Written Word

Life Is Not Limited to This Life

God did not create man, who is the excellence of His creation, to see him snuffed out like a candle in a short three-score and ten years. Lesser lives suffer the indignity of such final extinction, not man who was made in the image of his Creator; and God has taken care to show this truth to us in the following way: Life consists of a series of cycles or days, each of which mimics the complete life span of man. Every day has a morning and a night, a beginning and an ending. Early and midmorning symbolize the start and early years of life. Late morning, noontime and early afternoon denote the approach and entrance into middle age. Late afternoon and early evening are analogous to the nearing and entering into old age. Nighttime is death.

But night with its somber black shroud does not signal the end of existence. At the end of every night there is a bright morning, continually reminding the believer in Christ that the seeming finality of death is a lie and there is a new day following in its wake.

An Example from Nature

These naturally recurring cycles are meant to bring a message to the believer. Look at it: The normal man does not dread the approach of nighttime. Admittedly, the coming of night does bring with it a feeling of fatigue; but becoming tired is an accepted accompaniment of making it through the day. Just living through the day can of itself be a wearying thing, and for the average man a good night's rest is something to look forward to.

So it should be with the Christian. As his day moves inexorably towards night, he is expected to become weary with the rigors of living and long for the rest and release of the night. This is not being morbid or strange. It is the healthy, normal, natural approach to the end of the day.

An Example from Nature's Creatures

The caterpillar, a grubby little insect which is doomed to crawl on its belly all its days, at a certain time of life literally entombs itself in a coffin-like cocoon. It "dies," but only that it may emerge, in due time, a transfigured lovely butterfly. It willingly spins a shroud around itself and quits its present life. But this is by no means the end of the story for the caterpillar. God has ordained that this lowly creature should, in due time, awaken from its apparent death into a completely new life. It enters into a beautiful new existence, free from crawling on the ground, free from the tenacious grip of gravity, free to flit through the air on lovely gossamer wings. "Death" has greatly improved its appearance and habits.

While it was still a caterpillar it did not fear nor fight the termination of its life. It did what came naturally. If the caterpillar had had the intelligence of a man it very well might have had an unreasonable fear of the ending of its restricted life and fought to prolong it. But caterpillars do not have the reasoning ability of men. They go without fear into their dark night and, in due course, they awaken to the glorious end for which they were created.

Follow the Lowly Insect

The believer in Christ should be as "unsophisticated" as the caterpillar. With his vastly superior knowledge man should realize that death is merely a natural step forward in the continuum of his eternal existence. As ironic as it may seem, death is a divinely appointed part of life and ought to be accepted as such. To die is to live forever.

We have to face the reality that man is a grubby little insect that is doomed to crawl on its belly all its days. Then, at a certain time in its mucky life, it dies. But this lowly insect dies only that it may emerge, in due time, a transcendent glorified being, completely changed from its old appearance and habits. The glorified man will no longer crawl through the filth of the earth. He will no longer be held in the grip of gravity. He will be free: free from all cares and fears, free from disappointments and heartaches, free from sickness and death and tears, free to live eternally with Christ.

You're not through yet, friend. Whether you are eighteen or eighty, you have a demand laid on you by God to keep the faith and finish the course. Start living!

Jesus Is the Answer to Your Confusion

The post below was written by me January 28, 2008. I have made some minor editorial changes because I am not the same person now that I was then. I am a child of the King and, like all normal children, I have grown some in that brief time. My horizon has been broadened and my vision has improved.

 

There is a personal story I want to tell you because there may be someone it can help. Please indulge me.

Faith Covenant Church of Jesus Christ, where I am a member, had gone on a 21-day period of special fasting, self-denial and prayer. The 21-day journey had ended on a Sunday afternoon. I had made a commitment to do thus and so during the special consecration and, by the grace of God, I had honored that commitment to the end. Now that the final lap had been completed, it would seem that I would be flushed with victory. I was – for a few hours – but it did not last long.

