As requested, here are the quotes I shared in my message this morning…
“In Greek the word idol has in it the sense of unreality. Plato used it for the illusions of this world as opposed to the unchangeable realities of eternity.” —William Barclay
“What we think and believe, we are; not what we say we think and believe, but what we really do think and believe, we are; there is no divorce at all.” —Oswald Chambers
“Until the love of God that knows no boundary, limit, or breaking point is internalized through personal decision; until the furious longing of God seizes the imagination; until the heart is conjoined to the mind through sheer grace, nothing happens. The idolatry of ideas has left me puffed up, narrow-minded, and intolerant of any idea that does not coincide with mine.” —Brennan Manning
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.
Knowing God’s Thoughts
As soon as we begin to examine the foundations of our salvation we are up against the thoughts of God, and as Christians we ought to be busy thinking God’s thoughts after Him. That is where we fall short…. It is because of the refusal to think on Christian lines that satan has come in as an angel of light and switched off numbers of God’s children in their head, with the result that there is a divorce between heart and head.
From Conformed To His Image
I read a report recently that said in the United Kingdom, Facebook is read more each day than the Bible. My guess is that the same thing could be said for the United States of America. So if we’re not reading God’s Word, how in the world can we think God’s thoughts? If we don’t know what God is saying, we can’t know what He is thinking?!
So what are we left with? “I feel that God would want…” or “I don’t think God would…” and the like. WE, the biblically-illiterate, have become the final authority on what God thinks. No wonder satan has switched off so many people’s heads!
Don’t simply repeat what someone else says that God says. Read it for yourself!Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true (Acts 17:11).
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.
Prayer Works
The prayer of the feeblest saint on earth who lives in the Spirit and keeps right with God is a terror to satan. The very powers of darkness are paralyzed by prayer; no spiritualistic seance can succeed in the presence of a humble praying saint. No wonder satan tries to keep our minds fussy in active work till we cannot think in prayer. It is a vital necessity for Christians to think along the lines on which they pray. The philosophy of prayer is that prayer is the work.
From Christian Disciplines
Pray is not getting ready to work; prayer is the work.
We don’t make time to pray; but by prayer our effective time is multiplied.
Christians need to stop seeing prayer as something to do before work, or something to do instead of work, or something that is done after our work doesn’t seem to work. Prayer is the work because prayer works!
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.
Our Father
Think for one minute, have you behaved today as though God were your Father or have you to hang your head in absolute shame before Him for the miserable, mean, unworthy thoughts you have had about your life?
It all springs from one thing, you have lost hold of the idea that God is your Father. Some of us are such fussy, busy people, refusing to look up and realize the tremendous revelation in Jesus Christ’s words—“Your heavenly Father knows what you need….”
From He Shall Glorify Me
What an amazing thought that when Jesus taught us to pray, He said we could address Almighty God with the affectionate title of “Our Father.” In his book Who Do You Think You Are?, Mark Driscoll points out:
“In the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament, God is referred to only as Father roughly fourteen times—and each time it’s impersonally, in reference to the nation of Israel, not to individuals. Everything radically changed with Jesus. He spoke of God as Father more than sixty times in the New Testament.”
Your heavenly Father loves you more than you can possibly imagine! Let that truth sink in. Don’t give in to the thoughts that your life is not very valuable, or even that God doesn’t like you very much.
God loves you as if you were the only person on earth to love!And He sent Jesus to earth to make it possible for you to be adopted into His family, to call Him Father. Even more than that, to call Him “Daddy God” (see Romans 8:15-17).
Whether in a lecture, a sermon, a book, or a magazine article, Oswald Chambers challenges me like few other authors do. God’s Workmanship is a collection of lectures and articles which were odds-and-ends until his wife compiled them just prior to her death.
Many people know Chambers through his highly popular devotional My Utmost For His Highest. In that devotional book, Chambers shares a short thought, usually centered around a single passage of Scripture. In God’s Workmanship, the feel is very much the same. Each of the nearly 50 pieces which comprise this book are based around a single verse or a short passage from the Bible, but Chambers has more “space” to elaborate on his themes than he did in his devotional book.
The topics are varied, but rich. Themes such as grace, redemption, truth, possessions, personal relationships, the Bible, personal devotions, God’s holiness, sin, blessings, and suffering are covered so succinctly, eloquently, and biblically. Next to My Utmost, God’s Workmanship is a great introduction to the breadth of Oswald Chambers’ godly wisdom.
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Since the children have flesh and blood, [Jesus] too shared in their humanity so that by His death He might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil…. Because He Himself suffered when He was tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted. … Therefore, holy brothers, who share in the heavenly calling, fix your thoughts on Jesus…. (Hebrews 2:14, 18; 3:1)
Jesus defeated every temptation as a Man. He didn’t use His prerogatives as God to defeat the devil’s temptations; He faced them as we do: as a Man in the flesh.
Therefore, I need to fix my thoughts on Jesus.
[Think carefully about Jesus in the New Living Translation]
Jesus defeated—destroyed!—the devil by His death. Did God die? No! But the Man part—the human part of Jesus—died on the Cross. Then God raised Jesus from the dead. Was God dead? No! The Man part of Jesus was dead, and the Man part was resurrected.
Therefore, I need to fix my thoughts on Jesus.
[Thoughtfully and attentively consider Jesus in the Amplified Bible]
Jesus alone is able to help me. I cannot defeat the devil or his temptations on my own. Jesus defeated the devil’s temptation by His total reliance on the Father, and I can gain a victory over temptation by no other means.
Therefore, I need to fix my thoughts on Jesus.
[Look carefully at Jesus in the God’s Word translation]
Jesus suffered through temptation, but He was victorious and without sin. I too suffer through temptation, but He is able to help those who are being tempted! He can help me be victorious too!
