresh for a prayer meeting but not fresh for
cleaning boots!

Being born again of the Spirit is an unmistakable work of God, as
mysterious as the wind, as surprising as God Himself. We do not know
where it begins, it is hidden away in the depths of our personal
life. Being born again from above is a perennial, perpetual and
eternal beginning; a freshness all the time in thinking and in
talking and in living, the continual surprise of the life of God.
Staleness is an indication of something out of joint with God - "I
must do this thing or it will never be done." That is the first sign
of staleness. Are we freshly born this minute or are we stale, raking
in our minds for something to do? Freshness does not come from
obedience but from the Holy Spirit; obedience keeps us in the light
as God is in the light.

Guard jealously your relationship to God. Jesus prayed "that they may
be one, even as we are one" - nothing between. Keep all the life
perennially open to Jesus Christ, don't pretend with Him. Are you
drawing your life from any other source than God Himself? If you are
depending upon anything but Him, you will never know when He is gone.

Being born of the Spirit means much more than we generally take it to
mean. It gives us a new vision and keeps us absolutely fresh for
everything by the perennial supply of the life of God.



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   From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 7:56 pm  
To:  ALL   (120 of 163)  
 
  204.120 in reply to 204.89  
 
THE VOICE OF THE NATURE OF GOD

     I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send?
     Isaiah 6:8

When we speak of the call of God, we are apt to forget the most
important feature, viz., the nature of the One Who calls. There is
the call of the sea, the call of the mountains, the call of the great
ice barriers, but these calls are only heard by the few. The call is
the expression of the nature from which it comes, and we can only
record the call if the same nature is in us. The call of God is the
expression of God's nature, not of our nature. There are strands of
the call of God providentially at work for us which we recognize and
no one else does. It is the threading of God's voice to us in some
particular matter, and it is no use consulting anyone else about it.
We have to keep that profound relationship between our souls and God.

The call of God is not the echo of my nature; my affinities and
personal temperament are not considered. As long as I consider my
personal temperament and think about what I am fitted for, I shall
never hear the call of God. But when I am brought into relationship
with God, I am in the condition Isaiah was in. Isaiah's soul was so
attuned to God by the tremendous crisis he had gone through that he
recorded the call of God to his amazed soul. The majority of us have
no ear for anything but ourselves, we cannot hear a thing God says.
To be brought into the zone of the call of God is to be profoundly
altered.



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From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 7:58 pm  
To:  ALL   (121 of 163)  
 
  204.121 in reply to 204.89  
 
THE VOCATION OF THE NATURAL LIFE

     But when it pleased God ... to reveal His Son in me ...
     Galatians 1:15-16

The call of God is not a call to any particular service; my
interpretation of it may be because contact with the nature of God
has made me realize what I would like to do for Him. The call of God
is essentially expressive of His nature; service is the outcome of
what is fitted to my nature. The vocation of the natural life is
stated by the apostle Paul - "When it pleased God to reveal His Son
in me that I might preach Him" (i.e., sacramentally express ) "among
the Gentiles."

Service is the overflow of superabounding devotion; but, profoundly
speaking, there is no call   to that, it is my own little actual bit
and is the echo of my identification with the nature of God. Service
is the natural part of my life. God gets me into a relationship with
Himself whereby I understand His call, then I do things out of sheer
love for Him on my own account. To serve God is the deliberate
love-gift of a nature that has heard the call of God. Service is
expressive of that which is fitted to my nature: God's call is
expressive of His nature; consequently when I receive His nature and
hear His call, the voice of the Divine nature sounds in both and the
two work together. The Son of God reveals Himself in me, and I serve
Him in the ordinary ways of life out of devotion to Him.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 8:00 pm  
To:  ALL   (122 of 163)  
 
  204.122 in reply to 204.89  
 
RECALL WHAT GOD REMEMBERS

     I remember ... the kindness of thy youth.
     Jeremiah 2:2

Am I as spontaneously kind to God as I used to be, or am I only
expecting God to be kind to me? Am I full of the little things that
cheer His heart over me, or am I whimpering because things are going
hardly with me? There is no joy in the soul that has forgotten what
God prizes. It is a great thing to think that Jesus Christ has need
of me - "Give Me to drink." How much kindness have I shown Him this
past week? Have I been kind to His reputation in my life?

God is saying to His people - You are not in love with Me now, but I
remember the time when you were - "I remember...the love of thine
espousals." Am I as full of the extravagance of love to Jesus Christ
as I was in the beginning, when I went out of my way to prove my
devotion to Him? Does He find me recalling the time when I did not
care for anything but Himself? Am I there now, or have I become wise
over loving Him? Am I so in love with Him that I take no account of
where I go? or am I watching for the respect due to me; weighing how
much service I ought to give?

If, as I recall what God remembers about me, I find He is not what He
used to be to me, let it produce shame and humiliation, because that
shame will bring the godly sorrow that works repentance.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 8:02 pm  
To:  ALL   (123 of 163)  
 
  204.123 in reply to 204.89  
 
WHAT AM I LOOKING AT?

     Look unto Me, and be ye saved.
     Isaiah 14:22

Do we expect God to come to us with His blessings and save us? He
says - Look unto Me, and be saved. The great difficulty spiritually
is to concentrate on God, and it is His blessings that make it
difficult. Troubles nearly always make us look to God; His blessings
are apt to make us look elsewhere. The teaching of the Sermon on the
Mount is, in effect - Narrow all your interests until the attitude of
mind and heart and body is concentration on Jesus Christ. "Look unto
Me."

Many of us have a mental conception of what a Christian should be,
and the lives of the saints become a hindrance to our concentration
on God. There is no salvation in this way, it is not simple enough.
"Look unto Me" and - not "you will be saved," but "you are saved."
The very thing we look for, we shall find if we will concentrate on
Him. We get preoccupied and sulky with God, while all the time He is
saying - "Look up and be saved." The difficulties and trials - the
casting about in our minds as to what we shall do this summer, or
to-morrow, all vanish when we look to God.

Rouse yourself up and look to God. Build your hope on Him. No matter
if there are a hundred and one things that press, resolutely exclude
them all and look to Him. "Look unto Me," and salvation is, the
moment you look.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 8:04 pm  
To:  ALL   (124 of 163)  
 
  204.124 in reply to 204.89  
 
TRANSFORMED BY INSIGHT

     We all, with open face, beholding as in a glass the
     glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image.
     2nd Corinthians 3:1

The outstanding characteristic of a Christian is this unveiled
frankness before God so that the life becomes a mirror for other
lives. By being filled with the Spirit we are transformed, and by
beholding we become mirrors. You always know when a man has been
beholding the glory of the Lord, you feel in your inner spirit that
he is the mirror of the Lord's own character. Beware of anything
which would sully that mirror in you; it is nearly always a good
thing, the good that is not the best.

The golden rule for your life and mine is this concentrated keeping
of the life open towards God. Let everything else - work, clothes,
food, everything on earth - go by the board, saving that one thing.
The rush of other things always tends to obscure this concentration
on God. We have to maintain ourselves in the place of beholding,
keeping the life absolutely spiritual all through. Let other things
come and go as they may, let other people criticize as they will, but
never allow anything to obscure the life that is hid with Christ in
God. Never be hurried out of the relationship of abiding in Him. It
is the one thing that is apt to fluctuate but it ought not to. The
severest discipline of a Christian's life is to learn how to keep
"beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord."



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 8:06 pm  
To:  ALL   (125 of 163)  
 
  204.125 in reply to 204.89  
 
THE OVERMASTERING DIRECTION

     I have appeared unto thee for this purpose.
     Acts 26:16

The vision Paul had on the road to Damascus was no passing emotion,
but a vision that had very clear and emphatic directions for him, and
he says, "I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision." Our Lord
said, in effect, to Paul - Your whole life is to be overmastered by
Me; you are to have no end, no aim, and no purpose but Mine. "I have
chosen him."