That very night in the wee hours of the morning, Satan launched a massive attack on my faith. It was a mental thing and it was not against my faith in God, but against just about everything else. One was that I had not yet seen the resolution to a certain problem. Why should I have gone through a prolonged period of fasting and self-denial if my prayer was not answered? [As I now look at what I said then, it does seem a little conceited and self-centered.]

Another attack was focused on my unworthiness. Who am I that I should expect anything special from the Lord? My life has not been what one would call a resounding success story in any area. [Again it was all about ME in a self-pitying sort of way.]

For the time I was a confused traveler, wandering spiritually and mentally. It wasn't that I no longer sensed the presence of God (I had been through that before and it was not a pleasant experience). I sensed His presence, but not in a special way. There was a huge obstacle in my path, a rock of immense proportions blocking all further progress. I was weary to the bone, exhausted and frustrated. I thought, Have I come this far only to be defeated? Am I thus vanquished when I am so near the end of my journey? In desperation I cried out to God for help and strength and a renewal of my depleted energy.

I felt no comfort or assurance, no encouragement at the moment. If God had only given me a measure of comfort, assurance and encouragement even without showing me the right way to take at the time, it would have sufficed. But He gave me nothing that night.

Then the next day about noon, God began to move and to speak… and He spoke and He spoke. He made me to know that the insurmountable, immovable, unyielding rock lying athwart my pathway is Jesus! My Master had for the moment blocked my progress that He might teach me several valuable lessons (that had been learned previously but their light had been dimmed by the cloud of my adversities). The lessons were 1) no success is attained without difficulty; 2) what seems to be crushing defeat is just a step on the road to success; and 3) God is my ROCK, He is the source of my aggravating hindrances, but also the fountainhead of my joy, peace and life itself.

Suddenly, gushing from the rock before me, "lo! A spring of joy I see," a life-giving, refreshing stream issuing from the Rock that was blocking my pathway. My thirst was quenched and my weary soul revived. Then, miraculously, a way was opened through the very Rock itself! Now my eyes are opened and I can see clearly what had previously been hidden by my carnal doubts and fears. The way through all obstacles is Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth and the life.

Although He has not yet shown me the particular path I should take, I am no longer harried and confused. Everything is superbly, supremely and serenely all right. He will work in His own way and time. Jesus is the way and He has assured me of the fact. That was all I needed. I did not need to see exactly where I was going; I required no other sign than this: God spoke and all was right with my world.

Beware of the First Signs of Unbelief

Fighting the Beginnings of Doubt

“Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, in departing from the living God. But exhort one another daily, while it is called Today; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.” (Heb 3:12, 13)

   There will always be an adversary in this life trying to break down the relationship you have with your Maker. If the adversary can’t push you into overt sin, he will go the devious route and attempt to inject just the smallest seeds of doubt into your thoughts. As the frail creature that he is, man is particularly subject to disbeliefs easing themselves insidiously into his consciousness. We have to deal with the possibility of doubt at this point because no one is immune to it and, if it is left unchecked, it can destroy the Christian’s fellowship with God.

   The mind (heart) is the critical area that Satan seeks to control fully, so it is a matter of guarding your mind as well as possible against the unwanted intrusion of doubt. Somewhat akin to the Parable of the Sower is the analogy between the heart of the believer and a natural garden. Both have a gardener tending them. In this analogy, however, the gardener of the Christian’s heart is the Christian himself. You the gardener have to expend much care on your garden to see that it produces the right plants and that once a seedling or bulb is planted it grows to perfection. The area of utmost importance is to keep weeds from springing up in the midst of the good plants.

   The nature of a weed is exactly the opposite of a good plant in that it needs no tending. If a good plant is left untended it fares poorly and may soon wither. On the contrary, a weed shoots up unwanted at any time and flourishes as though it were given the best of care. Further, it is hard to root it all out of your garden. The proper method of handling weeds, therefore, is a preventative one. We must keep them from taking root or, failing that, we must promptly get rid of them, which can be a difficult task.

