Isa 43:10 Ye are my witnesses, saith the LORD, and my servant whom I have chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me

Friday, November 29, 2013

GOD Means What HE Says

                                                                               
                                                                            
Do you sit under strong preaching that lovingly exposes your sin?

If so, do you allow that word to convict you?

Or, do you go right back to your sin without grieving at all?

If you are rejecting the warnings of the restraining Holy Ghost—disobeying God time after time, without any heart-grief—then you are being recruited for the cult of Antichrist. 

The devil is silently initiating you into his “mystery of iniquity” and when the promising, miracle-working Antichrist comes along, you will be swept up in his lies and given over to a delusion!

Listen to what Paul says about compromising believers who refuse to love and obey God's Holy Word: “That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (2 Thessalonians 2:12).

Here are the ominous results of not believing and acting on God's truth: 


The heart becomes hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. Satan works on the hardened heart to justify itself, so that it is relieved from all fear of penalty.

The believer becomes blinded by the lie that says there are no wages for sin and no Judgment Day, and that he can get away with his lustful pleasure.

The believer falls prey to doctrines of demons, thinking evil is good and good is evil.

He eventually drifts so far from Christ and the truth, he becomes blinded to who the Antichrist is and he ends up worshiping and serving him as a god.  

On Judgment Day, God will say to such a person, Depart from Me, you worker of iniquity!

Beloved, it does not have to be this way for any of us.
 


God has made a covenant promise to remove all delusion from us and give us victory over sin, through the power of Christ’s cross.

All He asks is that we declare war on our sin, saying, “I won't make peace with this habit. I refuse to abide it. Deliver
me, Father, by Your Spirit.” When He hears this prayer, He will send such Holy Ghost power and glory from heaven, the devil will not stand a chance!

Pray right now that God implants in you a great reverence for His Word. Ask Him to help you be disciplined in your reading of the Scriptures and ask the Spirit to help you take to heart what you read and believe that God means what He says!


~David Wilkerson~
 

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

You Can Never Say GOD Failed!

                                                                           

John 7:18 He that speaketh of himself seeketh his own glory: but he that seeketh his glory that sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteousness is in him.

You and I are going to face God sometime. We are going to come face to face with God literally in eternity and then the question is going to arise, has God at any point failed us?

Shall we be able, on any detail, to say, "Lord, You failed me, You were not true to Your word"?

Such a position is unthinkable, that ever any being should be able to lay a charge like that at God's door, to have any question as to God's truth, reality, and faithfulness.

The Holy Spirit has been sent as the Spirit of truth to guide us into all the truth, so that there shall be no shadow whatever between God and ourselves as to His absolute faithfulness, His truth to Himself, and to all His word.

The Holy Spirit has come for that. If that is true, then the Holy Spirit will deal with all disciples in the School of Christ to undercut everything that is not true, that is not genuine, to make every such disciple to stand upon a foundation which can abide before God in the day of His absolute and utter vindication.

But in order that this may be so, you and I, under the Holy Spirit's teaching, have to be dealt with very faithfully, and have to come to the place where we are perfectly adjustable before God, where there is all responsiveness to the Holy Spirit, and nothing in us that resists or refuses the Holy Spirit, but where we are perfectly open and ready for the biggest consequence of the Holy Spirit putting His finger upon anything in our lives needing to be dealt with and adjusted. He is here for that.

The alternative to such a work of the Holy Spirit being allowed to be done in us is that we shall find ourselves in a false position, and it is far, far too costly to find ourselves in a false position, even though it only be on certain points.

This is a false world we are living in, a world that is carried on upon lies.

The whole constitution of this world is a lie, and it is in the very nature of man, though multitudes do not know it, but think they are true. They are trying to build the world on a false foundation.

The Kingdom of God is altogether other. It is built upon Jesus Christ, the Truth.

~T. Austin Sparks~
 



 

Friday, November 22, 2013

Hindrances To The Manifestation Of The Life Of Christ In Us

                                                                               
If your hindrance is ambition, God may open to you a tremendous door of opportunity. 

It might be the biggest, most ambitious project of your life and
God will allow you to step into it thinking, “This is it! I finally got my big break.”

