Filed under: Devotionals
. . . that they may be one just as We are one . . . —John 17:22
Personality is the unique, limitless part of our life that makes us distinct from everyone else. It is too vast for us even to comprehend. An island in the sea may be just the top of a large mountain, and our personality is like that island. We don’t know the great depths of our being, therefore we cannot measure ourselves. We start out thinking we can, but soon realize that there is really only one Being who fully understands us, and that is our Creator.
Personality is the characteristic mark of the inner, spiritual man, just as individuality is the characteristic of the outer, natural man. Our Lord can never be described in terms of individuality and independence, but only in terms of His total Person— “I and My Father are one” ( John 10:30 ). Personality merges, and you only reach your true identity once you are merged with another person. When love or the Spirit of God come upon a person, he is transformed. He will then no longer insist on maintaining his individuality. Our Lord never referred to a person’s individuality or his isolated position, but spoke in terms of the total person— “. . . that they may be one just as We are one . . . .” Once your rights to yourself are surrendered to God, your true personal nature begins responding to God immediately. Jesus Christ brings freedom to your total person, and even your individuality is transformed. The transformation is brought about by love— personal devotion to Jesus. Love is the overflowing result of one person in true fellowship with another.
Filed under: Devotionals
We realize that we are energized by the Holy Spirit for prayer; and we know what it is to pray in accordance with the Spirit; but we don’t often realize that the Holy Spirit Himself prays prayers in us which we cannot utter ourselves. When we are born again of God and are indwelt by the Spirit of God, He expresses for us the unutterable.
We do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered —Romans 8:26
“He,” the Holy Spirit in you, “makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God” ( Romans 8:27 ). And God searches your heart, not to know what your conscious prayers are, but to find out what the prayer of the Holy Spirit is.
The Spirit of God uses the nature of the believer as a temple in which to offer His prayers of intercession. “. . . your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit . . .” (1 Corinthians 6:19 ). When Jesus Christ cleansed the temple, “. . . He would not allow anyone to carry wares through the temple” ( Mark 11:16 ). The Spirit of God will not allow you to use your body for your own convenience. Jesus ruthlessly cast out everyone who bought and sold in the temple, and said, “My house shall be called a house of prayer . . . . But you have made it a ’den of thieves’ ” (Mark 11:17 ).
Have we come to realize that our “body is the temple of the Holy Spirit”? If so, we must be careful to keep it undefiled for Him. We have to remember that our conscious life, even though only a small part of our total person, is to be regarded by us as a “temple of the Holy Spirit.” He will be responsible for the unconscious part which we don’t know, but we must pay careful attention to and guard the conscious part for which we are responsible.
Filed under: Devotionals
If you love Me, keep My commandments —John 14:15
Our Lord never insists obedience. He stresses very definitely what we ought to do, but He never forces us to do it. We have to obey Him out of a oneness of spirit with Him. That is why whenever our Lord talked about discipleship, He prefaced it with an “If,” meaning, “You do not need to do this unless you desire to do so.” “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself . . .” ( Luke 9:23 ). In other words, “To be My disciple, let him give up his right to himself to Me.” Our Lord is not talking about our eternal position, but about our being of value to Him in this life here and now. That is why He sounds so stern (see Luke 14:26 ). Never try to make sense from these words by separating them from the One who spoke them.
The Lord does not give me rules, but He makes His standard very clear. If my relationship to Him is that of love, I will do what He says without hesitation. If I hesitate, it is because I love someone I have placed in competition with Him, namely, myself. Jesus Christ will not force me to obey Him, but I must. And as soon as I obey Him, I fulfill my spiritual destiny. My personal life may be crowded with small, petty happenings, altogether insignificant. But if I obey Jesus Christ in the seemingly random circumstances of life, they become pinholes through which I see the face of God. Then, when I stand face to face with God, I will discover that through my obedience thousands were blessed. When God’s redemption brings a human soul to the point of obedience, it always produces. If I obey Jesus Christ, the redemption of God will flow through me to the lives of others, because behind the deed of obedience is the reality of Almighty God.
Filed under: Devotionals
Without faith it is impossible to please Him . . . —Hebrews 11:6
Faith in active opposition to common sense is mistaken enthusiasm and narrow-mindedness, and common sense in opposition to faith demonstrates a mistaken reliance on reason as the basis for truth. The life of faith brings the two of these into the proper relationship. Common sense and faith are as different from each other as the natural life is from the spiritual, and as impulsiveness is from inspiration. Nothing that Jesus Christ ever said is common sense, but is revelation sense, and is complete, whereas common sense falls short. Yet faith must be tested and tried before it becomes real in your life. “We know that all things work together for good . . .” ( Romans 8:28 ) so that no matter what happens, the transforming power of God’s providence transforms perfect faith into reality. Faith always works in a personal way, because the purpose of God is to see that perfect faith is made real in His children.