When we are born again we all have visions, if we are spiritual at
all, of what Jesus wants us to he, and the great thing is to learn
not to be disobedient to the vision, not to say that it cannot be
attained. It is not sufficient to know that God has redeemed the
world, and to know that the Holy Spirit can make all that Jesus did
effectual in me; I must have the basis of a personal relationship to
Him. Paul was not given a message or a doctrine to proclaim, he was
brought into a vivid, personal, overmastering relationship to Jesus
Christ. Verse 16 is immensely commanding - "to make thee a minister
and a witness." There is nothing there apart from the personal
relationship. Paul was devoted to a Person not to a cause. He was
absolutely Jesus Christ's, he saw nothing else, he lived for nothing
else. "For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus
Christ, and Him crucified."



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 8:08 pm  
To:  ALL   (126 of 163)  
 
  204.126 in reply to 204.89  
 
LEAVE ROOM FOR GOD

     But when it pleased God...
     Galatians 1:15

As workers for God we have to learn to make room for God - to give
God "elbow room." We calculate and estimate, and say that this and
that will happen, and we forget to make room for God to come in as He
chooses. Would we be surprised if God came into our meeting or into
our preaching in a way we had never looked for Him to come? Do not
look for God to come in any particular way, but look for Him. That is
the way to make room for Him. Expect Him to come, but do not expect
Him only in a certain way. However much we may know God, the great
lesson to learn is that at any minute He may break in. We are apt to
over look this element of surprise, yet God never works in any other
way. All of a sudden God meets the life - "When it was the good
pleasure of God. . ."

Keep your life so constant in its contact with God that His
surprising power may break out on the right hand and on the left.
Always be in a state of expectancy, and see that you leave room for
God to come in as He likes.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 8:09 pm  
To:  ALL   (127 of 163)  
 
  204.127 in reply to 204.89  
 
LOOK AGAIN AND CONSECRATE

     If God so clothe the grass of the field ... shall He not
     much more clothe you?
     Matthew 6:30

A simple statement of Jesus is always a puzzle to us if we are not
simple. How are we going to be simple with the simplicity of Jesus?
By receiving His Spirit, recognizing and relying on Him, obeying Him
as He brings the word of God, and life will become amazingly simple.
"Consider," says Jesus, "how much more your Father Who clothes the
grass of the field will clothe you, if you keep your relationship
right with Him." Every time we have gone back in spiritual communion
it has been because we have impertinently known better than Jesus
Christ. We have allowed the cares of the world to come in, and have
forgotten the "much more" of our Heavenly Father.

"Behold the fowls of the air" - their main aim is to obey the
principle of life that is in them and God looks after them. Jesus
says that if you are rightly related to Him and obey His Spirit that
is in you, God will look after your 'feathers.'

"Consider the lilies of the field" - they grow where they are put.
Many of us refuse to grow where we are put, consequently we take root
nowhere. Jesus says that if we obey the life God has given us, He
will look after all the other things. Has Jesus Christ told us a lie?
If we are not experiencing the "much more," it is because we are not
obeying the life God has given us, we are taken up with confusing
considerations. How much time have we taken up worrying God with
questions when we should have been absolutely free to concentrate on
His work? Consecration means the continual separating of myself to
one particular thing. We cannot consecrate once and for all. Am I
continually separating myself to consider God every day of my life?



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 8:12 pm  
To:  ALL   (128 of 163)  
 
  204.128 in reply to 204.89  
 
BUT IT IS HARDLY CREDIBLE THAT ONE COULD SO PERSECUTE JESUS!

     Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?
     Acts 26:14

Am I set on my own way for God? We are never free from this snare
until we are brought into the experience of the baptism of the Holy
Ghost and fire. Obstinacy and self-will will always stab Jesus
Christ. It may hurt no one else, but it wounds His Spirit. Whenever
we are obstinate and self-willed and set upon our own ambitions, we
are hurting Jesus. Every time we stand on our rights and insist that
this is what we intend to do, we are persecuting Jesus. Whenever we
stand on our dignity we systematically vex and grieve His Spirit; and
when the knowledge comes home that it is Jesus Whom we have been
persecuting all the time, it is the most crushing revelation there
could be.

Is the word of God tremendously keen to me as I hand it on to you, or
does my life give the lie to the things I profess to teach? I may
teach sanctification and yet exhibit the spirit of Satan, the spirit
that persecutes Jesus Christ. The Spirit of Jesus is conscious of one
thing only - a perfect oneness with the Father, and He says, "Learn
of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart." All I do ought to be
founded on a perfect oneness with Him, not on a self-willed
determination to be godly. This will mean that I can be easily put
upon, easily over-reached, easily ignored; but if I submit to it for
His sake, I prevent Jesus Christ being persecuted.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 8:14 pm  
To:  ALL   (129 of 163)  
 
  204.129 in reply to 204.89  
 
BUT IT IS HARDLY CREDIBLE THAT ONE COULD BE SO POSITIVELY IGNORANT!

     Who art Thou, Lord?
     Acts 26:15

"The Lord spake thus to me with a strong hand." There is no escape
when Our Lord speaks, He always comes with an arrestment of the
understanding. Has the voice of God come to you directly? If it has,
you cannot mistake the intimate insistence with which it has spoken
to you in the language you know best, not through your ears, but
through your circumstances.

God has to destroy our determined confidence in our own convictions.
"I know this is what I should do" - and suddenly the voice of God
speaks in a way that overwhelms us by revealing the depths of our
ignorance. We have shown our ignorance of Him in the very way we
determined to serve Him. We serve Jesus in a spirit that is not His,
we hurt Him by our advocacy for Him, we push His claims in the spirit
of the devil. Our words sound all right, but our spirit is that of an
enemy. "He rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit
ye are of." The spirit of our Lord in an advocate of His is described
in 1 Corinthians 13.

Have I been persecuting Jesus by a zealous determination to serve Him
in my own way? If I feel I have done my duty and yet have hurt Him in
doing it, I may be sure it was not my duty, because it has not
fostered the meek and quiet spirit, but the spirit of
self-satisfaction. We imagine that whatever is unpleasant is our
duty! Is that anything like the spirit of our Lord - "I delight to do
Thy will, O My God."



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 8:26 pm  
To:  ALL   (130 of 163)  
 
  204.130 in reply to 204.120  
 
THE DILEMMA OF OBEDIENCE

     And Samuel feared to shew Eli the vision.
     1st Samuel 3:15

God never speaks to us in startling ways, but in ways that are easy
to misunderstand, and we say, "I wonder if that is God's voice?"
Isaiah said that the Lord spake to him "with a strong hand," that is,
by the pressure of circumstances. Nothing touches our lives but it is
God Himself speaking. Do we discern His hand or only mere occurrence?

Get into the habit of saying, "Speak, Lord," and life will become a
romance. Every time circumstances press, say, "Speak, Lord"; make
time to listen. Chastening is more than a means of discipline, it is
meant to get me to the place of saying, "Speak, Lord." Recall the
time when God did speak to you. Have you forgotten what He said? Was
it Luke 11:13, or was it 1 Thess. 5:23? As we listen, our ear gets
acute, and, like Jesus, we shall hear God all the time.

Shall I tell my "Eli" what God has shown to me? That is where the
dilemma of obedience comes in. We disobey God by becoming amateur
providences - I must shield "Eli," the best people we know. God did
not tell Samuel to tell Eli; he had to decide that for himself. God's
call to you may hurt your "Eli;" but if you try to prevent the
suffering in another life, it will prove an obstruction between your
soul and God. It is at your own peril that you prevent the cutting
off of the right hand or the plucking out of the eye.