   Like good plants in a garden, faith is not an automatic thing that grows unplanted and untended in your heart. God the Master Gardener offered you the incipient faith you had when you were first saved. When you (the “tenant” gardener) accepted God’s offer, God planted the beginning faith in your heart. From that point it is up to you to tend the seedling of faith so that it may germinate and sprout upward like any other good plant.

   Doubt, like its counterpart the weed, is a hardy growth and is just the opposite of faith. Doubt is wafted into your heart like the seed of a weed that has been blown into a natural garden by a capricious breeze. The seed of doubt needs no tending to grow from a small insignificant growth into a large, unsightly and dangerous weed of unbelief.

The Results of Unbelief

   Eve, the mother of us all and the first human to encounter doubt, presents an example of the characteristics of doubt. In her case the doubt was not wafted in by chance; it was deliberately implanted there by Lucifer. Nevertheless, he had to have Eve’s cooperation. God had told Adam,

“Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Gen. 2:16b, 17.

   Eve was formed from Adam’s rib after the com­mandment was given, nevertheless she was aware of the commandment because she repeated to Lucifer what God had told Adam. Lucifer brushed what she said aside. “Ye shall not surely die,” he said. “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

   Eve gullibly allowed Lucifer to plant the doubt in her heart. Then, instead of realizing her mistake and rooting out the offensive plant, she began to consider the matter. That was a very serious mistake. God had given a commandment and no thought should have been given to evading it. She should have rejected Lucifer’s proposition out of hand. But, as she looked at the tree and saw how appealing its fruit was and considered the contradicting words of Lucifer, the small plant of doubt within her heart grew with a rush into a rank growth of unbelief. She did not believe what God had commanded.

“And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.” Gen. 3:6.

   There we have the picture of the planting of the seed of doubt and the growth of the seed into gross unbelief.

The text above is taken from Sweet Will of God, chapter two, “Beware of Unbelief.” You may get fuller details on the book by pressing here: http://bit.ly/Hj7m9

The Sublime and the Ridiculous

The Sublime – Working with God

I am not so brash as to think I can give the Lord help in directing my path. I am not smart enough to assist Him (imagine the audacity!) in laying out my days, my months or my entire life. God has plans for me and for every person who comes into this world. But we have to  realize He wants our total surrender to His will. Mark this well: God wants our total surrender to, and involvement in, His will. At no time does He require our advice.

There is a difference between 1) surrendering to God’s will and being involved in its fulfillment and 2) giving Him advice or even suggestions. We should not suggest, “Lord, perhaps it would be best for me to do thus and so,” or “Have you thought about my going here or there?” What impudence! God does not need nor does He want counsel from the creature He made without help or advice from any being outside of His own mighty Self. He needs no sage counsel from anyone on how to run a universe, a world or a life.

There has always been only God who made us and all things and to whom we give all the praise. God has done us only good from our inception until now. Whatever mistakes were made, man or angels made them. Man caused the terrible condition the world is in by his first sin in the Garden of Eden and by his  multitudinous sins since that time.

Yet God wants us to be totally involved with Him in fulfilling His will in the universe, the world and particularly in our individual lives. If we want to do this or that in our service to God, He is delighted that we want to work with Him and it certainly pleases Him that we should seek His will before boldly (and foolishly) striking out on our own. Seeking God’s will for a move we want to make and giving Him advice are two entirely separate things. The first God delights in, the second displeases Him.

The Ridiculous – Advising God

We are the children of God and have no need to fear extreme divine punishment. Hear what the Lord declares to us:

“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.  (12)  Then shall ye call upon me, and ye shall go and pray unto me, and I will hearken unto you.  (13)  And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.”  (Jer 29:11-13)

Read the Scriptures; you will find in them just how much God wants to work with us – as a junior partner of course – but that is excellent. You will be able to advance your ideas for His approval – or not – and know that nothing can go wrong with the “company” as long as the Senior Partner is in control.

