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

Sunday, August 30, 2015

Out Of Any Circumstance

Psa 55:16  As for me, I will call upon God; and the LORD shall save me. 

Yes, I must and will pray. What else can I do! What better can I do? 

Betrayed, forsaken, grieved, baffled, O my LORD, I will call upon Thee. 

My Ziklag is in ashes, and men speak of stoning me; but I encourage my heart in the LORD, who will bear me through this trial as He has borne me through so many others.

Jehovah shall save me; I am sure He will, and I declare my faith.

The LORD and no one else shall save me. I desire no other helper and would not trust in an arm of flesh even if I could.

I will cry to Him evening, and morning, and noon, and I will cry to no one else, for He is all sufficient.

How He will save me I cannot guess; but He will do it, I know. 

He will do it in the best and surest way, and He will do it in the largest, truest, and fullest sense.

Out of this trouble and all future troubles the great I AM will bring me as surely as He lives; and when death comes and all the mysteries of eternity follow thereon, still will this be true:

The LORD shall save me. This shall be my song all through this autumn day.

Is it not as a ripe apple from the tree of life? I will feed upon it. How sweet it is to my taste!

~Charles Spurgeon~

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

He Of Tender Conscience


Eze 34:22  Therefore will I save my flock, and they shall no more be a prey; and I will judge between cattle and cattle.
 

Some are fat and flourishing, and therefore they are unkind to the feeble. This is a grievous sin and causes much sorrow. 

Those thrustings with side and with shoulder, those pushings of the diseased with the horn, are a sad means of offense in the assemblies of professing believers.

The LORD takes note of these proud and unkind deeds, and He is greatly angered by them, for He loves the weak.

Is the reader one of the despised? Is he a mourner in Zion and a marked man because of his tender conscience?

Do his brethren judge him harshly? Let him not resent their conduct; above all let him not push and thrust in return.

Let him leave the matter in the LORD's hands. He is the Judge.

Why should we wish to intrude upon His office? He will decide much more righteously than we can. 

His time for judgment is the best, and we need not be in a hurry to hasten it on. Let the hard-hearted oppressor tremble.

Even though he may ride roughshod over others with impunity for the present, all his proud speeches are noted, and for every one of them account must be given before the bar of the great Judge. 

Patience, my soul! Patience! The LORD knoweth thy grief. Thy Jesus hath pity upon thee!

~Charles Spurgeon~


Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Who Has The Majority?

2Ki 6:16  And he answered, Fear not: for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.

Horses and chariots and a great host shut up the prophet in Dothan. His young servant was alarmed. How could they escape from such a body of armed men?

But the prophet had eyes which his servant had not, and he could see a greater host with far superior weapons guarding him from all harm.

Horses of fire are mightier than horses of flesh, and chariots of fire are far preferable to chariots of iron. Even so is it at this hour. 

The adversaries of truth are many, influential, learned, and crafty; and truth fares ill at their hands; and yet the man of GOD has no cause for trepidation.

Agencies, seen and unseen, of the most potent kind, are on the side of righteousness. God has armies in ambush which will reveal themselves in the hour of need.

The forces which are on the side of the good and the true far outweigh the powers of evil.

Therefore, let us keep our spirits up, and walk with the gait of men who possess a cheering secret, which has lifted them above all fear.

We are on the winning side. The battle may be sharp, but we know how it will end.

Faith, having GOD with her, is in a clear majority: "They that be with us are more than they that be with them."

~Charles Spurgeon~

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Christ's Fretlessness

John 11:9  Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours in the day? If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world.
 

Then lastly, and in a word or two, our text illuminates Christ's fretlessness.

For never was there a life of such untiring labor that breathed such a spirit of unruffled calm.

We talk about our busy modern city, and many of us are busy in the city, but for a life of interruption and distraction, give me the life of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

Some of us could hardly live without the hills--a day in their solitude is benediction;

But when Jesus retired to that fellowship of lonely places, even there He was pressed and harassed by the crowd.