For every detail of common sense in life, there is a truth God has revealed by which we can prove in our practical experience what we believe God to be. Faith is a tremendously active principle that always puts Jesus Christ first. The life of faith says, “Lord, You have said it, it appears to be irrational, but I’m going to step out boldly, trusting in Your Word” (for example, see Matthew 6:33 ). Turning intellectual faith into our personal possession is always a fight, not just sometimes. God brings us into particular circumstances to educate our faith, because the nature of faith is to make the object of our faith very real to us. Until we know Jesus, God is merely a concept, and we can’t have faith in Him. But once we hear Jesus say, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” ( John 14:9 ) we immediately have something that is real, and our faith is limitless. Faith is the entire person in the right relationship with God through the power of the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
By John Piper
1. There is very little in the New Testament about the forms and style and content of corporate worship. Following Old Testament forms too closely contradicts the obsolescence of the wineskins. God must mean to leave the matter of form and style and content to the judgment of our spiritual wisdom—not to our whim or our tradition, but to prayerful, thoughtful, culturally alert, self-critical, Bible-saturated, God-centered, Christ-exalting, reflection driven by a passion to be filled with all the fullness of God. I assume this will be an ongoing process, not a one time effort.
2. One way to describe the differences in how people approach worship is to speak in terms of fine culture and folk culture. By “culture” I mean a pattern of life including thought and emotion and speech and activity. By “fine culture” I have in mind the pattern of life that puts a high priority on intellectual and artistic expressions that require extraordinary ability to produce and often demand disciplined efforts to understand and appreciate. By “folk culture” I have in mind the pattern of life that puts a high priority on expressions of heart and mind that please and help average people without demanding unusual effort.
For example it’s the difference between classical music and blue grass (or easy listening or rock or show tunes or oldies or country western —all of which are “the music of the people”, though I realize there is a continuum rather than a neat box for all kinds and qualities of music.)
Or another example would be the contrast between a Shakespearean drama at the Guthrie and “The Empire Strikes Back” at a theater.
Or one might think of the difference between reading Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Poem “The Windhover – To Christ Our Lord”.
“I caught this morning’s minion, kingdom
of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing.
Or on the other hand reading the homespun poetry of Edgar A Guest,
It takes a heap o’ livin’ to make a house a home.
3. We should not pass judgment on fine culture or folk culture per se. There are caricatures of the excesses in both that are easy to condemn. That is not our purpose. It is more profitable is to consider the strengths and weaknesses built in to both of them so has to avoid the weaknesses and affirm the strengths in both. Fine culture and folk culture have intrinsic vulnerabilities to sin and unique potentialities for God-glorifying goodness. They are redeemable.
4. Intrinsic vulnerabilities of high culture include elitism and snobbishness. In demanding high levels of intellect and skill, it easily inflates the ego of those who succeed in it, and tempts them to look with contempt on folk culture with its simpler achievements. It easily isolates technical expertise from the larger issues of life and attempt to give it intrinsic value instead of defining its value in relation to other, more important spiritual and personal realities. It is inevitably less accessible to average people and therefore tends toward performance rather than participation, and this performance orientation carries again the tendency toward an atmosphere of aloofness and distance.
5. Intrinsic vulnerabilities of folk culture include a laziness and carelessness. There is an intrinsic drift toward increasing indifference to simple disciplines that define excellence at the most rudimentary levels (for example, using bad grammar in worship songs like “you reigneth” or having “you” and “thou” in the same line. This is not like the word “ain’t” in “You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.” It’s like singing “Thou ain’t nothin but a hound dog.”). Folk culture, with its intrinsic anti-intellectualism tends to short circuit the mind and move the emotions with shortcuts. Thus folk culture is not generally a preservative force for great Biblical doctrine.
6. The positive potentials of fine culture include the preservation of what we might call the “life of the mind”. Fine culture is more likely than folk culture to inject into the stream of society the commitment to think hard and think clearly. It is more likely than folk culture to keep the intellect from atrophying. It is especially crucial that Christians not surrender the life of the mind to the secular world, first, because it belongs to God, and he commanded us to love him with our minds, and second, because we will lose succeeding generations if we do not have intellectually credible expressions of faith to pass on to them.
Further, fine culture has the potential of preserving the very concepts of truth and excellence and beauty as objective ideals rooted in God as our Absolute. Folk culture tends always to exalt what works. It is intrinsically pragmatic and colloquial and does not measure its achievements in terms of objective, absolute ideals, but generally in terms of wide appeal and practical effect. Fine culture tends to march the beat of a drummer other than mass appeal or practical effect. At its best it strives to create images of excellence and beauty and truth that echo more faithfully the ultimate excellence of God. Fine culture thus has the potential (if not contemporary success) of helping preserve the real complexities of truth and thus guarding against the intrinsic tendency of folk culture toward over-simplification and eventual distortion.
