This is an astounding video clip from John Piper! Please soak up this powerful 2-minute snippet…
I love when he says, “Too many Christians are fighting graduate school sins with a grammar school knowledge of God.” You can find the link to watch Piper’s entire sermon by clicking here.
This is a periodic 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.
Faith And Common Sense
Common sense is not faith and faith is not common sense; they stand in the relation of Ishmael and Isaac, of the natural and the spiritual, of individuality and personality, of impulse and inspiration. 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 right relationship. …
How am I going to find out what the will of God is? In one way only, by not trying to find out. If you are born again of the Spirit of God, you are the will of God, and your ordinary common sense decisions are God’s will for you unless He gives you an inner check. When He does, call a halt immediately and wait on Him. Be renewed in the spirit of your mind that you may make out His will, not in your mind, but in practical living. God’s will in my common sense life is not for me to accept conditions and say—“Oh well, it is the will of God,” but to apprehend them for Him, and that means conflict, and it is of God that we conflict. Doing the will of God is an active thing in my common sense life.
From Not Knowing Where [italics in original; bold font added by me]
Have you ever considered that we find the will of God by not trying to find the will of God? I love Chambers’ conclusion that as a Christian you are the will of God, now we just need to be renewed in our spirits to hear His voice and direction for us.
Here are some more quotes from Oswald Chambers’ book Notes On Ezekiel. My book review is here, and my first set of quotes from this book is here.
“We are too shallow to be afraid of God. … It requires a miracle of grace before we believe this, consequently we are foolishly fearless, but when the grace of God lifts us into the life of God we fear nothing and no one saving God alone. … Confusion arises when we do not see God as Almighty.”
“God will put us in circumstances where we have to take steps of which we do not see the meaning, only on looking back do we discern that it was God’s will for us.”
“We are always on the wrong line when we come to God with a pre-occupied mind because a pre-occupied mind springs from a disloyal heart: ‘I don’t want to do God’s will, what I want is for God to give me permission to do what I want to do.’”
“What God burns is not weakness, not imperfection, but perverted goodness.”
“Every part of our human nature which is not brought into subjection to the Holy Spirit after experiencing deliverance from sin will prove a corrupting influence.”
“We all have the sneaking idea that we are the favorites of God—‘It’s alright for me to do this, God will understand.’ If I as a child of God commit sin, I will be as sternly dealt with as if I were not His child.”
“Don’t tie God up in your own conceptions, or say too surely you know what God will do. … The sovereign purposes of God work out slowly and inexorably, but ever be careful to note where God’s sovereignty is at work among men in matters of history and Time, and where it is at work in matters of eternal destiny. Beware of allowing your memory of how God has worked to take the place of present vital moral relationship to Him.”
“When I have been using ‘the sword of the Spirit’ in a spirit of indignation against another, it is a terrible experience to find the sword suddenly wrested out of my hand and laid about me personally by God. Let your personal experience of the work of God’s Spirit instruct you at the foot of Calvary; let the light of God riddle you through, then you will never use the Word of God to another, never turn the light of God on him, without fear and trembling.”
“Liberty is the ability to obey the law of God, with the power to live according to its demands; license is the unrestrained impulse to traffic against the law of God. … The seal of immorality is that I do what I like; the seal of freedom is that I do what God likes.”
“If the Holy Spirit is obeyed the stubbornness is blown out, the dynamite of the Holy Ghost blows it out.”
“Pride in its most estimable as well as its most debased form is self-deification; it is not a yielding to temptation from without, but a distinct alteration of relationships within.”
“I may suffer because of the sins of my progenitors—I am never punished for them.”
“In dealing with Bible experiences we must ever make allowance for the miraculous, which never contradicts reason, but very often does contradict common sense. The miraculous transcends reason and lifts it into another world than the logical one, consequently spiritual experience is something I have lived through, not thought through.”
I love the way Brennan Manning writes! It’s so gut-level real. His words both convict me and encourage me to go deeper into God’s love. You can read my full book review of The Furious Longing Of God by clicking here. Below are some of the quotes I especially appreciated.