Every day was thronged with incident or danger. There was no leisure so much as to eat.

Now He was teaching--now He was healing--now He was parrying some cruel attack.

Yet through it all, with all its stir and movement, there is a brooding calm upon the heart of Christ that is only comparable to a waveless sea asleep in the stillness of a summer evening. 

Some men are calm because they do not feel. We call it quiet, and it is callousness.

But Christ being sinless was infinitely sensitive--quick to respond to every touch and token.

Yet He talked without contradiction of His peace--"My peace that the world cannot give or take away"--and down in the depths of that unfathomed peace was the thought of the twelve hours in the day.

Christ knew that if God had given Him a twelve hours' work, God would give Him the twelve hours to do it in.

To every task its time, and to every time its task, that was one great method of the Master.

And no man will ever be calm as Christ was calm who cannot halt in the midst of the stir and say, "My peace"; who cannot stop for a moment in the busiest whirl and say to himself, "My times are in Thy hand."

God never blesses unnecessary labor. That is the labor of the thirteenth hour.

All that God calls us to and all that love demands is fitted with perfect wisdom to the twelve.

Therefore be restful; do not be nervous and fussy; leave a little leisure for smiling and for sleep.

There is no time to squander, but there is time enough--are there not twelve hours in the day?

~George H. Morrision~

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

The Price Of Freedom

Mark 9:26  And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him: and he was as one dead; insomuch that many said, He is dead.

Evil never surrenders its hold without a sore fight.

We never pass into any spiritual inheritance through the delightful exercises of a picnic, but always through the grim contentions of the battle field.

It is so in the secret realm of the soul. Every faculty which wins its spiritual freedom does so at the price of blood.

Apollyon is not put to flight by a courteous request; he straddles across the full breadth of the way, and our progress has to be registered in blood and tears.

This we must remember or we shall add to all the other burdens of life the gall of misinterpretation.

We are not "born again" into soft and protected nurseries, but in the open country where we suck strength from the very terror of the tempest. "

We must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God." 

~Dr. J. H. Jowett~

Faith of our Fathers! living still, In spite of dungeon, fire and sword:

O how our hearts beat high with joy Whene'er we hear that glorious word:

Faith of our Fathers! Holy Faith! We will be true to Thee till death!

Our fathers, chained in prisons dark, Were still in heart and conscience free;

How sweet would be their children's fate, If they, like them, could die for Thee!"

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

God's "Well Done" Is For The Faithful Man

John the Baptist did no miracle, yet he won the highest praise of Christ. "Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John." 

A man may lead a false and rotten life and yet win the praise of men. 

The acid test of the successful life is this: does it win the praise of Christ?

And the fine thing is that to win that praise one does not need to be wonderful or striking: it is given to those who may do no miracle...

To those who trust Him when everything is dark; to those who keep their faces towards the morning;

To those who, through headache and through heartache, quietly and doggedly do their appointed bit;

To those who "endure" with a smile upon their lips; to those who help a brother by the way;

To those who look for a city which hath foundations.

In this big world there is room for every gift and for every genius who has the power of miracle.

But in this big world there is no room and power and victory for the great multitude who do no miracle.

It is not "Well done, thou good and brilliant servant," else would there be little hope for millions.

It is "Well done, thou good and faithful servant."

~George H.Morrison~

Sunday, August 9, 2015

Three Realms Of Deception

There is the realm of the ungodly, there is the realm of the religious and there is the realm of the spiritual.

In every one of these realms the Deceiver works projecting his deceptions, but he adapts his deceptions to suit the realm.

We touch lightly upon the first and the second in order to come to the third more specifically.

1. The Ungodly: The deceiving work among the ungodly, for “the whole world lieth in the Wicked One”, and “the god of this age hath blinded the minds of them that believe not”, they are in the “kingdom of darkness”, they are utterly deceived though they know it not.

So utterly deceived that this letter to the Corinthians in its earlier passages tells us that in its very wisdom, at the very height of its wisdom, it slew the Lord of Glory, it killed the Prince of Life, so blind was it.

