Thursdays With Oswald—The Word & The Words

This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.

Oswald Chambers

The Word & The Words

     The Bible is the Word of God only to those who are born from above and who walk in the light. Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, and the Bible, the words of God, stand or fall together, they can never be separated without fatal results. A man’s attitude to our Lord determines his attitude to the Bible. 

     The “sayings” of God to a man not born from above are of no moment; to him the Bible is simply a remarkable compilation of literature—“that it is, and nothing more.” All the confusion arises from not recognizing this. 

     But to the soul born from above, the Bible is the universe of God’s revealed will. The Word of God to me is ever according to my spiritual character; it makes clear my responsibility to God as well as my individuality apart from Him. 

From Christian Disciplines (emphasis mine)

Do you agree with Chambers on this viewpoint?

In light of this, how will you view Scripture differently?

Mouth-To-Mouth

Mouth to mouthI’ve notice that when someone feels physically tired, mentally unengaged, spiritually embattled, emotionally dry, or just plain worn out, they have an audible physical sign that is almost universal.

Those people sigh.

A sigh is an involuntary response that signifies frustration and a call for help. It should also be a reminder of the best place to find that help.

In Psalm 119, the chapter is organized in 8-verse segments. I like to look at the “bookend” verses of each section, as it usually gives a good idea of what that section is focusing on. The section called kaph has this bookended statement—

My soul faints with longing for Your salvation … Preserve my life according to Your love, and I will obey the statues of Your mouth (Psalm 119:81, 88).

Follow this progression:

  • When God created man, He breathed a soul into him. So we are created by His breath.
  • Jesus said that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. God’s Word is inspired, which means it is literally God-breathed. So our soul is sustained by the breath of God.

The psalmist says his soul is sighing and wasting away, but he recognizes that his God-breathed soul can be restored through the God-breathed word. So in verse 88 he is asking God to give him mouth-to-mouth (or perhaps mouth-to-soul) resuscitation! 

The psalmist talks about clinging tenaciously to God’s Word as if it were his only lifeline … because it is! So whenever you find yourself sighing, let that be a reminder that you can get your spiritual resuscitation from the breath of God: His Word. Hold on to it as if your very life depended on it … because it does!

If you have missed any of the messages in our P119 series, you can access them all by clicking here.

The Preacher’s Power

Andrew Murray“There are many who think they must only preach the Word, and that the Spirit will make the Word fruitful. They do not understand that it is the Spirit, in and through the preacher, who will bring the Word to the heart of the listeners. I must not be satisfied with praying to God to bless through the operation of His Spirit the Word that I preach. The Lord wants me to be filled with the Spirit; then I will speak as I should and my preaching will be in the manifestation of the Spirit and power.”

—Andrew Murray

Thursdays With Oswald—The Will Of God

This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.

Oswald Chambers

The Will Of God 

     Supernatural voices, dreams, ecstasies, visions and manifestations, may or may not be an indication of the will of God. The words of Scripture, the advice of the saints, strong impressions during prayer, may or may not be an indication of the will of God.

     The one test given in the Bible is discernment of a personal God and a personal relationship to Him, witnessed to ever after in walk and conversation. 

From Christian Disciplines

The will of God may or may not come to you in a thundering voice or even in a still, small impression in your heart. But the way you walk and talk will absolutely attest to what you believe the will of God is. The way you walk and talk witnesses to what you believe.

So when you look at you, do you see God’s will on display?

Oxymoron

John of the CrossNo, an oxymoron is not the big oaf sitting next to you! An oxymoron is a literary term where two seemingly contradictory things are put together to make a new item. For instance, jumbo shrimp isn’t something that is big smallness, but a tasty seafood dish. A girl who is awfully pretty isn’t a beautiful jerk, but someone remarkably cute.

I love the oxymoron that appears in the section of Psalm 119 called Teth—good pain. In just eight verses the word good appears six times, right alongside the word afflicted, which appears twice.

How in the world can pain be good?!?