Then the Lord will allow the whole thing to fall to the ground. 


You'll end up standing amid the ruins of your dream, crying, Lord, I thought this project was Your will. I thought it had Your blessing. I prayed to You faithfully about it, and You brought me this far. How could You allow it to fail so miserably?

The failure of your project is meant to be a death to everything that hinders the Christ-life from being manifested in you.

Your hindrance could be the incredible revelations you receive from God's Word.
 

You may ask, “How can fresh revelation ever be a hindrance to a lover of Jesus?” One day you may be reveling in new truths being opened to you, profound doctrines you have never seen before. Your confidence is growing, because you consistently apply every new revelation to your walk with the Lord.

Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, your soul is stricken with dryness.


Soon your joy and assurance give way to a sense of frailty and uselessness. An unexplainable depression fills your soul, and each day becomes a burden to you.

The Scriptures that had come so alive in your heart now seem like a closed book. 


Instead of receiving revelation, you wonder if you'll ever learn anything again—but the problem isn't your intellect. 

Your dryness is meant to hasten your death to all confidence in your flesh.

It's a death to your tendency to glory in the revelation you are given, rather than getting your joy from Christ.

The fact is, revelation tends to produce pride. 


This is the very reason God gave Paul a thorn in his flesh. He was restraining Paul from glorying in his many great revelations. God wanted His faithful servant to remain humble in all things.

This whole process of having to endure “death situations” can seem cruel.
 

Without question, it is one of the most painful aspects of our walk with Jesus.
 

But if we allow death to finish its work in us, Christ's own resurrection life will flow freely out of us.

If, on the other hand, we resist death's work, we will not ever have Christ's life in us!

~David Wilkerson~

Monday, November 18, 2013

Perfected Through Sufferings

                                                   

I wonder if you grasp the point. What is God doing with His people?

He is using all these things which are happening, primarily to bring about in His people that conformity to the image of His Son which is to mean Christ in manifestation in an elect people- a people foreordained because foreknown for this very thing. 

This thought of God is a delivering thought. How do you pray for the Lord's people in times of trouble? Of course, we are all tempted to pray for their deliverance, to cry to the Lord that they may escape.

It may be right at times to pray thus, but suppose the Lord does not deliver? He does not always deliver at once. He allows the situation to continue, to become long drawn out.

The enemy will encamp upon that fact and give it his own twist and interpretation — 'God is not doing anything; He has left His people, is standing back, is not concerned.' There is no answering voice, no slightest indication that He is taking any account at all.

It is like that very often, and that is a real playground for the enemy. God apparently makes no response.

How shall we be delivered from going to pieces, from being overwhelmed in such a time and under such conditions?

Only by grasping this thought of God; and then we have to begin to pray along other lines. If God does not act to deliver His people, there is a deeper and a higher thought and purpose than their deliverance, and He is at work upon that; and deeply in them He is going to reproduce the patience, the endurance, the longsuffering of Jesus Christ.

If you go right over the whole ground of God's Son perfected through sufferings and can read your Gospels anew and understand Him as He differs so utterly from the standards of men, you can see what God is doing with us His people.

Meekness and gentleness — these are foreign things to our natures; under stress, under adversity, under the cruel hand of tyrannical men, to say, 'Father, forgive'! He could say "I am meek and lowly in heart." Oh, you see — the image of His Son. 

Such testing conditions are a terrible challenge to our natural dispositions. Our whole nature revolts against meekness and lowliness and wants to rise up and be even with the other one, or be the master. Our nature does not accept and delight in opposition, antagonism, frustration, persecution, and all such things.
 

But think — and this is the marvel of Christ in Pilate's hall and before the High Priest — think again. Spat upon, mocked, struck, in every way degraded — and He is almighty and infinite God incarnate Who, with the parting of His lips, the silent lifting of His hand, could have smitten that crowd out of existence!

The centurion was right; when he saw what had happened he was filled with fear and said, Truly this was the Son of God. We have heard of people suddenly discovering their awful mistake and dying of heart failure on the spot.

Think of the shock that has to come yet to those who treated Him as He was treated — when they see Him. 