Saul of Tarsus was an excellent specimen of the wisdom of this world in setting his hand against the Lord, and the Lord’s own, to hound them to death, and when the light came and he was undeceived, how completely he saw the blindness in which he had been;

But the ungodly are even more deceived than that. Many of them before they close their earthly course wake up to the fact that they have been deceived, and you find in the end of their life so frequently they realize that they have been out full stretch in quest for something to make life complete, to make it full, to satisfy themselves...

And now, well, in some cases disaster has overtaken them, calamity has befallen them and all that they set their hearts upon has been lost, and they have nothing left of time or ability or strength or any kind of resource to begin again, and life has gone and now laughs back at them.

Everything was put out to reach an end which has eluded them, which they have missed, and the only thing that they can honestly say is, that they have been deceived.

On the other hand many reach their goal, accumulate wealth and possessions, position, influence, power and still heart-hungry they end their lives.

Well, we have had many instances of late. We have read of one who took his own life, not because things had gone wrong, he had accumulated his wealth, he turned his hand upon himself because he had nothing more to live for, and if that is not deception what is?

Oh, yes, beloved, the ungodly are in the grip of a mighty deception and in the end the Deceiver is going to laugh at them whether they succeed or whether they fail in what they set their hands to in this life.

In the end they are going to discover that the thing for which they were given a being has been missed and life has been just one delusion.

That is the meaning of the commission given to the Apostle Paul. He had had his eyes opened and the Lord said to him “Thou shalt stand before kings and rulers, and nations to whom I send thee to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God.”

Turning from the power of Satan unto God, from darkness to light, is the result of having eyes opened; thus becoming disillusioned, undeluded by having eyes opened.

They are blind and the blindness is the work of one who has got them in his grip.

Kings, rulers and people, yes, many of them repudiating any such suggestion that they are blinded or deluded, but the Lord knows “to open their eyes”.

That is what we meant when we said that the Gospel in a sense is peculiarly for delivering men from deception, universally. So much for the ungodly.

2. The Religious: A word about the religious, for the same thing holds good here adapted by the Deceiver to the realm in which he is working, the type of people with whom he is dealing, the religious.

Yes, religiously deceived, to put it in another way, deceived by their very religiousness, and that is a strong and a mighty delusion.

There is power in that delusion that seems so often to defy every kind of attempt to deal with it.

Deceived by religiousness. What more can be expected than the recognition of the fact of God and the giving to God of reverence, acknowledgment, and recognition:

Of taking active interest in things which relate to God, attending religious services, and being very busy in religious activities and interests, and finding your chief interest in religious things and the religious realm?

What more can be expected? What is the matter with that? Be patient, bear with me if I say with very great emphasis: that may be one colossal delusion.

So often that very thing obscures one fundamental thing, a true and living relationship with God. “Ye must be born again”, and religion very often obscures that issue.

Oh, religion is no argument for salvation. Religion can be found in the darkest places of the earth.

Universally there is religion; depraved and very low in many places, but universally there is the consciousness of standing in relationship to some supreme object of worship, demanding worship; and then men's minds or imaginations get to work to give some kind of expression to that consciousness, of that supreme object of worship...

And the imagination produces that sometimes out of a tree, a stone, or in the heavenly bodies; somehow it is expressed, but it is the thing that is there, behind all the forms of expression which is universal.

All the highly civilized forms of that brought into the realm of Christendom are only the same thing developed. It does not say that Christendom’s more intelligent, civilized, educated interpretation of God, even though it gets its ideas from the Bible, is salvation.

It may be a mighty delusion and very often is.

I have asked people if they have been born again, and they have said “It is not necessary; I have been confirmed.”

Such may be an extreme case, and I do not take it up for criticism but by way of illustration. You may take on religion because you have got a religious temperament and that does not mean that you are saved.

The devil may be holding you just as firmly, tightly, in the grip of an unsaved state by your religion as he does the worldly by his pleasures.