Fine culture has the potential of touching some emotions that folk culture will not touch. Folk culture tends toward what can be commonly shared and therefore minimizes what is rare. However some emotions that belong to God are rare and profound, and may be awakened and carried best through the expressions of fine culture. For example there are probably some senses of grandeur that find preservation and expression best in some grand and magnificent artistic statements that are not part of folk culture.
7. The positive potentials of folk culture include meeting people where they are in order to communicate. Folk culture affirms the importance of building bridges of shareable experience. It is a go-and-tell mentality rather than a come-and-see mentality. It goes the extra mile to make its vision accessible to the average person.
Folk culture keeps the truth clear that elite groups of intellectuals and artists that look with contempt on the common man and his needs and tastes are not admirable persons no matter how accomplished their talents. Folk culture has the potential of reminding us that God must have loved the common people because he made so many of them. Folk culture is by nature incarnational: it clothes its claims with the skin of ordinary people and affirms implicitly the value of getting though to the mind and heart of the masses.
Folk culture at its best has the potential of touching emotions that fine culture will not generally touch. Thus folk culture honors the preciousness of average wonders. Falling in love, taking a walk, eating a good meal, talking to a friend, swimming in the ocean, having a baby, planting a garden—all these are likely to be the subject of folk culture creations and communications. It helps us not neglect ordinary beauty.
8. In the church all that we do falls somewhere on the continuum between fine culture and folk culture. Our music, our architecture, our furnishings, our dress, our written materials, our preaching and teaching, our conversation between services, etc.
9. In thinking about our worship forms and about the general tone and atmosphere of our church we should take the possible weaknesses and potential strengths of fine culture and folk culture into account. We will hopefully be able to affirm all that is good in both cultures find a way both to “be ourselves” (which is partly inevitable) and be what we need to be to honor the excellence and truth and beauty of God and reach out to all the kinds of people God is calling us to touch.
10. This will be an ongoing process, not a once for all discovery
Filed under: Devotionals
Address: Ephesians 1:20
Phone: Romans 10:13
Website: The Bible. Keywords: Christ, Lord, Savior and Jesus
Hello. My name is Jesus Christ. Many call me Lord! I’ve sent you my resume
because I’m seeking the top management position in your heart. Please
consider my accomplishments as set forth in my resume.
Qualifications
· I founded the earth and established the heavens, (See Proverbs
3:19)
· I formed man from the dust of the ground, (See Genesis 2:7)
· I breathed into man the breath of life, (See Genesis 2:7)
· I redeemed man from the curse of the law, (See Galatians 3:13)
· The blessings of the Abrahamic Covenant comes upon your life
through me, (See Galatians 3:14)
Occupational Background
· I’ve only had one employer, (See Luke 2:49).
· I’ve never been tardy, absent, disobedient, slothful or
disrespectful.
· My employer has nothing but rave reviews for me, (See Matthew
3:15-17)
Skills Work Experiences
· Some of my skills and work experiences include: empowering the
poor to be poor no more, healing the brokenhearted, setting the captives
free, healing the sick, restoring sight to the blind and setting at liberty
them that are bruised, (See Luke 4:18).
· I am a Wonderful Counselor, (See Isaiah 9:6). People who listen
to me shall dwell safely and shall not fear evil, (See Proverbs 1:33).
· Most importantly, I have the authority, ability and power to
cleanse you of your sins, (See I John 1:7-9)
Educational Background
· I encompass the entire breadth and length of knowledge, wisdom
and understanding, (See Proverbs 2:6).
· In me are hid all of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, (See
Colossians 2:3).
· My Word is so powerful; it has been described as being a lamp
unto your feet and a lamp unto your path, (See Psalms 119:105).
· I can even tell you all of the secrets of your heart, (See Psalms
44:21).
Major Accomplishments
· I was an active participant in the greatest Summit Meeting of all
times (See Genesis 1:26).
· I laid down my life so that you may live (See II Corinthians
5:15).
· I defeated the archenemy of God and mankind and made a show of
them openly (See Colossians 2:15).
· I’ve miraculously fed the poor, healed the sick and raised the
dead!
· There are many more major accomplishments, too many to mention
here. You can read them on my website, which is located at: www dot – the
BIBLE. You don’t need an Internet connection or computer to access my
website.
References
· Believers and followers worldwide will testify to my divine
healings, salvation, deliverance, miracles, restoration and supernatural
guidance.