But, as we so often do, we entertain the idea of “doing it my way.” We can never leave a good situation unspoiled; we have to make it “better.” Now we all know that God is longsuffering and very patient with us. But good scriptural common sense should tell us, despite the grace of God being limitless, we cannot go on bucking against God forever. That would lead to chaos in the Company.

The time is coming – maybe it’s many long years down the road, and maybe not – when this patient God who is also a just God, will have to consider severing your contract with the Company. That is a sobering thought. You can’t live outside the Company. You have been involved in Company work so long (trying to run the operations without consulting the Senior Partner) that you would be lost without its rules and regulations. You would be a Linus deprived of his security blanket.

You know of course that if you continue always doing things your way, you will find yourself fighting against God, and that is not wise, not wise at all. Have you lost all sanity? Do you really want to make God your adversary? If you continue to ignore the wishes of the Senior Partner, He will, in all fairness, have to disavow you. Then your plight will be tragic.

I can recall only two times in which the wrath of God was displayed through Jesus, and then it was relatively minimal. One was when Jesus cleansed the Temple (Mat. 21.12, 13; Mark  111.15, 16; Luke 19.45, 46), the other was when the crucifixion mob was trying to arrest Jesus (John 18.5, 6). Both instances were brief and comparatively low-key, thanks to the grace and mercy of God.  Jesus had come to save men, not destroy them.

Nevertheless there is a judgmental side to Jesus. If He is God incarnate, He has to have within Him all the traits of divinity. He does, and the wrathful side will show itself in the earth after the saints are caught away to be with their Lord. Jesus may at times evince displeasure with His children, He will reprove them when it is needed, but He never displays His wrath against them.

If I were an artist and possessed a talent that no artist has yet displayed of putting on canvas the concentrated wrath of God, the painting, although truthful, would be terrifying in the extreme. There would be lightning bolts furiously striking all around, denoting the aroused rage of God. The painting would be so real that the beholder could “hear” the booming thunderclaps accompanying the lightning strikes of divine wrath. The heavens would be black with the storm clouds of God’s extreme displeasure and all angels and cherubim would have fled the scene.  This work of art would be so  real that it would terrify all who looked at it. It would cause them to shut their eyes as if to keep divine wrath from damning them there in that moment.

The full wrath of God is a devastating stroke, annihilating all that offends God. It is at the same time an all-consuming fire that no creature or object can withstand. The human mind cannot take in the concept of the full wrath of God; it can only experience it and by then it will be an eternity too late.

Friend, God has tried to get you to work with Him. It’s possible He has been trying for many years. Don’t you think it’s time to put away the boxing gloves? You can’t spar with God; as one writer stated, your arms are too short. Perhaps you are even now on the outside, looking in, out in the miserable cold elements where you have no need to be. Dispense with the adversarial relationship with God. Take off the Advisor-to-the-Most-High-God chest band you’ve been wearing and learn to trust in Him and to work with Him, not against Him. He will do you naught but good.

Chosen by God

Have you ever given thought to how you happened to be involved in whatever it is that you are doing for God? Have circumstances and the like pushed you in a direction not originally of your choosing? Let’s not immediately get defensive and denigrate the “little” talent we have or the “small” work we are doing: “Why, I’m not doing anything worth talking about! I just work with this or that group...” or “I don’t have much talent, so I just do the little things that I can: I listen to people, I pray for them – God hasn’t called me to any great work...” and then your voice trails off wistfully as though you wish God would change His mind and call you to “any great work...”

You are just the one to whom I am directing these remarks. The workers in the Kingdom whom we esteem to be “great” – the preachers, missionaries, speakers, and whatnot – know how they got where they are. God called them to the specific work they are doing. Some had a vision or a dream or some great event through which God spoke to them. Others were called not so spectacularly, but they received a definite call from God to do what they are doing. (If they did not, they need to go to God for further instructions in how to serve Him correctly.)  But you – and I – we are water boys for the championship team. We are unnoticed and unsung contributors to a team of superstars.