“The God I’ve come to know by sheer grace, the Jesus I met in the grounds of my own self, has furiously loved me regardless of my state—grace or disgrace. And why? For His love is never, never, never based on our performance, never conditioned by our moods—of elation or depression. The furious love of God knows no shadow of alteration or change. It is reliable. And always tender.”
“The foundation of the furious longing of God is the Father who is the originating Lover, the Son who is the full self-expression of that Love, and the Spirit who is the original and inexhaustible activity of that Love, drawing the created universe into itself.”
“Pagan philosophers such as Aristotle arrived at the existence of God via human reason and referred to Him in vague, impersonal terms: the uncaused cause, the immovable mover. The prophets of Israel revealed the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in a warmer, more compassionate manner. But only Jesus revealed to an astonished Jewish community that God is truly Father.”
“The degree of Abba’s love for me is in direct proportion to His love for Jesus. For example, I can love the mailman with twenty percent and my best friend with ninety percent. But with God, there is no division, no more and no less. God loves me as much as He loves Jesus. Wow!”
“First, if we continue to picture God as a small-minded bookkeeper, a niggling customs officer rifling through our moral suitcase, as a policeman with a club who is going to bat us over the head every time we stumble and fall, or as a whimsical, capricious, and cantankerous thief who delights in raining on our parade and stealing our joy, we flatly deny what John writes in his first letter (4:16)—‘God is love.’ In human beings, love is a quality, a high-prized virtue; in God, love is His identity. Secondly, if we continue to view ourselves as moral lepers and spiritual failures, if our lives are shadowed by low self-esteem, shame, remorse, unhealthy guilt, and self-hatred, we reject the teaching of Jesus and cling to our negative self-image.”
“Healing becomes the opportunity to pass off to another human being what I have received from the Lord Jesus; namely His unconditional acceptance of me as I am, not as I should be. He loves me whether in a state of grace or disgrace, whether I live up to the lofty expectations of His gospel or I don’t. He comes to me where I live and loves me as I am.”
“To affirm a person is to see the good in them that they cannot see in themselves and to repeat it in spite of appearances to the contrary.”
“Jesus said the world is going to recognize you as His by only one sign: the way you are with one another on the street every day. You are going to leave people feeling a little better or a little worse. You’re going to affirm them or deprive them, but there’ll be no neutral exchange.”
“The question is not can we heal? The question, the only question, is will we let the healing power of the risen Jesus flow through us to reach and touch others, so that they may dream and fight and bear and run where the brave dare not go?”
“How is it then that we’ve come to imagine that Christianity consists primarily in what we do for God? How has this come to be the good news of Jesus? Is the kingdom that He proclaimed to be nothing more than a community of men and women who go to church on Sunday, take an annual spiritual retreat, read their Bibles every now and then, vigorously oppose abortion, don’t watch x-rated movies, never use vulgar language, smile a lot, hold doors open for people, root for the favorite team, and get along with everybody? Is that why Jesus went through the bleak and bloody horror of Calvary? Is that why He emerged in shattering glory from the tomb? Is that why He poured out His Holy Spirit on the church? To make nicer men and women with better morals? The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand-new creations. Not to make people with better morals, but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love.”
Brennan Manning at times seems to tap into dimensions of our relationship with God that I had never considered before, and his book The Furious Longing Of God is a great example of this.
It is almost foreign in a Christian’s vocabulary, or even understanding of Scripture, to think of God furiously longing for a relationship with the people He has created. But God does long for this, and Manning pulls out those biblical passages and weaves them together with his own life story to create a hunger in us for more of God.
Each chapter builds on the previous chapter, creating in me a longing to experience God’s longing. This book is not difficult to read, but it is confronting. I doubt you can read Manning’s words are remain unmoved by God’s passionate, relentless, furious longing for you.
If you too long for a deeper relationship with your Creator, this is a great book to help you on that journey.
Suppose you had to do a secret project on a remote island. In fact, the island is so remote that it doesn’t even have a name or show up on a map. I am your only point of contact, and the only one with the latitude and longitude coordinates to come get you. You have a satellite phone to use. If I truly cared about you, I would give you the precise sequence of digits to reach me. If I didn’t care about you, I’d let you call any number you wanted to call: perhaps you would eventually reach someone who could help you.