You can understand something of what took place in Saul of Tarsus (who knew all about what had happened in Jerusalem) when he saw Him -"I am Jesus"-saw Him in a brightness above that of the noonday sun.
 

But my point is this, He accepted and endured all that, going through to the bitter end, letting them hammer nails through His hands and feet and fix Him to the Cross, with all the deriding- He saved others; himself he cannot save... Let (God) deliver him now, if he desireth him: for he said, I am the Son of God.

And He did not stir a finger or utter a word, when twelve legions of angels were standing ready for His aid.
 

If one angel could smite the host of Sennacherib, what would twelve legions do?

That is meekness and lowliness of heart, and that is what God is trying to effect in us. That is the thought of God; that is going to be glory in God's universe; that will make a world worth living in, and a universe of that nature will be bearable.

God thus works in us; and so the portion we read finds early in it these words —"I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us."

~T. Austin Sparks~

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Divided Loyalties Issue In Disaster

Now take Jonathan. Even he can be involved at last in the awful tragedy of compromise. It is one of the saddest stories.

We all want to shed tears when we read David's lament over Jonathan. We remember the beginnings of the relationship between David and Jonathan, how their souls were knit together.

Their story is always being taken as a kind of classic and model of friendship, and yet even there...there were divided loyalties in the case of Jonathan - loyalty to the realm of nature, to his father after the flesh, straining against his loyalty to David, and causing him to be a divided personality.

When he is with his father, his heart is with David. When he is with David, he feels the pull of duty to his father. He is a divided man. What a problem divided loyalties present!

Jonathan must have known all about that Amalek episode and what Samuel did; that in the Divine intent the kingdom was then taken from Saul and passed to David; that the Lord forsook Saul and was no longer with him.

He may have known of the consultation with the witch, the touching of that realm forbidden so strongly by the Lord. And yet, on natural grounds of some kind, Jonathan did not break with that whole system of things.

What a different story might have been told if he had taken sides wholly with David and been David's right hand man for the kingdom!

But this divided loyalty involved him in the ultimate tragedy.

And even good people who have been blessed of the Lord, to whom He has shown His favor and whom He has used very greatly, may in the end be involved in spiritual tragedy if for some reason compromise has entered in.

It may have come in because of policy. What a snare policy is! We tell ourselves we must be very careful that we do not do this or that because it may have such and such a result.

It is all policy and diplomacy. 'We must be careful to avoid...' - what? just what we seek to avoid betrays the whole case.

Are we afraid of losing prestige with men, support, friends, position, opportunity?

Do these things weigh with us as over against implicit obedience to the Lord?

If so, there is divided loyalty; and if we allow it, we may at the end pass into terrible tragedy; the tragedy that always follows compromise.

~T. Austin Sparks~

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Will You Give Your Life To GOD?


Rom 12:1  I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.

You have a life, and that life is a great trust, a great responsibility. It can stay in its own ambitions, its own interests, its own worldly concerns and considerations, it can stay by itself.

Will you give your life to God, will you let it go to Him, will you put it on the altar and let the knife be taken that God may have it utterly?

If you will, God will multiply your life, God will extend your life, God will make much more of it than ever it would have been if you had kept it in your own hands.

Have you got something in your life that you are holding on to as a Christian; you are not letting that go to the Lord? You know what it is. 

I should miss it if I tried to catalog the things it might be. You know you have something where you are not letting go to the Lord. The Lord has put His finger on something, and you are holding on.

You have an argument which you think is a very good argument. You have a reason you think perfectly good, so you are holding on.

Deep down the truth is you are not prepared to let that go....

There are times when, in recognition that a certain course is the Lord’s way, we have to wait for the Lord’s time and see to it that our strength of will coming into alliance with some purpose of God is not jeopardizing the fruitfulness of that thing, and doing other people harm and making other people suffer. 

There are times when we have to come back to the Lord and say, "Lord, You have shown me that is Your way for me, but I can see that it is going to involve others in a great deal of suffering.

I do want to be sure of Your time in my strength of will to do Your will. I want to do this thing in self-sacrificing love, so that the least loss shall be suffered by others.