Never ask the advice of another about anything God makes you decide
before Him. If you ask advice, you will nearly always side with
Satan. "Immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood."



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 8:27 pm  
To:  ALL   (131 of 163)  
 
  204.131 in reply to 204.120  
 
DO YOU SEE YOUR CALLING?

     Separated unto the Gospel.
     Romans 1:1

Our calling is not primarily to be holy men and women, but to be
proclaimers of the Gospel of God. The one thing that is all important
is that the Gospel of God should be realized as the abiding Reality.
Reality is not human goodness, nor holiness, nor heaven, nor hell;
but Redemption; and the need to perceive this is the most vital need
of the Christian worker to-day. As workers we have to get used to the
revelation that Redemption is the only Reality. Personal holiness is
an effect, not a cause, and if we place our faith in human goodness,
in the effect of Redemption, we shall go under when the test comes.

Paul did not say he separated himself, but - "when it pleased God who
separated me. . ." Paul had not a hypersensitive interest in his own
character. As long as our eyes are upon our own personal whiteness we
shall never get near the reality of Redemption. Workers break down
because their desire is for their own whiteness, and not for God.
"Don't ask me to come into contact with the rugged reality of
Redemption on behalf of the filth of human life as it is; wbat I want
is anything God can do for me to make me more desirable in my own
eyes." To talk in that way is a sign that the reality of the Gospel
of God has not begun to touch me; there is no reckless abandon to
God. God cannot deliver me while my interest is merely in my own
character. Paul is unconscious of himself, he is recklessly
abandoned, separated by God for one purpose - to proclaim the Gospel
of God (cf. Rom. 9:3.)



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 8:29 pm  
To:  ALL   (132 of 163)  
 
  204.132 in reply to 204.120  
 
THE CALL OF GOD

     For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the
     gospel.     1st Corinthians 1:17

Paul states here that the call of God is to preach the gospel; but
remember what Paul means by "the gospel," viz., the reality of
Redemption in our Lord Jesus Christ. We are apt to make
sanctification the end-all of our preaching. Paul alludes to personal
experience by way of illustration, never as the end of the matter. We
are nowhere commissioned to preach salvation or sanctification; we
are commissioned to lift up Jesus Christ (John 12:32). It is a
travesty to say that Jesus Christ travailed in Redemption to make me
a saint. Jesus Christ travailed in Redemption to redeem the whole
world, and place it unimpaired and rehabilitated before the throne of
God. The fact that Redemption can be experienced by us is an
illustration of the power of the reality of Redemption, but that is
not the end of Redemption. If God were human, how sick to the heart
and weary He would be of the constant requests we make for our
salvation, for our sanctification. We tax His energies from morning
till night for things for ourselves - some thing for me to be
delivered from! When we touch the bedrock of the reality of the
Gospel of God, we shall never bother God any further with little
personal plaints.

The one passion of Paul's life was to proclaim the Gospel of God. He
welcomed heart-breaks, disillusionments, tribulation, for one reason
only, because these things kept him in unmoved devotion to the Gospel
of God.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 8:32 pm  
To:  ALL   (133 of 163)  
 
  204.133 in reply to 204.120  
 
THE CONSTRAINT OF THE CALL

     Woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel!
     1st Corinthians 9:16

Beware of stopping your ears to the call of God. Everyone who is
saved is called to testify to the fact; but that is not the call to
preach, it is merely an illustration in preaching. Paul is referring
to the pangs produced in him by the constraint to preach the Gospel.
Never apply what Paul says in this connection to souls coming in
contact with God for salvation. There is nothing easier than getting
saved because it is God's sovereign work - Come unto Me and I will
save you. Our Lord never lays down the conditions of discipleship as
the conditions of salvation. We are condemned to salvation through
the Cross of Jesus Christ. Discipleship has an option with it - "IF
any man. . . '

Paul's words have to do with being made a servant of Jesus Christ,
and our permission is never asked as to what we will do or where we
will go. God makes us broken bread and poured-out wine to please
Himself. To be "separated unto the gospel" means to hear the call of
God; and when a man begins to overhear that call, then begins agony
that is worthy of the name. Every ambition is nipped in the bud,
every desire of life quenched, every outlook completely extinguished
and blotted out, saving one thing only - "separated unto the gospel."
Woe be to the soul who tries to put his foot in any other direction
when once that call has come to him. This College exists for you, and
you - to see whether God has a man or woman here who cares about
proclaiming His Gospel; to see whether God grips you. And be ware of
competitors when God does grip you.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 8:34 pm  
To:  ALL   (134 of 163)  
 
  204.134 in reply to 204.120  
 
THE RECOGNIZED BAN OF RELATIONSHIP

     We are made as the filth of the world.
     1st Corinthians 4:9-13

These words are not an exaggeration. The reason they are not true of
us who call ourselves ministers of the gospel is not that Paul forgot
the exact truth in using them, but that we have too many discreet
affinities to allow ourselves to be made refuse. "Filling up that
which is behind of the afflictions of Christ" is not an evidence of
sanctification, but of being "separated unto the gospel."

"Think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try
you," says Peter. If we do think it strange concerning the things we
meet with, it is because we are craven-hearted. We have discreet
affinities that keep us out of the mire - I won't stoop, I won't
bend. You do not need to, you can be saved by the skin of your teeth
if you like; you can refuse to let God count you as one separated
unto the gospel. Or you may say - "I do not care if I am treated as
the offscouring of the earth as long as the Gospel is proclaimed." A
servant of Jesus Christ is one who is willing to go to martyrdom for
the reality of the gospel of God. When a merely moral man or woman
comes in contact with baseness and immorality and treachery, the
recoil is so desperately offensive to human goodness that the heart
shuts up in despair. The marvel of the Redemptive Reality of God is
that the worst and the vilest can never get to the bottom of His
love. Paul did not say that God separated him to show what a
wonderful man He could make of him, but "to reveal His Son in me."



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 8:35 pm  
To:  ALL   (135 of 163)  
 
  204.135 in reply to 204.120  
 
THE OVERMASTERING MAJESTY OF PERSONAL POWER

     For the love of Christ constraineth us.
     2nd Corinthians 5:14

Paul says he is overruled, overmastered, held as in a vice, by the
love of Christ. Very few of us know what it means to be held in a
grip by the love of God; we are held by the constraint of our
experience only. The one thing that held Paul, until there was
nothing else on his horizon, was the love of God. "The love of Christ
constraineth us" - when you hear that note in a man or woman, you can
never mistake it. You know that the Spirit of God is getting
unhindered way in that life.

When we are born again of the Spirit of God, the note of testimony is
on what God has done for us, and rightly so. But the baptism of the
Holy Ghost obliterates that for ever, and we begin to realize what
Jesus meant when He said - "Ye shall be witnesses unto Me." Not
witnesses to what Jesus can do - that is an elementary witness - but
"witnesses unto Me." We will take everything that happens as
happening to Him, whether it be praise or blame, persecution or
commendation. No one can stand like that for Jesus Christ who is not
constrained by the majesty of His personal power. It is the only
thing that matters, and the strange thing is that it is the last
thing realized by the Christian worker. Paul says he is gripped by
the love of God, that is why he acts as he does. Men may call him mad
or sober, but he does not care; there is only one thing he is living
for, and that is to persuade men of the judgment seat of God, and of
the love of Christ. This abandon to the love of Christ is the one
thing that bears fruit in the life, and it will always leave the
impression of the holiness and of the power of God, never of our
personal holiness.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 8:38 pm  
To:  ALL   (136 of 163)  
 
  204.136 in reply to 204.120  
 
ARE YOU READY TO BE OFFERED?

