You must warn each other every day, while it is still “today,” so that none of you will be deceived by sin and hardened against God. (Hebrews 3:13).
We talk about our motives, and we say, Our motive was right! We talk about our conscientiousness, we talk about our intentions; but you and I do not know what lies behind what we call our good motives. There is a deceitfulness about this human heart that defies our greatest attempt at tracking it down, and we shall never do it... Here is where the church has become such a confused thing, and such a tragedy; for the prevailing idea is that if you give yourself over to God He will take you up and use you: "Bring over your humanity and consecrate it to the Lord! Consecrate your old man to the Lord, and go out and serve the Lord, with a consecrated old man!" it is utterly contrary to the teaching of God’s Word. The result is that in the work of God all the world over you have people serving the Lord in the energy of the flesh, in the reasoning of the flesh, in the emotions of the flesh. Meet them, counter them, frustrate them, and you meet something evil; you meet with a fight, a division, a schism, a scattering, and wholesale resignations.
Do you see what a havoc the enemy can make in that which is called the church, because people with best intentions, purest motives have come to serve the Lord with all their own intelligence, their own strength, and their own emotion? They have not seen that God has closed the door to the old creation, and that God’s attitude is this: "The only thing that can satisfy Me, that can serve Me is My Son, and if you are going to come into My service, He has to be the energy of everything, the Life of everything, the Wisdom of everything!" He has to be the governing, ruling reality in everything. It is not to be a matter of your impulses, but of His urgings and leadings by the Holy Spirit; not your sitting down to reason out what it would be good to do for the Lord, what ought to be done, what needs to be done, but what He shows you, nothing more... You and I must not bring over our old creation and give it to God, expecting God to use it. God begins with birth. The church of the firstborn is something quite new, and it comes out of a death. That death is the death of an old creation, and the resurrection is of something that is not the resuscitation of an old creation, but the resurrection of something wholly of God.
T.Austin Sparks
From: The Church of the Firstborn - Chapter 1 _______________________
2 comments:
As each has received a gift, employ it for one another as good stewards of God's varied grace: whoever speaks (let him speak) as one who utters oracles of God; whoever renders service (let him render it) as one who renders it by the strength which God supplies, in order that in everything God might be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.
Here we have one of the clearest answers in the Bible to the question: How do we serve or do good so that God gets the glory? The answer is, in order for God to get the glory we have to do good as one does it who is depending on God's strength. Not mere good deeds, but good deeds done in a spirit that comes from a joyful dependence on God's help—this is what glorifies God.
God's will himself to glorify
Is not a weight
to make us sigh
For it is wings
to make us fly.
P.S. I tried to email you but it keeps kicking back. Just saying....
Well said. This is a post that can be a reminder to anyone is calls themselves a Christian. Thanks for sharing.
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