To be sure there is bad pain, but where does good pain come in? Bad pain is the pain that sends you to the doctor, perhaps the pain that means you need to have surgery. There is still pain after the surgery, but that’s a good pain because it reminds you that what was wrong has been fixed. But if what was wrong has now been fixed, wouldn’t we say that the initial pain was really good pain all along?

That’s what the writer of the 119th Psalm thought. He said, “It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn Your decrees” (v. 71). Do you see the good pain there? How about in verse 67: “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey Your Word.”

A 16th-century monk named John of the Cross described good pain this way—

“Thou hast wounded me, oh, hand Divine, in order to heal me, and Thou hast slain in me that which would have slain me but for the life of God wherein now I see that I live.” (emphasis added)

We’re really good at dulling physical pain with aspirin, Motrin and Tylenol. We try to chase away emotional pain with anti-depressants. And, to our own harm, we try to excuse or mask our spiritual pain too. But that spiritual pain is GOOD pain … if we will listen to it.

The psalmist knew good pain that came from the Holy Spirit’s illumination of God’s Word was something to pay attention to and obey quickly. The writer of Hebrews knew it too—

For the Word that God speaks is alive and full of power, making it active, operative, energizing, and effective; it is sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating to the dividing line of the breath of life (soul) and the immortal spirit, and of joints and marrow of the deepest parts of our nature, exposing and sifting and analyzing and judging the very thoughts and purposes of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12, Amplified Bible)

Don’t ignore that spiritual pain. It’s good pain for those who will listen.

If you have missed any of the messages in our P119 series, you can access them all by clicking here.

Thursdays With Oswald—The Right Context For Scripture

This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.

Oswald Chambers

The Right Context For Scripture 

     You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. … Yet you refuse to come to Me to have life. (John 5:39-40) 

     These verses reveal how a knowledge of the Scriptures may distort the mind away from Jesus Christ. Unless we know the Living Word personally first, the literal words may lead us astray. The only way we can understand the Bible is by personal contact with the Living Word, then the Holy Spirit expounds the literal words to us along the line of personal experience. 

     … There is a context to the Bible, and Jesus Christ is that Context. The right order is personal relationship to Him first, then the interpretation of the Scriptures according to His Spirit. 

From Bringing Sons Until Glory 

Amen! Chambers is precisely on target with this.

Broken And Poured Out

Pastor, do you preach your sermons to yourself? You should, because you need to hear the Word of God more than your congregation does!

If you are going to speak the living Word of God to others, you need to be a pure vessel for God’s use. You need to allow the Holy Spirit to break you and pour you out. Consider these words from Smith Wigglesworth—

WigglesworthYou cannot take people into the depths of God unless you have been broken yourself. … God wants to bring you forth as a flame of fire with a message from God, with a truth that will disturb the powers of satan, and with an unlimited supply for every needy soul.

How important it is for all God’s ministers to be continually in prayer and constantly feeding on the Scriptures of Truth. … None of you can be strong in God unless you are diligently and constantly listening to what God has to say to you through His Word. You cannot know the power and the nature of God unless you partake of His inbreathed Word.

Oh, if I could only stir you up to see that, as you are faithful in the humblest role, God can fill you with His Spirit, make you a chosen vessel for Himself, and promote you to a place of mighty ministry in the salvation of souls and in the healing of the sick. Nothing is impossible to a man filled with the Holy Spirit. The possibilities are beyond all human comprehension. When you are filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, God will wonderfully work wherever you go.

(From his book On Healing, emphasis added)

Thursdays With Oswald—Are Christ’s Teachings Nonsense?

This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.

Oswald Chambers

Are Christ’s Teachings Nonsense? 

     Every Christian worker has to decide this question: Is Jesus Christ’s mind infallible, or is the modern Western mind infallible? The tendency abroad today is to think ourselves infallible, and the Bible a jumble up of the most extraordinary stuff, good stuff, but we cannot be expected to accept all its views. That means we believe ourselves to be more infallible than Jesus Christ. 