     I am already being poured out as a drink offering.
     2nd Timothy 4:6

"I am ready to be offered." It is a transaction of will, not of
sentiment. Tell God you are ready to be offered; then let the
consequences be what they may, there is no strand of complaint now,
no matter what God chooses. God puts you through the crisis in
private, no one person can help an other. Externally the life may be
the same; the difference is in will. Go through the crisis in will,
then when it comes externally there will he no thought of the cost.
If you do not transact in will with God along this line, you will end
in awakening sympathy for yourself.

"Bind the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar."
The altar means fire - burning and purification and insulation for
one purpose only, the destruction of every affinity that God has not
started and of every attachment that is not an attachment in God. You
do not destroy it, God does; you bind the sacrifice to the horns of
the altar; and see that you do not give way to self-pity when the
fire begins. After this way of fire, there is nothing that oppresses
or depresses. When the crisis arises, you realize that things cannot
touch you as they used to do. What is your way of fire?

Tell God you are ready to be offered, and God will prove Himself to
be all you ever dreamed He would be.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    2/26/2002 8:41 pm  
To:  ALL   (137 of 163)  
 
  204.137 in reply to 204.120  
 
INSTANTANEOUS AND INSISTENT SANCTIFICATION

     And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly.
     1st Thessalonians 5:23-24

When we pray to be sanctified, are we prepared to face the standard
of these verses? We take the term sanctification much too lightly.
Are we prepared for what sanctification will cost? It will cost an
intense narrowing of all our interests on earth, and an immense
broadening of all our interests in God. Sanctification means intense
concentration on God's point of view. It means every power of body,
soul and spirit chained and kept for God's purpose only. Are we
prepared for God to do in us all that He separated us for? And then
after His work is done in us, are we prepared to separate ourselves
to God even as Jesus did? "For their sakes I sanctify Myself." The
reason some of us have not entered into the experience of
sanctification is that we have not realized the meaning of
sanctification from God's standpoint. Sanctification means being made
one with Jesus so that the disposition that ruled Him will rule us.
Are we prepared for what that will cost? It will cost everything that
is not of God in us.

Are we prepared to be caught up into the swing of this prayer of the
apostle Paul's? Are we prepared to say - "Lord, make me as holy as
You can make a sinner saved by grace"? Jesus has prayed that we might
be one with Him as He is one with the Father. The one and only
characteristic of the Holy Ghost in a man is a strong family likeness
to Jesus Christ, and freedom from everything that is unlike Him. Are
we prepared to set ourselves apart for the Holy Spirit's
ministrations in us?



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 1:37 pm  
To:  ALL   (138 of 163)  
 
  204.138 in reply to 204.120  
 
ARE YOU EXHAUSTED SPIRITUALLY?

     The everlasting God ... fainteth not, neither is weary.
     Isaiah 40:28

Exhaustion means that the vital forces are worn right out. Spiritual
exhaustion never comes through sin but only through service, and
whether or not you are exhausted will depend upon where you get your
supplies. Jesus said to Peter - "Feed My sheep," but He gave him
nothing to feed them with. The process of being made broken bread and
poured out wine means that you have to be the nourishment for other
souls until they learn to feed on God. They must drain you to the
dregs. Be careful that you get your supply, or before long you will
be utterly exhausted. Before other souls learn to draw on the life of
the Lord Jesus direct, they have to draw on it through you; you have
to be literally "sucked," until they learn to take their nourishment
from God. We owe it to God to be our best for His lambs and His sheep
as well as for Himself.

Has the way in which you have been serving God betrayed you into
exhaustion? If so, then rally your affections. Where did you start
the service from? From your own sympathy or from the basis of the
Redemption of Jesus Christ? Continually go back to the foundation of
your affections and recollect where the source of power is. You have
no right to say - "O Lord, I am so exhausted." He saved and
sanctified you in order to exhaust you. Be exhausted for God, but
remember that your supply comes from Him. "All my fresh springs shall
be in Thee."



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 1:39 pm  
To:  ALL   (139 of 163)  
 
  204.139 in reply to 204.120  
 
IS YOUR IMAGINATION OF GOD STARVED?

     Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created
     these things. Isaiah 40:26

The people of God in Isaiah's day had starved their imagination by
looking on the face of idols, and Isaiah made them look up at the
heavens, that is, he made them begin to use their imagination aright.
Nature to a saint is sacramental. If we are children of God, we have
a tremendous treasure in Nature. In every wind that blows, in every
night and day of the year, in every sign of the sky, in every
blossoming and in every withering of the earth, there is a real
coming of God to us if we will simply use our starved imagination to
realize it.

The test of spiritual concentration is bringing the imagination into
captivity. Is your imagination looking on the face of an idol? Is the
idol yourself? Your work? Your conception of what a worker should be?
Your experience of salvation and sanctification? Then your
imagination of God is starved, and when you are up against
difficulties you have no power, you can only endure in darkness. If
your imagination is starved, do not look back to your own experience;
it is God Whom you need. Go right out of yourself, away from the face
of your idols, away from everything that has been starving your
imagination. Rouse yourself, take the gibe that Isaiah gave the
people, and deliberately turn your imagination to God.

One of the reasons of stultification in prayer is that there is no
imagination, no power of putting ourselves deliberately before God.
We have to learn how to be broken bread and poured out wine on the
line of intercession more than on the line of personal contact.
Imagination is the power God gives a saint to posit himself out of
himself into relationships he never was in.



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   From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 1:40 pm  
To:  ALL   (140 of 163)  
 
  204.140 in reply to 204.120  
 
IS YOUR HOPE IN GOD FAINT AND DYING?

     Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose imagination is
     stayed on Thee. Isaiah 26:3

Is your imagination stayed on God or is it starved? The starvation of
the imagination is one of the most fruitful sources of exhaustion and
sapping in a worker's life. If you have never used your imagination
to put yourself before God, begin to do it now. It is no use waiting
for God to come; you must put your imagination away from the face of
idols and look unto Him and he saved. Imagination is the greatest
gift God has given us and it ought to be devoted entirely to Him. If
you have been bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience
of Christ, it will be one of the greatest assets to faith when the
time of trial comes, because your faith and the Spirit of God will
work together. Learn to associate ideas worthy of God with all that
happens in Nature - the sunrises and the sunsets, the sun and the
stars, the changing seasons, and your imagination will never be at
the mercy of your impulses, but will always be at the service of God.

"We have sinned with our fathers; . . . and have forgotten" - then
put a stiletto in the place where you have gone to sleep. "God is not
talking to me just now," but He ought to be. Remember Whose you are
and Whom you serve. Provoke yourself by recollection, and your
affection for God will increase tenfold; your imagination will not be
starved any longer, but will be quick and enthusiastic, and your hope
will be inexpressibly bright.



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From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 1:41 pm  
To:  ALL   (141 of 163)  
 
  204.141 in reply to 204.120  
 
MUST I LISTEN?

     And they said unto Moses, Speak thou with us and we will
     hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die.
     Exodus 20:19

We do not consciously disobey God, we simply do not heed Him. God has
given us His commands; there they are, but we do not pay any
attention to them, not because of wilful disobedience but because we
do not love and respect Him. "If ye love Me, ye will keep My
commandments." When once we realize that we have been "disrespecting"
God all the time, we are covered with shame and humiliation because
we have not heeded Him.

"Speak thou with us...but let not God speak with us." We show how
little we love God by preferring to listen to His servants only. We
like to listen to personal testimonies, but we do not desire that God
Himself should speak to us. Why are we so terrified lest God should
speak to us? Because we know that if God does speak, either the thing
must be done or we must tell God we will not obey Him. If it is only
the servant's voice we hear, we feel it is not imperative, we can
say, "Well, that is simply your own idea, though I don't deny it is
probably God's truth."

