Come What May

He shall not be afraid of evil tidings; his heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord.  Ps. 112:7

Suspense is dreadful.  When we have no news from home, we’re apt to grow anxious and we cannot be persuaded that ‘no news is good news’.  Faith is the cure for this condition of sadness: the Lord by His Spirit settles the mind in holy serenity, and all fear is gone as to the future as well as the present.

The fixedness of heart spoken of by the Psalmist is to be diligently sought after.  It is not believing this or that promise of the Lord, but the general condition of the unstaggering trustfulness in our God, the confidence which we have in Him that He will neither do us ill Himself, nor suffer anyone else to harm us.  This constant confidence meets the unknown as well as the known of life.  Let the morrow be what it may, our God is the God of tomorrow.  Whatever events may have happened which to us are unknown, our Jehovah is God of the unknown as well as of the known.  We are determined to trust the Lord, come what may.  If the very worst should happen, our God is still the greatest and the best.  Therefore will we not fear though the postman’s knock should startle us, or a telegram wake us at midnight.  The Lord liveth, and what can His children fear?

Recognizing Him

Three convicting thoughts this morning from Oswald Chambers:

The love of God is that He laid down His life for His enemies.  Think of the worst man or woman you know; can you say to yourself, with any degree of joyful certainty, “That man-that woman-perfect in Christ Jesus”?  You will soon see how much you believe in Christ Jesus and how much in common sense.

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We can always know whether we are hearkening to God’s voice by whether or not we have joy;  if there is no joy, we are not hearkening.  Hearkening to the voice of God will produce the joy that Jesus had.  A life of intimacy with God is characterized by joy.  You cannot counterfeit joy or peace.  What is of value to God is what we are, not what we affect to be.

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To be faithful in every circumstance means that we have only one loyalty, and that is to our Lord.  Most of us are too devoted to our own ideas of what God wants even to hear His call when it comes.  We may be loyal to what we like, but we may find we have been disloyal to God’s calling of us by not recognizing Him in either the distress and humiliation or the joy and blessing.

The Great Reversal

Provocative thoughts on our time daily in the Word, from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together:

Consecutive reading of Biblical books [Scripture] forces everyone who wants to hear to put himself, or to allow himself to be found, where God has acted once and for all for the salvation of men.  We become a part of what once took place for our salvation.  Forgetting and losing ourselves, we, too, pass through the Red Sea, through the desert, across the Jordan into the promised land.  With Israel we fall into doubt and unbelief and through punishment and repentance experience again God’s help and faithfulness.  All this is not reverie but holy, godly reality.  We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth.  There God dealt with us, and there He still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace.  It is not that God is the spectator and sharer of our present life, howsoever important that is; but rather that we are the reverent listeners and participants in God’s action in the sacred story, the history of Christ on earth.  And only insofar as we are there, is God with us today also.

   

A complete reversal occurs.  It is not in our life that God’s help and presence must still be proved, but rather God’s presence and help have been demonstrated for us in the life of Jesus Christ.  It is in fact more important for us to know what God did to Israel, to his Son Jesus Christ, than to seek what God intends for us today.  The fact that Jesus Christ died is more important than the fact that I shall die, and the fact that Jesus Christ rose from the dead is the sole ground of my hope that I, too, shall be raised on the Last Day.  Our salvation is external to ourselves.  I find no salvation in my life history, but only in the history of Jesus Christ.  Only he who allows himself to be found in Jesus Christ, in His incarnation, his cross, and His resurrection, is with God and God with him.

In this light the whole devotional reading of the Scriptures becomes daily more meaningful and salutary.  What we call our life, our troubles, our guilt, is by no means all of reality; there in the Scriptures is our life, our need, our guilt, and our salvation.  Because it pleased God to act for us there, it is only there that we shall be saved.  Only in the Holy Scriptures do we learn to know our own history… 

A Joy That Can Never Be Quenched

"In every phase of human experience apart from Jesus, there is something that hinders our getting full joy.  We may have the fulfillment of our ambitions, we may have love and money, yet there is the sense of something unfulfilled, something not finished, not right.  A man [woman] is only joyful when s/he fulfills the design of God’s creation of him, and that is a joy that can never be quenched." --Oswald Chambers

(Reminds me of the first catechism question—What is the chief end of man?  To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.)