     We would repudiate this statement if made baldly, but we all act as if it were true, we all take for granted that Jesus Christ’s teachings are nonsense; we treat them with respect and reverence, but we do not do anything with them, we do not carry them out. 

From The Highest Good 

“Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.” —Jesus

14 Quotes From “Smith Wigglesworth On Healing”

Wigglesworth HealingI hope these quotes from Smith Wigglesworth On Healing will excite you to read this book. If you’d like to read my book review, please click here.

“Never listen to human plans. God can work mightily when you persist in believing Him in spite of discouragement from the human standpoint. … I am moved by what I believe. I know this: no man looks at the circumstances if he believes.”  

“There are times when there seems to be a stone wall in front of us. There are times when there are no feelings. There are times when everything seems as black as midnight, and there is nothing left by confidence in God. What you must do is have the devotion and confidence to believe that He will not fail, and cannot fail. You will never get anywhere if you depend on your feelings. There is something a thousand times better than feelings, and it is the powerful Word of God. There is a divine revelation within you that came when you were born from above, and this is real faith. To be born into the new kingdom is to be born into a new faith.”

“You must be yielded to the Word of God. The Word will work out love in our hearts, and when practical love is in our hearts, there is no room to boast about ourselves. We see ourselves as nothing when we get lost in this divine love.”

“You can never pray ‘the prayer of faith’ (James 5:15) if you look at the person who is needing it; there is only one place to look, and that is to Jesus.”

“Hard things are always opportunities to gain more glory for the Lord as He manifests His power. Every trial is a blessing. … The hardest things are just lifting places into the grace of God.”

“The Master does not want us to reason things out, for carnal reasoning will always land us in a bog of unbelief. He wants us simply to obey.”

“You must come to see how wonderful you are in God and how helpless you are in yourself.”

“May God help us to see this truth. We cannot be ‘to the praise of His glory’ (Ephesians 1:12) until we are ready for trials and are able to triumph in them.”

“God is never tightfisted with any of His blessings.”

“Jesus was manifested in the flesh to destroy the power of the devil (1 John 3:8). What does that mean? It means this: He is God’s example to show us that what God did for and in Jesus, He can do for and in us.”

“The reason the world is not seeing Jesus is that Christian people are not filled with Jesus. They are satisfied with attending meetings weekly, reading the Bible occasionally, and praying sometimes. … It is an awful thing for me to see people who profess to be Christians lifeless, powerless, and in a place where their lives are so parallel to unbelievers’ lives that it is difficult to tell which place they are in, whether in the flesh or in the Spirit.”

“There is no such thing as the Lord’s not meeting your need. There are no ifs or mays; His promises are all shalls. ‘All things are possible to him who believes’ (Mark 9:23).”

“Faith is just the open door through which the Lord comes. Do not say, ‘I was saved by faith’ or ‘I was healed by faith.’ Faith does not save and heal. God saves and heals through that open door. You believe, and the power of Christ comes.” 

“I clearly see that we ought to have spiritual giants in the earth, mighty in understanding, amazing in activity, always having a wonderful testimony because of their faith-filled activity. I find instead that there are many people who perhaps have better discernment than the average believer, better knowledge of the Word the the average believer, but they have failed to put their discernment and knowledge into practice, so the gifts lie dormant.”

Servanthood

ServanthoodThis morning we wrapped up our series called Life Together—where we looked at the one another phrases in the New Testament that related to the Church—with the thought of serving one another.

I think this 1-minute video from John Maxwell captures this thought about servanthood well…

From The Personalized Promise Bible we looked at this prayer that comes from the servanthood example of Jesus in John 13:13-17—

Jesus is my Mentor and the Lord of my life. He has left me an example of the greatest servitude the world has ever known. I will do as he did and wash the feet of my brothers and sisters in Christ. I will see the real good and benefit of others through humble service. With a tender heart of compassion, I will take the time to do good to those around me. Through this generosity of service and willingness to give of myself to others, no matter how humbling the service may be, I store up for myself favor upon favor, and blessing upon blessing.