He does not mind how he holds you. By the most aesthetic religious activities, self-denials and such like, so long as he can keep you from the main thing. 

Now one could pursue that for a long time, there is so much more, but it is merely indicated. It is the deception that we are getting at.

There is a vast difference, beloved, between vital union with God in Jesus Christ and religious formalism, and as we said at the outset, there is a very great need for a ministry by which deception, even amongst religious people, shall be shattered and broken and the fact of an essential, vital union with God by new birth shall be brought home to religious people.

Along that line the enemy is destroying the whole testimony of the Church by packing it full of active, energetic, unconverted people.

That is where he is sapping the strength of the Testimony of God.

3. The Spiritual: Now we come to the third, the spiritual people, and we are now dealing with the truly born anew children of God, the spiritual people.

The enemy will adapt his work of deception to this realm as cleverly and even more cleverly and ingeniously than to any other realm, but he does not give up the children of God as incapable of being deceived, for it is here that we find delusion and deception in its finest, its most acute forms.

It is here that so often dear children of God have been utterly led off into error by something which bore all the semblance of absolute Gospel truth.

It is in this realm, amongst the Lord’s own children, that the deceptions of today are most rampant and active.

What is the mark, the peculiar mark of the Deceiver’s deceiving work for the Lord’s own people? It is the counterfeit of all that is of God. The counterfeit system which includes anything that is of God. 

Now if you will get down with your Bible you will be able to trace that counterfeit system as it moves into every connection with God.

First of all you will see that there is a counterfeiting of the very Godhead. That is saying a terrific thing, but it is true.

A counterfeiting of the very Godhead, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The counterfeiting of the first Person in the Trinity, God.

What does the Scripture have to say: “The god of this age hath blinded...” The god of this age, and Satan is seen in the Word of God to set himself up all the way through as the supreme object of worship to draw away from God Himself.

You have not to go very far into the Bible to see that. It is implied in his very first act. “Hath God said?”

Well, “I am a greater authority than He is.” That is what is implied in that. “You listen to me,” and so by subtle insinuation he captured God’s place of reverence, of fear, of acknowledgment, in the heart of man and in so doing became man’s god, you see, getting worship.

His subtle insinuation by which he did it was, “God knows if you do that, you will be as God knowing good and evil, and God forbidding you to do that is simply robbing you of something which, being yours, would make your life fuller and larger and greater; and so God after all is not favorable to you, and is keeping something back.

He is making life smaller and narrower than it need be, and if you will only do as I tell you, you will have a life higher than that.

Yes - become a Christian, give your life to God, and life will become a narrow, mean thing, and you will have to give up this and that.

That is always the insinuation of the enemy, he never lets you know what you are going to gain by going on with God, and the deception works, that instead of gaining you lose, when you give heed to the enemy. “The god of this age hath blinded.”

When Israel came out of Egypt, the supreme object of their coming out was not the coming into the land or the wilderness, but that they should come out to the Lord, belong to the Lord, be His people. 

Let my son go; that was the word: coming out to, belonging to, the Lord.

They had not been in the wilderness very long before Moses went up into the mountain for a period with the Lord, and the enemy broke into the company. What was God saying to Moses in the mount? 

Let them bring me gold and silver and brass and precious stones and fine linen, and let them make me a sanctuary.

The enemy broke in at that time and said in effect: “Not if I can help it,” and he provoked the people to bring their gold for a molten image, taking the gold away from God.

What is gold? That which is representative and typical of God Himself - the Divine nature. 

This thing runs all the way through. Same principle back of things: the god of this age is seeking to get the worship due to God, and he simulates the first Person of the Trinity, imitates, counterfeits along the line of religion to get worship.

Then the second Person of the Trinity (you realize that we cannot stay to thoroughly exhaust each one of these) is the Lord Jesus, God Incarnate in the Son.

We read: “Many shall come in my name saying I am Christ and shall deceive many.” Antichrist is the simulation of God Incarnate. Taking the place of god amongst men in human form to capture the worship of men’s hearts. Sitting in the temple of God giving out that he is God.