Am I putting God in the humiliating position of having treated me as
a child of His whilst all the time I have been ignoring Him? When I
do hear Him, the humiliation I have put on Him comes back on me -
"Lord, why was I so dull and so obstinate?" This is always the result
when once we do hear God. The real delight of hearing Him is tempered
with shame in having been so long in hearing Him.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 1:44 pm  
To:  ALL   (142 of 163)  
 
  204.142 in reply to 204.120  
 
THE DISCIPLINE OF HEEDING

     What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light: and
     what ye hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the
     housetops.  Matthew 10:27

At times God puts us through the discipline of darkness to teach us
to heed Him. Song birds are taught to sing in the dark, and we are
put into the shadow of God's hand until we learn to hear Him. "What I
tell you in darkness" - watch where God puts you into darkness, and
when you are there keep your mouth shut. Are you in the dark just now
in your circumstances, or in your life with God? Then remain quiet.
If you open your mouth in the dark, you will talk in the wrong mood:
darkness is the time to listen. Don't talk to other people about it;
don't read books to find out the reason of the darkness, but listen
and heed. If you talk to other people, you cannot hear what God is
saying. When you are in the dark, listen, and God will give you a
very precious message for someone else when you get into the light.

After every time of darkness there comes a mixture of delight and
humiliation (if there is delight only, I question whether we have
heard God at all), delight in hearing God speak, but chiefly
humiliation - What a long time I was in hearing that! How slow I have
been in understanding that! And yet God has been saying it all these
days and weeks. Now He gives you the gift of humiliation which brings
the softness of heart that will always listen to God now.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 1:47 pm  
To:  ALL   (143 of 163)  
 
  204.143 in reply to 204.120  
 
THE INSPIRATION OF SPIRITUAL INITIATIVE

     Arise from the dead.
     Ephesians 5:14

All initiative is not inspired. A man may say to you - "Buck up, take
your disinclination by the throat, throw it overboard, and walk out
into the thing!" That is ordinary human initiative. But when the
Spirit of God comes in and says, in effect, "Buck up," we find that
the initiative is inspired.

We all have any number of visions and ideals when we are young, but
sooner or later we find that we have no power to make them real. We
cannot do the things we long to do, and we are apt to settle down to
the visions and ideals as dead, and God has to come and say - "Arise
from the dead." When the inspiration of God does come, it comes with
such miraculous power that we are able to arise from the dead and do
the impossible thing. The remarkable thing about spiritual initiative
is that the life comes after we do the "bucking up." God does not
give us overcoming life; He gives us life as we overcome. When the
inspiration of God comes, and He says - "Arise from the dead," we
have to get up; God does not lift us up. Our Lord said to the man
with the withered hand - "Stretch forth thy hand," and as soon as the
man did so, his hand was healed, but he had to take the initiative.
If we will do the overcoming, we shall find we are inspired of God
because He gives life immediately.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 1:50 pm  
To:  ALL   (144 of 163)  
 
  204.144 in reply to 204.120  
 
THE INITIATIVE AGAINST DESPAIR

     Rise, let us be going.
     Matthew 26:46

The disciples went to sleep when they should have kept awake, and
when they realized what they had done it produced despair. The sense
of the irreparable is apt to make us despair, and we say - "It is all
up now, it is no use trying any more." If we imagine that this kind
of despair is exceptional, we are mistaken, it is a very ordinary
human experience. Whenever we realize that we have not done that
which we had a magnificent opportunity of doing, then we are apt to
sink into despair; and Jesus Christ comes and says - "Sleep on now,
that opportunity is lost for ever, you cannot alter it, but arise and
go to the next thing." Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the
bosom of Christ, and go out into the irresistible future with Him.

There are experiences like this in each of our lives. We are in
despair, the despair that comes from actualities, and we cannot lift
ourselves out of it. The disciples in this instance had done a
downright unforgivable thing; they had gone to sleep instead of
watching with Jesus, but He came with a spiritual initiative against
their despair and said - "Arise and do the next thing." If we are
inspired of God, what is the next thing? To trust Him absolutely and
to pray on the ground of His Redemption.

Never let the sense of failure corrupt your new action.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 1:53 pm  
To:  ALL   (145 of 163)  
 
  204.145 in reply to 204.120  
 
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN CARRIED AWAY FOR HIM?

     She hath wrought a good work on Me.
     Mark 14:6

If human love does not carry a man beyond himself, it is not love. If
love is always discreet, always wise, always sensible and
calculating, never carried beyond itself, it is not love at all. It
may be affection, it may be warmth of feeling, but it has not the
true nature of love in it.

Have I ever been carried away to do something for God not because it
was my duty, nor because it was useful, nor because there was
anything in it at all beyond the fact that I love Him? Have I ever
realized that I can bring to God things which are of value to Him, or
am I mooning round the magnitude of His Redemption whilst there are
any number of things I might be doing? Not Divine, colossal things
which could be recorded as marvellous, but ordinary, simple human
things which will give evidence to God that I am abandoned to Him?
Have I ever produced in the heart of the Lord Jesus what Mary of
Bethany produced?

There are times when it seems as if God watches to see if we will
give Him the abandoned tokens of how genuinely we do love Him.
Abandon to God is of more value than personal holiness. Personal
holiness focuses the eye on our own whiteness; we are greatly
concerned about the way we walk and talk and look, fearful lest we
offend Him. Perfect love casts out all that when once we are
abandoned to God. We have to get rid of this notion - "Am I of any
use?" and make up our minds that we are not, and we may be near the
truth. It is never a question of being of use, but of being of value
to God Himself. When we are abandoned to God, He works through us all
the time.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 1:55 pm  
To:  ALL   (146 of 163)  
 
  204.146 in reply to 204.120  
 
THE DETERMINATION TO SERVE

     The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to
     minister. Matthew 20:28

Paul's idea of service is the same as Our Lord's: "I am among you as
He that serveth;" "ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake." We have
the idea that a man called to the ministry is called to be a
different kind of being from other men. According to Jesus Christ, he
is called to be the "door-mat" of other men; their spiritual leader,
but never their superior. "I know how to be abased," says Paul. This
is Paul's idea of service - "I will spend myself to the last ebb for
you; you may give me praise or give me blame, it will make no
difference." So long as there is a human being who does not know
Jesus Christ, I am his debtor to serve him until he does. The
mainspring of Paul's service is not love for men, but love for Jesus
Christ. If we are devoted to the cause of humanity, we shall soon be
crushed and broken-hearted, for we shall often meet with more
ingratitude from men than we would from a dog; but if our motive is
love to God, no ingratitude can hinder us from serving our fellow
men.