But what you fail to realize is that everyone connected with this team is important – if he or she carries out their assigned tasks faithfully and well. Everyone is a contributor to the team’s success. Besides that, everyone is called by God to do “whatever it is that he is doing.” God does not work as we do, by whim and chance. He has known before we were ever a passing thought of our parents, who we would be, what He wanted us to be and of course He had to have a plan for our lives.

So many  of us fail to live up to God’s expectations. We either do not know what He wants of us or what He wants is not to our liking – although we would never think of ourselves as being disobedient to God. We just shrug off the gentle divine nudge to go this way or that way because it is too demeaning or it is not convenient. By a twisted sort of wishful thinking we assume it is not God leading us when it is really God trying to guide us in the path on which we belong, the path for which we were divinely chosen.

In chapter four of this book [Sweet Will of God] I have written that God can lead us by a variety of methods. One of the methods that I want to focus on in this present discussion is the “Circumstantial Method.” God can cause the paths of individuals from various widely separated places to converge for an hour, a day or whatever time it takes for them to jointly do the will of God. Or He can make their paths cross although the individuals may not be where their paths cross at the time they cross, but their having been there and the influence they leave behind them will fulfill the will of God for the moment, the hour or whatever time it takes to fulfill the will of God. Here is a preview of chapter four:

Example 2: Circumstantial

In this (circumstantial) method God allows circumstances to direct an individual's path. It will not be so much a matter of choice on the individual's part; he will be pulled along by the current of various happenings. Of course, the individual will already have committed himself to the will of God and that will be the way by which God leads him at that time.

An example of this type of divine guidance is found in the eighteenth chapter of Acts. It shows how God brought Aquila, born in Pontus on the Black Sea, and his wife Priscilla, together with Apollos who was born in Alexandria, Egypt to propagate the Gospel. Aquila and Priscilla had been living in Rome and had to leave there because Claudius Caesar had ordered all Jews out of Rome. They went to Corinth in Greece. While they were there Paul came to the city and stayed with them because they were of the same occupation as Paul. They were tent makers. We know from the record in Acts and from Paul's epistles how important Aquila and Priscilla were to Paul's efforts and to the Church in general. When Paul left Corinth to go to Ephesus, he took Aquila and Priscilla with him. Paul soon left the city, but Aquila and Priscilla stayed there.

Sometime after, Apollos came to Ephesus, preaching the limited knowledge of Christ that he had. He had been baptized only by John the Baptist who himself had said there was another baptism to come. When Aquila and his wife had heard Apollos preach, they realized that he needed to learn more, so they took him and taught him the full Gospel of Christ. After Apollos learned more, his preaching was more effective. From Ephesus he went to Achaia where ‘...he mightily convinced the Jews...shewing by the scriptures that Jesus was Christ.’ Apollos too became a good influence in propagating the Gospel in other places. This also is confirmed by Paul's letters. The Spirit of God evidently orchestrated this series of ‘chance’ happenings, proving that God is not limited in the ways He can lead His people.

If you are sincerely uncertain about what God wants you to do – and are not deliberately refusing to do His will – this is what you need to do to find that elusive mind of God: 1) clear out of your mind all thoughts about the “great work” you want to do; 2) yield to  God’s will as fully as you can; 3) pray earnestly for wisdom and guidance; and 4) do whatever good your hands find to do and, voila! – you will find yourself turning into the path God has had in mind for you all along. This may not happen overnight, but if you are sincere and don’t pay attention to the doubts that your carnal nature and the adversary bring to mind, God will be compelled to put you on the right track. That is what a God does.

The text above is an excerpt from Sweet Will of God by Aaron J. Smith. You can get more detail on the book by clicking here: http://bit.ly/Hj7m9