Therefore, I need to fix my thoughts on Jesus.
[Fix your eyes and mind upon Jesus in the Greek Dictionary]
Where are your thoughts today? If they are on what you can do to defeat temptation, you’ll be disappointed in the outcome. Fix your thoughts: turn your full attention to Jesus!
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.
My Standard Of Conduct
Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter into the kingdom of Heaven. (Matthew 5:20)
The practical outcome of these words is astonishing; it means that my standard of moral conduct must exceed the standards of the most moral, upright man I know who lives apart from the grace of God. … Instead of our Lord lowering the standards of our moral conduct, He pushes it to a tremendous extreme. We have not only to do right things, but our motives have to be right, the springs of our thinking have to be right; we have to be so unblameable that God Himself can see nothing to censure in us.
There are some very moral people in the world, but their morality is of their own design, and not the morality that comes from a relationship in God’s grace (i.e. just like the first-century Pharisees). I cannot try to match their moral lifestyle, because my morality will not be God-centered.
My thoughts have to be perfectly moral. My thoughts about how I’m going to behave must be God-pleasing. This prayer of David needs to be my prayer as well if my thoughts and conduct are to be unblameable in God’s sight—
How can I know all the sins lurking in my heart? Cleanse me from these hidden faults. Keep Your servant from deliberate sins! Don’t let them control me. Then I will be free of guilt and innocent of great sin. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing to You, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:12-14)
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.
Mirror
It is a wonderful thing that God can cleanse and purify the thinking of our hearts. That is why our Lord says, “Of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh” (Luke 6:45). The Bible says that words are born in the heart, not in the head. …
Jesus Christ said He always spoke as His Father wished Him to. Did His Father write out the words and tell Him to learn them by heart? No, the mainspring of the heart of Jesus Christ was the mainspring of the heart of God the Father, consequently the words Jesus Christ spoke were the exact expression of God’s thoughts. In our Lord the tongue was in its right place; He never spoke from His head, but always from His heart.
Have you ever noticed how friends begin to talk like each other? They laugh at the punchline without the joke being told any longer, because they know it so well.
Or how about married couples who can finish each other’s sentences, because they are so in tune with each other.
Biblical scholars have pointed out the similarity of the writing styles of Luke and the Apostle Paul, probably due to the huge amount of time they spent with each other.
We begin to mirror those with whom we spend the most time.
Jesus Christ had His heart filled with God’s presence, so His words mirrored the thoughts of His Father (John 12:49).
What about me? Whom do I mirror? My vocabulary will tell me who fascinates me most, who has my attention, and who has my heart.
I pray that more and more my words reveal that I mirror my Savior Jesus Christ. May my heart be fascinated and attentive to Him, and then may I never speak from my head, but always from my heart.
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.
Guard Your Heart With Your Head
The Bible puts the head in the prominent position, not the central position; the head is the “finish off,” the manifestation of what the heart is like; the outward expression of the heart, as a tree is the outward expression of the root. This is the relationship between the head and the heart which the Bible reveals. …
In dealing with the Bible the danger is to come to it with a preconceived idea, to exploit it, and take out of it only what agrees with that idea. If we try, as has been tried by psychologists, to take out of the Bible something that agrees with modern science, we shall have to omit many things the Bible says about the heart. According to the Bible the heart is the center: the center of physical life, the center of memory, the center of damnation and of salvation, the center of God’s working and the center of the devil’s working, the center from which everything works which molds the human mechanism.
Oswald Chambers was a holistic thinker: he knew the role of the Holy Spirit and the role of psychologists; he saw how the mind, spirit, and soul worked interdependently with each other. He never suggested that psychological issues be repaired with spiritual methods, nor that spiritual concerns be addressed by psychology.
But he also saw how easy it was to make heart matters (spiritual) concerns which should be addressed as head matters (psychological). The Bible says, “Above all else guard your heart, for from it flow all of the issues of life” (Proverbs 4:23).
So how do I guard my heart? Part of guarding my heart does start with my head: I need to think about what’s going into my heart. But, as Oswald Chambers says, the head is just the “finish off” of what is happening in the heart. So ultimately, to keep my head in the right place, I need to guard my heart. I need to make my heart exclusively the home of the Holy Spirit, and allow Him free access to all of the concerns in my heart.
This is the only way I can “finish off” the right way.
These words are usually said after we have messed up something. We look back and say, “What was I thinking?!”
The truth is: you were thinking, it was just wrong thinking.
The Apostle Paul writes this:
Clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature. (Romans 13:14)
The King James Version, instead of do not think, says, “make no provision for the flesh.” In other words, the idea here is forethought.
We have a filter at the base of our brains called the reticular activating system (or R.A.S.). This is what lets in the important things, and keeps out the unimportant things. But here is the vital issue—
YOU CAN PROGRAM YOUR R.A.S.!
You tell your RAS what’s important and what’s unimportant. Paul says that if we use our forethought to consciously decide to clothe ourselves with Christ, we are programming our RAS to spot the things that glorify Him and ignore the things that gratify our fleshly desires.
A phrase that I use often (hat tip to Dr. Richard Dobbins) is: I need to think about what I’m thinking about.
By doing this, I’m able to see how I’ve programmed my RAS. It’s either programmed to look for God-honoring things or flesh-gratifying things.
Try it for yourself. Make the conscious decision to read the Bible every day. Then in your prayer time, ask the Holy Spirit to help you think about God-honoring things. If you will do this, you will notice that you are noticing more things that please God, and that you are ignoring more things that please your sinful nature.
As requested, here are the quotes I shared in my message this morning…
Craig T. Owens 