Paul's realization of how Jesus Christ had dealt with him is the
secret of his determination to serve others. "I was before a
perjurer, a blasphemer, an injurious person" - no matter how men may
treat me, they will never treat me with the spite and hatred with
which I treated Jesus Christ. When we realize that Jesus Christ has
served us to the end of our meanness, our selfishness, and sin,
nothing that we meet with from others can exhaust our determination
to serve men for His sake.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 1:56 pm  
To:  ALL   (147 of 163)  
 
  204.147 in reply to 204.120  
 
THE DELIGHT OF SACRIFICE

     I will very gladly spend and be spent for you;
     2nd Corinthians 12:15

When the Spirit of God has shed abroad the love of God in our hearts,
we begin deliberately to identify ourselves with Jesus Christ's
interests in other people, and Jesus Christ is interested in every
kind of man there is. We have no right in Christian work to be guided
by our affinities; this is one of the biggest tests of our
relationship to Jesus Christ. The delight of sacrifice is that I lay
down my life for my Friend, not fling it away, but deliberately lay
my life out for Him and His interests in other people, not for a
cause. Paul spent himself for one purpose only - that he might win
men to Jesus Christ. Paul attracted to Jesus all the time, never to
himself. "I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means
save some." When a man says he must develop a holy life alone with
God, he is of no more use to his fellow men: he puts himself on a
pedestal, away from the common run of men. Paul became a sacramental
personality; wherever he went, Jesus Christ helped Himself to his
life. Many of us are after our own ends, and Jesus Christ cannot help
Himself to our lives. If we are abandoned to Jesus, we have no ends
of our own to serve. Paul said he knew how to be a "door-mat" without
resenting it, because the mainspring of his life was devotion to
Jesus. We are apt to be devoted, not to Jesus Christ, but to the
things which emancipate us spiritually. That was not Paul's motive.
"I could wish my self were accursed from Christ for my brethren" -
wild, extravagant - is it? When a man is in love it is not an
exaggeration to talk in that way, and Paul is in love with Jesus
Christ.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 1:58 pm  
To:  ALL   (148 of 163)  
 
  204.148 in reply to 204.120  
 
THE DESTITUTION OF SERVICE

     Though the more abundantly I love you, the less I be
     loved. 2nd Corinthians 12:15

Natural love expects some return, but Paul says - I do not care
whether you love me or not, I am willing to destitute myself
completely, not merely for your sakes, but that I may get you to God.
"For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though He was
rich, yet for your sakes He became poor." Paul's idea of service is
exactly along that line - I do not care with what extravagance I
spend myself, and I will do it gladly. It was a joyful thing to Paul.

The ecclesiastical idea of a servant of God is not Jesus Christ's
idea. His idea is that we serve Him by being the servants of other
men. Jesus Christ out-socialists the socialists. He says that in His
Kingdom he that is greatest shall be the servant of all. The real
test of the saint is not preaching the gospel, but washing disciples'
feet, that is, doing the things that do not count in the actual
estimate of men but count everything in the estimate of God. Paul
delighted to spend him self out for God's interests in other people,
and he did not care what it cost. We come in with our economical
notions - "Suppose God wants me to go there - what about the salary?
What about the climate? How shall I be looked after? A man must
consider these things." All that is an indication that we are serving
God with a reserve. The apostle Paul had no reserve. Paul focuses
Jesus Christ's idea of a New Testament saint in his life, viz.: not
one who proclaims the Gospel merely, but one who becomes broken bread
and poured out wine in the hands of Jesus Christ for other lives.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 1:59 pm  
To:  ALL   (149 of 163)  
 
  204.149 in reply to 204.120  
 
INFERIOR MISGIVINGS ABOUT JESUS

     Sir, Thou hast nothing to draw with.
     John 4:11

"I am impressed with the wonder of what God says, but He cannot
expect me really to live it out in the details of my life!" When it
comes to facing Jesus Christ on His own merits, our attitude is one
of pious superiority - Your ideals are high and they impress us, but
in touch with actual things, it cannot be done. Each of us thinks
about Jesus in this way in some particular. These misgivings about
Jesus start from the amused questions put to us when we talk of our
transactions with God - Where are you going to get your money from?
How are you going to be looked after? Or they start from ourselves
when we tell Jesus that our case is a bit too hard for Him. It is all
very well to say "Trust in the Lord," but a man must live, and Jesus
has nothing to draw with - nothing whereby to give us these things.
Beware of the pious fraud in you which says - I have no misgivings
about Jesus, only about myself. None of us ever had misgivings about
ourselves; we know exactly what we cannot do, but we do have
misgivings about Jesus. We are rather hurt at the idea that He can do
what we cannot.

My misgivings arise from the fact that I ransack my own person to
find out how He will he able to do it. My questions spring from the
depths of my own inferiority. If I detect these misgivings in myself,
let me bring them to the light and confess them - "Lord, I have had
misgivings about Thee, I have not believed in Thy wits apart from my
own; I have not believed in Thine almighty power apart from my finite
understanding of it."



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 2:02 pm  
To:  ALL   (150 of 163)  
 
  204.150 in reply to 204.120  
 
DO YE NOW BELIEVE?

     By this we believe ... Jesus answered, Do ye now
     believe? John 16:30-31

Now we believe. Jesus says - Do you? The time is coming when you will
leave Me alone. Many a Christian worker has left Jesus Christ alone
and gone into work from a sense of duty, or from a sense of need
arising out of his own particular discernment. The reason for this is
the absence of the resurrection life of Jesus. The soul has got out
of intimate contact with God by leaning to its own religious
understanding. There is no sin in it, and no punishment attached to
it; but when the soul realizes how he has hindered his understanding
of Jesus Christ, and produced for himself perplexities and sorrows
and difficulties, it is with shame and contrition he has to come
back.

We need to rely on the resurrection life of Jesus much deeper down
than we do, to get into the habit of steadily referring everything
back to Him; instead of this we make our common - sense decisions and
ask God to bless them. He cannot, it is not in His domain, it is
severed from reality. If we do a thing from a sense of duty, we are
putting up a standard in competition with Jesus Christ. We become a
"superior person," and say - "Now in this matter I must do this and
that." We have put our sense of duty on the throne instead of the
resurrection life of Jesus. We are not told to walk in the light of
conscience or of a sense of duty, but to walk in the light as God is
in the light. When we do anything from a sense of duty, we can back
it up by argument; when we do anything in obedience to the Lord,
there is no argument possible; that is why a saint can be easily
ridiculed.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 2:03 pm  
To:  ALL   (151 of 163)  
 
  204.151 in reply to 204.120  
 
THE INITIATIVE AGAINST DREAMING

     Arise, let us go hence.
     John 14:31

Dreaming about a thing in order to do it properly is right; but
dreaming about it when we should be doing it is wrong. After Our Lord
had said those wonderful things to His disciples, we might have
expected that He would tell them to go away and meditate over them
all; but Our Lord never allowed "mooning." When we are getting into
contact with God in order to find out what He wants, dreaming is
right; but when we are inclined to spend our time in dreaming over
what we have been told to do, it is a bad thing and God's blessing is
never on it. God's initiative is always in the nature of a stab
against this kind of dreaming, the stab that bids us "neither sit nor
stand but go."

If we are quietly waiting before God and He has said - "Come ye
yourselves apart," then that is meditation before God in order to get
at the line He wants; but always beware of giving over to mere
dreaming when once God has spoken. Leave Him to be the source of all
your dreams and joys and delights, and go out and obey what He has
said. If you are in love, you do not sit down and dream about the one
you love all the time, you go and do something for him; and that is
what Jesus Christ expects us to do. Dreaming after God has spoken is
an indication that we do not trust Him.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 2:30 pm  
To:  ALL   (152 of 163)  
 
  204.152 in reply to 204.121  
 
THE UNDEVIATING QUESTION

     Lovest thou Me?
     John 21:17

Peter declares nothing now (cf. Matthew 26:33-35). Natural
individuality professes and declares; the love of the personality is
only discovered by the hurt of the question of Jesus Christ. Peter
loved Jesus in the way in which any natural man loves a good man.
That is temperamental love; it may go deep into the individuality,
but it does not touch the centre of the person. True love never
professes anything. Jesus said - "Whosoever shall confess Me before
men," i.e., confess his love not merely by his words, but by
everything he does.