The most loving thing I could do for you is to make sure you knew the one number to call in order to get the help you needed.
This is exactly how God starts the Ten Commandments—And God spoke all these words: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me.”
How confusing and utterly unloving it would be if God said, “Call any number you want to see if you can find the help you need.” Instead, in His great love for us God says, “I am the only One you will ever need!”
Notice the wording here: “…I am the LORD your God…”
This First Commandment is the orientating commandment. When we see all of God’s commandments are rooted in His love (by the way, God uses the phrase the LORD your God five times in the Ten Commandments), everything else in our lives and attitudes is properly aligned.
Jesus demonstrated this for us. He said He loved His Father and therefore obeyed all of His commands (John 14:31). Christ’s obedience was motivated and aligned by love. The Apostle John said this loving obedience is to be the distinguishing characteristic for us too:
This is love for God: to keep His commands. And His commands are not burdensome. (1 John 5:3)
We honor God and obey the First Commandment best when we know He is the One Who loves us enough to say, “I am the only One you need. Don’t look to anyone or anything else, but just come to Me!”
If you have missed any of the messages in our series The Love In The Law, you can find them all by clicking here.
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.
Get Closer To Jesus
You can’t pump up faith out of your own heart. Whenever faith is starved in your soul it is because you are not in contact with Jesus; get in contact with Him and lack of faith will go in two seconds.
From Conformed To His Image
Oswald Chambers’ words remind me of the old song…
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.
Character Development
God can put a saint into a right relationship with Himself, but He cannot make him work out that relationship, the saint must do that himself. …
God alters our disposition, but He does not make our character. When God alters my disposition the first thing the new disposition will do is to stir up my brain to think along God’s line. As I began to think, begin to work out what God has worked in, it will become character. Character is consolidated thought. God makes me pure in heart; I must make myself pure in conduct.
From Conformed To His Image
I like to think of the word sanctification this way: saint-ification. Through His Holy Spirit, God is making me a saint, by making it possible for me to demonstrate Christlike conduct.
Are you allowing the Holy Spirit to make a saint out of you? What’s holding you back?
(If you are in the Cedar Springs area this Sunday, I will be talking more about the Holy Spirit’s role in this saint-ification process. Please join me!)
These are links to articles and quotes I found interesting today.
“C.S. Lewis wrote that the most dangerous ideas in a society aren’t the ones argued, but the ones assumed. For most of us—myself included—it’s tempting to take up arms and jump in the trenches every time a loud and headline-grabbing controversy breaks. But if Lewis was right, it’s not the moments of intense crossfire that are the most culturally significant. They come and go. But it is those times, like the Grammy Awards, when culture doesn’t react, that really signal where we are” (John Stonestreet). Read John′s full commentary: Why The Grammys Mattered More Than Miley
[VIDEO] Very fun: The Great Grasshoppers!
7 More Ways Husbands & Wives Injure Each Other Without Even Knowing It
“The best style of prayer is that which cannot be called anything but a cry.” —Charles Spurgeon
[VIDEO] Amazing (and cold!!): Surfing Lake Michigan
What is man that You are mindful of him, the son of man that You care for him? You made him ruler over the works of Your hands; You put everything under his feet. (Psalm 8:4-5)
In mythology, humans are an after-thought, a nuisance, slaves and servants of the gods, and usually pawns in the gods’ scheming against each other.
But Jehovah God created man as a part of His creation. He created mankind in His own image and breathed His own life into him. After the first five days of creation, God said, “It is good.” But on the sixth day, after creating man, He said, “It is very good!”
Jehovah God has man at the forefront of His mind. He not only calls us into a relationship with Him, but the Trinity works in divine cooperation to make it possible for us to come to Him.
He doesn’t see a mass of humanity, but He sees each one of us individually and uniquely. And He is attentive to us—“For the Lord has heard my cry for mercy; the Lord accepts my prayer” (Psalm 6:9).
As David burst into praise with this realization of God’s forethought of us, let us echo this praise (Psalm 8:9)—
Craig T. Owens 