In Summation
Now that you’ve read my resume, I’m confident that I’m the only candidate
uniquely qualified to fill this vital position in your heart. In summation,
I will properly direct your paths, (See Proverbs 3:5-6), and lead you into
everlasting life, (See John 6:47). When can I start? Time is of the
essence, (See Hebrews 3:15).
Filed under: Devotionals
If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new —2 Corinthians 5:17
Our Lord never tolerates our prejudices— He is directly opposed to them and puts them to death. We tend to think that God has some special interest in our particular prejudices, and are very sure that He will never deal with us as He has to deal with others. We even say to ourselves, “God has to deal with other people in a very strict way, but of course He knows that my prejudices are all right.” But we must learn that God accepts nothing of the old life! Instead of being on the side of our prejudices, He is deliberately removing them from us. It is part of our moral education to see our prejudices put to death by His providence, and to watch how He does it. God pays no respect to anything we bring to Him. There is only one thing God wants of us, and that is our unconditional surrender.
When we are born again, the Holy Spirit begins to work His new creation in us, and there will come a time when there is nothing remaining of the old life. Our old gloomy outlook disappears, as does our old attitude toward things, and “all things are of God” (2 Corinthians 5:18 ). How are we going to get a life that has no lust, no self-interest, and is not sensitive to the ridicule of others? How will we have the type of love that “is kind . . . is not provoked, [and] thinks no evil”? ( 1 Corinthians 13:4-5 ). The only way is by allowing nothing of the old life to remain, and by having only simple, perfect trust in God— such a trust that we no longer want God’s blessings, but only want God Himself. Have we come to the point where God can withdraw His blessings from us without our trust in Him being affected? Once we truly see God at work, we will never be concerned again about the things that happen, because we are actually trusting in our Father in heaven, whom the world cannot see.
Filed under: Devotionals
This is the will of God, your sanctification . . . —1 Thessalonians 4:3
Sanctification is not a question of whether God is willing to sanctify me— is itmy will? Am I willing to let God do in me everything that has been made possible through the atonement of the Cross of Christ? Am I willing to let Jesus become sanctification to me, and to let His life be exhibited in my human flesh? (see 1 Corinthians 1:30 ). Beware of saying, “Oh, I am longing to be sanctified.” No, you are not. Recognize your need, but stop longing and make it a matter of action. Receive Jesus Christ to become sanctification for you by absolute, unquestioning faith, and the great miracle of the atonement of Jesus will become real in you.
All that Jesus made possible becomes mine through the free and loving gift of God on the basis of what Christ accomplished on the cross. And my attitude as a saved and sanctified soul is that of profound, humble holiness (there is no such thing as proud holiness). It is a holiness based on agonizing repentance, a sense of inexpressible shame and degradation, and also on the amazing realization that the love of God demonstrated itself to me while I cared nothing about Him (seeRomans 5:8). He completed everything for my salvation and sanctification. No wonder Paul said that nothing “shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39 ).
Sanctification makes me one with Jesus Christ, and in Him one with God, and it is accomplished only through the magnificent atonement of Christ. Never confuse the effect with the cause. The effect in me is obedience, service, and prayer, and is the outcome of inexpressible thanks and adoration for the miraculous sanctification that has been brought about in me because of the atonement through the Cross of Christ.
Filed under: Devotionals
Pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest —Matthew 9:38
The key to the missionary’s difficult task is in the hand of God, and that key is prayer, not work— that is, not work as the word is commonly used today, which often results in the shifting of our focus away from God. The key to the missionary’s difficult task is also not the key of common sense, nor is it the key of medicine, civilization, education, or even evangelization. The key is in following the Master’s orders— the key is prayer. “Pray the Lord of the harvest . . . .” In the natural realm, prayer is not practical but absurd. We have to realize that prayer is foolish from the commonsense point of view.
From Jesus Christ’s perspective, there are no nations, but only the world. How many of us pray without regard to the persons, but with regard to only one Person— Jesus Christ? He owns the harvest that is produced through distress and through conviction of sin. This is the harvest for which we have to pray that laborers be sent out to reap. We stay busy at work, while people all around us are ripe and ready to be harvested; we do not reap even one of them, but simply waste our Lord’s time in over-energized activities and programs. Suppose a crisis were to come into your father’s or your brother’s life— are you there as a laborer to reap the harvest for Jesus Christ? Is your response, “Oh, but I have a special work to do!” No Christian has a special work to do. A Christian is called to be Jesus Christ’s own, “a servant [who] is not greater than his master” (John 13:16 ), and someone who does not dictate to Jesus Christ what he intends to do. Our Lord calls us to no special work— He calls us to Himself. “Pray the Lord of the harvest,” and He will engineer your circumstances to send you out as His laborer.