Unless we get hurt right out of every deception about ourselves, the
word of God is not having its way with us. The word of God hurts as
no sin can ever hurt, because sin blunts feeling. The question of the
Lord intensifies feeling, until to be hurt by Jesus is the most
exquisite hurt conceivable. It hurts not only in the natural way but
in the profound personal way. The word of the Lord pierces even to
the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, there is no deception left.
There is no possibility of being sentimental with the Lord's
question; you cannot say nice things when the Lord speaks directly to
you, the hurt is too terrific. It is such a hurt that it stings every
other concern out of account. There never can be any mistake about
the hurt of the Lord's word when it comes to His child; but the point
of the hurt is the great point of revelation.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 2:31 pm  
To:  ALL   (153 of 163)  
 
  204.153 in reply to 204.121  
 
HAVE YOU FELT THE HURT OF THE LORD?

     Jesus said unto him the third time, Lovest thou Me?
     John 21:17

Have you felt the hurt of the Lord to the uncovered quick, the place
where the real sensitiveness of your life is lodged? The devil never
hurts there, neither sin nor human affection hurts there, nothing
goes through to that place but the word of God. "Peter was grieved
because Jesus said unto him the third time. . . ." He was awakening
to the fact that in the real true centre of his personal life he was
devoted to Jesus, and he began to see what the patient questioning
meant. There was not the slightest strand of delusion left in Peter's
mind, he never could be deluded again. There was no room for
passionate utterance, no room for exhilaration or sentiment. It was a
revelation to him to realize how much he did love the Lord, and with
amazement he said - "Lord, Thou knowest all things." Peter began to
see how much he did love Jesus; but he did not say - "Look at this or
that to confirm it." Peter was beginning to discover to himself how
much he did love the Lord, that there was no one in heaven above or
upon earth beneath beside Jesus Christ; but he did not know it until
the probing, hurting questions of the Lord came. The Lord's questions
always reveal me to myself.

The patient directness and skill of Jesus Christ with Peter! Our Lord
never asks questions until the right time. Rarely, but probably once,
He will get us into a corner where He will hurt us with His
undeviating questions, and we will realize that we do love Him far
more deeply than any profession can ever show.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 2:33 pm  
To:  ALL   (154 of 163)  
 
  204.154 in reply to 204.121  
 
THE UNRELIEVED QUEST

     Feed My sheep.
     John 21:17

This is love in the making. The love of God is tin-made, it is God's
nature. When we receive the Holy Spirit He unites us with God so that
His love is manifested in us. When the soul is united to God by the
indwelling Holy Spirit, that is not the end; the end is that we may
be one with the Father as Jesus was. What kind of oneness had Jesus
Christ with the Father? Such a oneness that the Father sent Him down
here to be spent for us, and He says - "As the Father hath sent Me,
even so send I you."

Peter realizes now with the revelation of the Lord's hurting question
that he does love Him; then comes the point - "Spend it out." Don't
testify how much you love Me, don't profess about the marvellous
revelation you have had, but - "Feed My sheep." And Jesus has some
extraordinarily funny sheep, some bedraggled, dirty sheep, some
awkward, butting sheep, some sheep that have gone astray! It is
impossible to weary God's love, and it is impossible to weary that
love in me if it springs from the one centre. The love of God pays no
attention to the distinctions made by natural individuality. If I
love my Lord I have no business to be guided by natural temperament;
I have to feed His sheep. There is no relief and no release from this
commission. Beware of counterfeiting the love of God by working along
the line of natural human sympathy, because that will end in
blaspheming the love of God.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 2:34 pm  
To:  ALL   (155 of 163)  
 
  204.155 in reply to 204.121  
 
COULD THIS BE TRUE OF ME?

     But none of these things move me, neither count I my
     life dear unto myself.
     Acts 20:24

It is easier to serve God without a vision, easier to work for God
without a call, because then you are not bothered by what God
requires; common sense is your guide, veneered over with Christian
sentiment. You will be more prosperous and successful, more
leisure-hearted, if you never realize the call of God. But if once
you receive a commission from Jesus Christ, the memory of what God
wants will always come like a goad; you will no longer be able to
work for Him on the common-sense basis.

What do I really count dear? If I have not been gripped by Jesus
Christ, I will count service dear, time given to God dear, my life
dear unto myself. Paul says he counted his life dear only in order
that he might fulfil the ministry he had received; he refused to use
his energy for any other thing. Acts 20:24 states Paul's almost
sublime annoyance at being asked to consider himself; he was
absolutely indifferent to any consideration other than that of
fulfilling the ministry he had received. Practical work may be a
competitor against abandonment to God, because practical work is
based on this argument - Remember how 'useful you are here, or -
Think how much value you would be in that particular type of work."
That attitude does not put Jesus Christ as the Guide as to where we
should go, but our judgment as to where we are of most use. Never
consider whether you are of use; but ever consider that you are not
your own but His.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 2:35 pm  
To:  ALL   (156 of 163)  
 
  204.156 in reply to 204.122  
 
IS HE REALLY LORD?

     ... so that I might finish my course with joy, and the
     ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus.
     Acts 20:24

Joy means the perfect fulfilment of that for which I was created and
regenerated, not the successful doing of a thing. The joy Our Lord
had lay in doing what the Father sent Him to do, and He says - "As My
Father hath sent Me, even so am I sending you." Have I received a
ministry from the Lord? If so, I have to be loyal to it, to count my
life precious only for the fulfilling of that ministry. Think of the
satisfaction it will be to hear Jesus say - "Well done, good and
faithful servant"; to know that you have done what He sent you to do.
We have all to find our niche in life, and spiritually we find it
when we receive our ministry from the Lord. In order to do this we
must have companied with Jesus; we must know Him as more than a
personal Saviour. "I will show him how great things he must suffer
for My sake."

"Lovest thou Me?" Then - "Feed My sheep." There is no choice of
service, only absolute loyalty to Our Lord's commission; loyalty to
what you discern when you are in closest contact with God. If you
have received a ministry from the Lord Jesus, you will know that the
need is never the call: the need is the opportunity. The call is
loyalty to the ministry you received when you were in real touch with
Him. This does not imply that there is a campaign of service marked
out for you, but it does mean that you will have to ignore the
demands for service along other lines.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 2:38 pm  
To:  ALL   (157 of 163)  
 
  204.157 in reply to 204.122  
 
UNDAUNTED RADIANCE

     Nay, in all these things, we are more than conquerors
     through Him that loved us.
     Romans 8:37

Paul is speaking of the things that might seem likely to separate or
wedge in between the saint and the love of God; but the remarkable
thing is that nothing can wedge in between the love of God and the
saint. These things can and do come in between the devotional
exercises of the soul and God and separate individual life from God;
but none of them is able to wedge in between the love of God and the
soul of the saint. The bedrock of our Christian faith is the
unmerited, fathomless marvel of the love of God exhibited on the
Cross of Calvary, a love we never can and never shall merit. Paul
says this is the reason we are more than conquerors in all these
things, super-victors, with a joy we would not have but for the very
things which look as if they are going to overwhelm us.

The surf that distresses the ordinary swimmer produces in the
surf-rider the super-joy of going clean through it. Apply that to our
own circumstances, these very things - tribulation, distress,
persecution, produce in us the super-joy; they are not things to
fight. We are more than conquerors through Him in all these things,
not in spite of them, but in the midst of them. The saint never knows
the joy of the Lord in spite of tribulation, but because of it - "I
am exceeding joyful in all our tribulation," says Paul.

Undaunted radiance is not built on anything passing, but on the love
of God that nothing can alter. The experiences of life, terrible or
monotonous, are impotent to touch the love of God, which is in Christ
Jesus our Lord.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 2:40 pm  
To:  David (DavidABrown)    (158 of 163)  
 
  204.158 in reply to 204.122  
 
THE TIME OF RELAPSE

     Will ye also go away?
     John 6:67

A penetrating question. Our Lord's words come home most when He talks
in the most simple way. We know Who Jesus is, but in spite of that He
says - "Will ye also go away?" We have to maintain a venturing
attitude toward Him all the time.