"It takes a sharp discipline for many of us to learn that our goal is God Himself, not joy, nor peace, nor even blessing, but God Himself.  Oh the joy of life with God and in God and for God!" --Oswald Chambers 

--A street in Paris--

Unlike the Chameleon

“What comfort would it be to pray to a God that, like the chameleon, changed colors every day, every moment…The immutability of God is a strong ground of consolation…and encourages hope and confidence…While we have Him for our God, we have His immutability, as well as any other perfection of His nature, for our advantage.  The nearer we come to Him the more stability we shall have in ourselves; the further from Him, the more liable to change…let us also desire those things which are nearest to Him in this perfection: the righteousness of Christ, that shall never wear out; and the grace of the Spirit, that shall never burn out…”

Stephen Charnock, A Golden Treasury of Puritan Devotion

I Cannot Thrive On the Grace of Yesterday

“The daily bread is the gift of God.  Never let me divest it of its glamor and glory, as if it were a thing common and usual.  Never let me partake of it without reverence and the giving of thanks.  There may not be about its bestowal the same marvel, and the same manifest miraculousness, which marked the coming of manna to Israel: the King of Kings prefers to accompany me in modest quietness, rather than in flaming majesty and regal dress.  But behind the loaf and the grain, above the farmer and the miller, the Father of Lights stands unseen.  He opens His bountiful Hand, and my wants are met.  Would it not be an easy thing for Him to spoil my harvests and to leave me destitute?  All to Him I owe.  Apart from Him I must go hungry and thirsty, a beggar and in rags.  And do I praise Him for His largesse as I ought?

“The daily bread is a parable of higher and more sacred things.  The children of Israel saw in the manna something unearthly and inexplicable…I sit at my food and drink, and a window should be opened for me into a world more wonderful and more divine.  I should see Him Who is the Bread of my undying spirit, Him who gives me the Water of an everlasting life.  Him, too, I must seek and find with the return of every fresh morning.  I cannot thrive on the grace of yesterday, nourishing and ample as that was for yesterday’s need.  I must welcome, hour after hour, and minute after minute, a new pardon, a new sanctity, a new wisdom, a new strength to foil and overthrow the world and the flesh and the devil, a new peace of God to garrison my heart and mind.  With each new sunrise mine ought to be a mightier and fuller Christ.”

--taken from In The Secret Place, Alexander Smellie

Photos courtesy of Thistledown Cards

Thoughts, Affections, Activities--Led by the Spirit

"For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.”  Romans 8:14

Thus it is not I who am “master of my fate”, not I who am “captain of my soul”.  It is Some One else—Some One stronger, wiser, better by far.  I would be led by the Spirit of God.  For this is a tutelage and servitude more productive of good than any freedom which the world knows.  He is the noblest Guide, and who is so greatly to be envied as His pupil and follower, walking humbly where He points?

My thoughts – let the Spirit lead them.  Then they will not be surrendered to what is trivial, misleading, or sinful.  The largest and the holiest themes will enlist my mind:  God the Father, His Son, Jesus Christ, my soul with its powers and its needs, salvation, and eternity.  I shall engage in no study on which I cannot ask my Teacher’s blessing, and in which I may not rely on His help.  Especially I will beseech, and expect, and receive His illumination when the Book of books is open before me.  His glory will “guild the sacred pages, resplendent like the sun”.

My affections—let the Spirit lead them.  Then, while all that is fair and inviting in nature and art and human comradeship will have its legitimate place and its constraining and controlling influence, heaven will loom largest and God will be foremost.  I would have the lower attachments and tendernesses purged and hallowed by this diviner Love.  They enrich me more than I can say, and I am thankful for every one of them; but it appeases my hunger and purifies my life as the best of them cannot do.  Yielding to it, I shall carry in me a satisfied heart, and I shall be a spring of strength and grace to many another soul.

My activities—let the Spirit lead them.  Then I shall be up and doing.  Morning after morning I shall hear Him call me to my duties for the Master, and for the world over which the Master yearns.  Day after day He will empower me with a might which is not my own, and my labor will not be in vain in the Lord.  Evening after evening I shall subject myself to His scrutiny and wait for His verdict on what I have done.  He will be the Fountain of my strength, the Standard of my aspiration, and the Judge of my works.  And this is the life that pleases God and that benefits men.

My hopes—let the Spirit lead them.  Then consciously, rejoicingly, victoriously, I shall be stepping westward, away from the glooms behind, through a region bright, towards a heavenly destiny—not a sunset, but a sunrise.  The sky in front will be aglow with wonderful color, and I shall see the Holy City descending from God.  In it, as the Indwelling Comforter whispers, there is a place prepared by my Lord for me.  In it, He tells me, the disabilities of the present will be gone, and shall have passed from anticipation and prayer to fulfillment.  And is it not the best of prophecies and promises?