We have seen people who are right as to their objective, right as to what the Lord wants, but the way in which they do it often spoils the whole thing.

They take hold of Divine things, and while the thing is right, they are spoiling it by bringing their own strength of will into alliance with it. 

This applies in many ways. We must be circumcised in heart to do the will of God, ready to let go and let God determine the way to accomplish it.

May the Lord interpret His Word and make it fruitful. I know it is challenging. It searches us all; we shall all come up against it.

But oh, see what happened in heaven, and see that He desires that as it is in heaven, so it shall be on earth.

~T. Austin Sparks~

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

The Fire Of Afflictions

God selects the best and most notable of His servants for the
best and most notable afflictions, for those who have received
the most grace from Him are able to endure the most afflictions.
 

In fact, an affliction hits a believer never by chance but by God’s divine direction. He does not haphazardly aim His arrows, for each one is on a special mission and touches only the heart for whom it is intended.

It is not only the grace of God but also His glory that is revealed when a believer can stand and quietly endure an affliction.

~Joseph Caryl~
 

If all my days were sunny, could I say,
His fair land He wipes all tears away?
If I were never weary, could I keep
This blessed truth,“He gives His loved ones sleep”?
If no grave were mine, I might come to deem
The Life Eternal but a baseless dream.
My winter, and my tears, and weariness,
Even my grave, may be His way to bless.
I call them ills; yet that can surely be
Nothing but love that shows my Lord to me!
 

~Selected~

Christians with the most spiritual depth are generally those who have been taken through the most intense and deeply anguishing fires of the soul.

If you have been praying to know more of Christ, do not be surprised if He leads you through the desert or through a furnace of pain.
 

Dear Lord, do not punish me by removing my cross from me. Instead, comfort me by leading me into submission to Your will and by causing me to love the cross.

Give me only what will serve You best, and may it be used to reveal the greatest of all Your mercies: bringing glory to Your name through me, according to Your will.

~A Captive’s Prayer~

Friday, November 1, 2013

The Spirit Of Jezebel

The spirit of Jezebel hates God’s prophets and godly prophecies. And Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and withal how he had slain all the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger unto Elijah, saying, So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of one of them by tomorrow about this time" (1 Kings 19:1-2).
 

Christians bound by the Jezebel doctrine have no regard whatsoever for God's holy prophets. They sit coldly, as Jezebel did, unmoved while Ahab went into detail of the miraculous display of supernatural authority on Mount Carmel. But Jezebel was not impressed. All it did was turn her resolve to stone.
 

So it is now. The teachers of the Jezebel doctrine and those like Ahab who are its victims are not open to Holy Ghost conviction or to the message of repentance and holiness. They hear it and then go their way, more determined than ever in their doctrines. There is no fear of God before their eyes.
 

The surest sign of a false teacher and a Jezebel doctrine is the putting down of prophetic warnings and the refusal to hear about judgment. They call it gloom and doom. They laugh, mock and ridicule. Jeremiah says such shepherds are blind and dumb and the Lord told them to obey: "But they harkened not, nor inclined their ear, but walked in the counsels and in the imagination of their evil heart, and went backward, and not forward" (Jeremiah 7:24).
 

Those who teach the Jezebel doctrine claim to be prophets, but there is a test of true and false prophets. Jezebel prophets prophesy good things only, just peace and prosperity. "I have seen also in the prophets of Jerusalem an horrible thing: they commit adultery, and walk in lies: they strengthen also the hands of evildoers, that none doth return from his wickedness; they are all of them unto me as Sodom, and the inhabitants thereof as Gomorrah.


Therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts concerning the prophets; Behold, I will feed them with wormwood, and make them drink the water of gall: for from the prophets of Jerusalem is profaneness gone forth into all the land.


Thus saith the Lord of hosts, Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you: they make you vain: they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the Lord. They say still unto them that despise me, The Lord hath said, Ye shall have peace; and they say unto every one that walketh after the imagination of his own heart, No evil shall come upon you" (Jeremiah 23:14-17).
 

Those with the spirit of Jezebel do not turn people from wickedness. They speak of dreams and act foolishly in the pulpit.


~David Wilkerson~