Christs many, “there shall come false Christs.” The Deceiver is out to counterfeit Christ, simulate Him even to the point of incarnation, the devil incarnate, Antichrist. As far as possible he takes all the semblance of Christ.

~T. Austin Sparks~

Thursday, August 6, 2015

The Living God And The Battle For Life

God has one thing in view finally, and that is life. He intended from the beginning that that which issued from Himself, represented Himself, bore His mark, should be that which lives with His own life.

Satan has determined just the opposite, that that which comes from him bears his mark, and that is death, not because he wants to have death to gratify himself, but he wants God to be deprived of that upon which His heart is set.

Satan's heart is a heart of malicious spite against God. 

Remember that! He has, deep in his very being, this spite against God.

God has done something to Satan which has turned his heart with the bitterest malice and deep abysmal hatred for God and spite against God, and he wants to deprive God of His end - that is, a universe marked by God's own life.

And so anything whatever that has the mark of God upon it or is in the way of having that mark, that seal, is the objective of Satan's bitterest hatred.

It becomes a sharer with God in the spite of Satan. Remember that!

Wherever there is divine life, then that becomes part and lot with God in the animosity of the devil.

The one thing is to bring that life to an end, to spoil that life, to bring in death; where life is, to surround that and try and engulf it in death again.

There is only one way in which he can do it and that is to corrupt, but, strangely enough, it is to get the mind or the heart of the believer accepting corruption.
 

My conviction is this, that today Satan is standing at nothing in the wholesale slaughter on this earth in order to get at one corporate man, that man child of Revelation 12, that company with whom the heavenly and eternal interests of God and the testimony of Jesus are bound up, and this is it - life or death? 

And the pressure to corrupt will be intense, the pressure to destroy faith in the living God will be terrible, the pressure to move us away from our ground of confidence in God will be unspeakably great in order that that testimony of the living God, that life over which Satan has no power, shall be brought, so far as the instrument is concerned, into a neutralized state. 

God must have an instrument. He has done this thing again and again. The whole generation of babes of a certain age destroyed in Israel in order to get one - that Babe of Bethlehem.

It is this thing that is my conviction. I am not thinking in physical terms now - our destruction physically included in this that is going on today.

That is a mere incident; whether we live or whether we die is not the question just now.

I hope that we have got over that, that we can sing from our hearts, "The fear of death has gone forever" in so far as the physical side is concerned.

That is not the point. It is our faith, beloved; if we lose faith, we have lost our life.

If we lose our confidence in the living God, we are engulfed in that spiritual death; that is, we are put out of our functioning place for God, with God.

The true sons of God by faith in Jesus Christ, those who share God's life through regeneration in virtue of the Blood of Jesus which has dealt with the sin question, those who have become sharers with God in His life through His righteousness, are the objective of Satan today.

It seems a terrible thing, but then what is going on on the earth after all may only be limited to Europe.

And we say, all of us, is it not a terrible thing to think that one man in a continent will bring millions to death just to get his own end?

But take the whole world, and not only the whole world, the whole course of time, and Satan has repeated it again and again to get his own end.

It does not matter to him if he throws all the nations into the fire of destruction if he can get his end.

What is his end? It is that elect instrument, God's elect, with which all the purposes of God are bound up, to get at that, to get at the faith of that, not to destroy it physically, but to get at its faith.

~T. Austin Sparks~

Saturday, August 1, 2015

The Way Of Adversity

What are you expecting, what are you waiting for, what are you concerned about, what are you pleading and praying for?

If you are praying for full and final deliverance from adversity and suffering and difficulty and all that sort of thing, let me tell you your prayer will never be answered.

Forms of suffering may change, but in some form or another we are going on to the end in a way of adversity.

Satan is not going to become our friend while we are friends of Jesus Christ.

The kingdom of Satan is not going to rally to our support while we belong to the kingdom which is opposed to his.

Let us settle that. It will get us free, perhaps, from this entanglement. 

~T. Austin Sparks~