"From that time many of His disciples went back, and walked no more
with Him." They went back from walking with Jesus, not into sin, but
they relapsed. Many to-day are spending and being spent in work for
Jesus Christ, but they do not walk with Him. The one thing God keeps
us to steadily is that we may be one with Jesus Christ. After
sanctification the discipline of our spiritual life is along this
line. If God gives a clear and emphatic realization to your soul of
what He wants, do not try to keep yourself in that relationship by
any particular method, but live a natural life of absolute dependence
on Jesus Christ. Never try to live the life with God on any other
line than God's line, and that line is absolute devotion to Him. The
certainty that I do not know - that is the secret of going with
Jesus.

Peter only saw in Jesus Someone to minister salvation to him and to
the world. Our Lord wants us to be yoke-fellows with Him.

v. 70. Jesus answers the great lack in Peter. We cannot answer for
others.




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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 2:42 pm  
To:  ALL   (159 of 163)  
 
  204.159 in reply to 204.122  
 
VISION

     I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision.
     Acts 26:19

If we lose the vision, we alone are responsible, and the way we lose
the vision is by spiritual leakage. If we do not run our belief about
God into practical issues, it is all up with the vision God has
given. The only way to be obedient to the heavenly vision is to give
our utmost for God's highest, and this can only be done by
continually and resolutely recalling the vision. The test is the
sixty seconds of every minute, and the sixty minutes of every hour,
not our times of prayer and devotional meetings.

"Though it tarry, wait for it." We cannot attain to a vision, we must
live in the inspiration of it until it accomplishes itself. We get so
practical that we forget the vision. At the beginning we saw it but
did not wait for it; we rushed off into practical work, and when the
vision was fulfilled, we did not see it. Waiting for the vision that
tarries is the test of our loyalty to God. It is at the peril of our
soul's welfare that we get caught up in practical work and miss the
fulfilment of the vision.

Watch God's cyclones. The only way God sows His saints is by His
whirlwind. Are you going to prove an empty pod? It will depend on
whether or not you are actually living in the light of what you have
seen. Let God fling you out, and do not go until He does. If you
select your own spot, you will prove an empty pod. If God sows you,
you will bring forth fruit.

It is essential to practise the walk of the feet in the light of the
vision.



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   From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 2:48 pm  
To:  ALL   (160 of 163)  
 
  204.160 in reply to 204.122  
 
THE ABANDONMENT OF GOD

     God so loved the world that He gave...
     John 3:16

Salvation is not merely deliverance from sin, nor the experience of
personal holiness; the salvation of God is deliverance out of self
entirely into union with Himself. My experimental knowledge of
salvation will be along the line of deliverance from sin and of
personal holiness; but salvation means that the Spirit of God has
brought me into touch with God's personality, and I am thrilled with
something infinitely greater than myself, I am caught up into the
abandonment of God.

To say that we are called to preach holiness or sanctification, is to
get into a side eddy. We are called to proclaim Jesus Christ. The
fact that He saves from sin and makes us holy is part of the effect
of the wonderful abandonment of God.

Abandonment never produces the consciousness of its own effort,
because the whole life is taken up with the One to Whom we abandon.
Beware of talking about abandonment if you know nothing about it, and
you will never know anything about it until you have realized that
John 3:16 means that God gave Himself absolutely. In our abandonment
we give ourselves over to God just as God gave Himself for us,
without any calculation. The consequence of abandonment never enters
into our outlook because our life is taken up with Him.



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From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 2:48 pm  
To:  David (DavidABrown)    (161 of 163)  
 
  204.161 in reply to 204.122  
 
OBEDIENCE

     His servants ye are to whom ye obey.
     Romans 6:16

The first thing to do in examining the power that dominates me is to
take hold of the unwelcome fact that I am responsible for being thus
dominated. If I am a slave to myself, I am to blame because at a
point away back I yielded to myself. Likewise, if I obey God I do so
because I have yielded myself to Him.

Yield in childhood to selfishness, and you will find it the most
enchaining tyranny on earth. There is no power in the human soul of
itself to break the bondage of a disposition formed by yielding.
Yield for one second to anything in the nature of lust (remember what
lust is: "I must have it at once," whether it be the lust of the
flesh or the lust of the mind) - once yield and though you may hate
yourself for having yielded, you are a bondslave to that thing. There
is no release in human power at all but only in the Redemption. You
must yield yourself in utter humiliation to the only One Who can
break the dominating power viz., the Lord Jesus Christ - "He hath
anointed me...to preach deliverance to all captives."

You find this out in the most ridiculously small ways - "Oh, I can
give that habit up when I like." You cannot, you will find that the
habit absolutely dominates you because you yielded to it willingly.
It is easy to sing - "He will break every fetter" and at the same
time believing a life of obvious slavery to yourself. Yielding to
Jesus will break every form of slavery in any human life.



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  From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 2:52 pm  
To:  ALL   (162 of 163)  
 
  204.162 in reply to 204.122  
 
THE MASTER ASSIZES

     For we must all appear before the judgment seat of
     Christ. 2nd Corinthians 5:10

Paul says that we must all, preacher and people alike, "appear before
the judgment seat of Christ." If you learn to live in the white light
of Christ here and now, judgment finally will cause you to delight in
the work of God in you. Keep yourself steadily faced by the judgment
seat of Christ; walk now in the light of the holiest you know. A
wrong temper of mind about another soul will end in the spirit of the
devil, no matter how saintly you are. One carnal judgment, and the
end of it is hell in you. Drag it to the light at once and say - "My
God, I have been guilty there." If you don't, hardness will come all
through. The penalty of sin is confirmation in sin. It is not only
God who punishes for sin; sin confirms itself in the sinner and gives
back full pay. No struggling nor praying will enable you to stop
doing some things, and the penalty of sin is that gradually you get
used to it and do not know that it is sin. No power save the incoming
of the Holy Ghost can alter the inherent consequences of sin.

"But if we walk in the light as He is in the light." Walking in the
light means for many of us walking according to our standard for
another person. The deadliest Pharisaism to-day is not hypocrisy, but
unconscious unreality.




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   From:  David (DavidABrown)    5/13/2002 2:54 pm  
To:  ALL   (163 of 163)  
 
  204.163 in reply to 204.122  
 
SHALL I ROUSE MYSELF UP TO THIS?

     Perfecting holiness in the fear of God.
     2nd Corinthians 7:1

"Having therefore these promises." I claim the fulfilment of God's
promises, and rightly, but that is only the human side; the Divine
side is that through the promises I recognize God's claim on me. For
instance, am I realizing that my body is the temple of the Holy
Ghost, or have I a habit of body that plainly will not bear the light
of God on it? By sanctification the Son of God is formed in me, then
I have to transform my natural life into a spiritual life by
obedience to Him. God educates us down to the scruple. When He begins
to check, do not confer with flesh and blood, cleanse yourself at
once. Keep yourself cleansed in your daily walk.

I have to cleanse myself from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit
until both are in accord with the nature of God. Is the mind of my
spirit in perfect agreement with the life of the Son of God in me, or
am I insubordinate in intellect? Am I forming the mind of Christ, Who
never spoke from His right to Himself, but maintained an inner
watchfulness whereby He continually submitted His spirit to His
Father? I have the responsibility of keeping my spirit in agreement
with His Spirit, and by degrees Jesus lifts me up to where He lived -
in perfect consecration to His Father's will, paying no attention to
any other thing. Am I perfecting this type of holiness in the fear of
God? Is God getting His way with me, and are other people beginning
to see God in my life more and more?

Be serious with God and leave the rest gaily alone. Put God first
literally.



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