He is well led whom the Spirit leads.

--treasured from In the Secret Place, Alexander Smellie

Gospel-The Ridiculous Wonder that Dazzles

A guest post from our daughter; an imaginative look at the depth of grace upon grace our God has given us, that warmed and challenged me.

“But as we have been approved by God…”  What does it mean to be “approved by God?”  What are the implications?  Qualifications?  I have a picture of this picture of the Inspector of the grand warehouse of the cosmos, reviewing His creation, and we get glimpses at His verdicts—“It is good”, He spoke over creation in the beginning.  His heart was pleased, His purposes were being carried out without opposition, every living thing glorified Him in every act and every breath. 

Then, several chapters later, we find the Inspector “grieved in His heart”—the work of His hands, His precious possessions had rebelled, shaken off the easy, light yoke of their King and struck out along their own barren road. 

As I read in I Thessalonians, I find this confident assertion by Paul and his fellow workers, “we have been approved by God.”  Before I had read over this without thinking “approved by God”…next verse.  But something catches me here, the dazzling brilliance that lurks in the words.  Approved, approved by the God of eternity past and eternity to come, the God that spoke the universe into existence; He pronounced the work of His words good.  But we, we men acted defiance and twisted our minds away from the light and the entire world recoiled from God.  So now these words—approved by God, whence come they?  And I think I know, they come from the mighty God who being in the form of God, made Himself of no reputation, and took on himself the form of a bondservant;  they come from the mighty God Who came in the likeness of men, and felt the weakness of frail humanity, the fires of human passion, the manifold temptations of the flesh, and won out against the power of sin; they come from the mighty God Who, being found in appearance as a man humbled Himself to the point of death, even the death of the cross.  He bore the displeasure of a just God, the wrath of a potter on rebellious clay, the wrath of a Creator against His twisted creation, and threw His own Son out of His presence, forsook Him and cast Him out of all fellowship, out of all light, out of all harmony and all hope of glory—so that we who so desperately desired to make a name for ourselves apart from the name with which He named us in the beginning, might be called sons of the Living God; that we who rejected the lot appointed to us by a wise Creator might be called heirs of the kingdom of heaven; that we who rejected His hand of power over us might be given, our hand into His in holy marriage; that we who marred His image in us by our actions, might awake in His likeness; that we who so grieved His heart, filled deep with love, might please His heart, and delight our King; that we who distained fellowship and acquaintance and inheritance and all association with this glory might be approved by this Just King Whose wrath is fierce and who leaves no iniquity unpunished.

Reading on, Paul and the others say “But as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel…”  Wilder and wilder.  At this point, if I am truly grasping the words, this story has passed from completely unbelievable to definite fantasy.  The Father has welcomed His prodigal home and the world cannot believe it.  But now He sends that prodigal son out to all His clients as His representative, to carry out all His business, to sign in His name, to oversee His business and to set up contacts—to be the representation of His character by his intentions and actions.  I mean, God has sacrificed His own Son, brought sinners into His holy palace, clothed beggars in the royal robes after washing them in the lifeblood of His only Son—God has just written the most passionate, crazy love story ever heard of, and now He’s entrusting the relaying of this story to the people who botched up the whole mess and spit on this grace to begin with—the people who crucified His Son.  For goodness sake, why didn’t He send angels?  Probably the angel Gabriel alone could do a better job than a million blundering earthlings.  The gospel, that treasure whose glory and ridiculous wonder dazzles all who behold Christ—why on earth did He entrust us with that?

 

Somehow it all brings more glory to Him, for without His power we would fail miserably at this job, more miserably than we failed the test in the garden, because that was a midterm…this is the final.  We have the entire scheme of His working in history to look at, the cross is before us, the intention of His love is declared and sealed by and engagement ring—His Spirit, and this is the last age, the end of all time when the harvest is brought in and the time is short.  Knowing our weakness, He sent a helper, the engagement seal to aid us in our work until He returns.  He does not leave us comfortless, powerless, helpless, but sends assurance of His love, and the power to fulfill His call.  He didn’t send His angels to declare the gospel, but He commissioned us, His bride, to tell of His love, we, who know the depths and heights of His affection for us in Christ.  He didn’t send angels because Christ didn’t die for angels, the promises aren’t for angels, the sight of His glory in the gospel has not been fully given to angels, but to men.  And men are given this great, grand commission to go out and proclaim these mysteries hidden for ages, these things which angels long to hear; to proclaim the knowledge of Christ over the face of the earth that the hearts of all who are called might burn within them at the words of that gospel and be changed into the glorious likeness of Christ.