Word for Today, Fri, 13 Aug 2004: Confidence in God
Posted by: masinick <masinick@...>
Dear friends,
Yesterday, Oswald Chambers wrote a lesson on resting in God.
Today's message is also from Oswald Chambers. This message is a
continuation of the same topic. In today's message, Oswald
writes about the Spirit of God.
16 Always be joyful. 17 Keep on praying. 18 No matter what
happens, always be thankful, for this is God's will for you who
belong to Christ Jesus. 19 Do not stifle the Holy Spirit. 20 Do
not scoff at prophecies, 21 but test everything that is
said. Hold on to what is good. 22 Keep away from every kind of
evil. (1 Thessalonians 5:16-22, NLT)
Knowing how much God loves us, how much He wants to communicate
with us, take care of us, and guide us, can you see how important
Paul's instruction to the church at Thessalonica is? Those
instructions are not for them alone, they are for us as well, for
God is just as deeply interested in each one of us as He was
those people whom we've never seen.
Notice Oswald Chamber's warning, however. As we do our
activities from day to day, most of us have a tendency to go our
own way. We pay lip service to God and occasionally think about
Him. Quite frankly, we grieve God's Spirit and we quench,
stifle, suppress or subdue the Holy Spirit.
I suspect that quite a few of us are in a state of "marking
time". We don't hate God, in fact, we claim to love Him. But if
we are honest with ourselves and with one another, let's face it,
we haven't really spent more than a few minutes here and there
with God. Let's admit it, confess it, turn back to God, and ask
Him to reignite us, so that our lives may once again become like
hymns of praise to a loving, caring, Almighty God.
Yours in Christ,
Brian
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August 13
"Do Not Quench the Spirit"
Do not quench the Spirit -- 1 Thessalonians 5:19
The voice of the Spirit of God is as gentle as a summer breeze --
so gentle that unless you are living in complete fellowship and
oneness with God, you will never hear it. The sense of warning
and restraint that the Spirit gives comes to us in the most
amazingly gentle ways. And if you are not sensitive enough to
detect His voice, you will quench it, and your spiritual life
will be impaired. This sense of restraint will always come as a
"still small voice" (1 Kings 19:12), so faint that no one except
a saint of God will notice it.
Beware if in sharing your personal testimony you continually have
to look back, saying, "Once, a number of years ago, I was saved."
If you have put your "hand to the plow" and are walking in the
light, there is no "looking back" -- the past is instilled into
the present wonder of fellowship and oneness with God (Luke 9:62;
also see 1 John 1:6-7). If you get out of the light, you become
a sentimental Christian, and live only on your memories, and your
testimony will have a hard metallic ring to it. Beware of trying
to cover up your present refusal to "walk in the light" by
recalling your past experiences when you did "walk in the light"
(1 John 1:7). Whenever the Spirit gives you that sense of
restraint, call a halt and make things right, or else you will go
on quenching and grieving Him without even knowing it.
Suppose God brings you to a crisis and you almost endure it, but
not completely. He will engineer the crisis again, but this time
some of the intensity will be lost. You will have less
discernment and more humiliation at having disobeyed. If you
continue to grieve His Spirit, there will come a time when that
crisis cannot be repeated, because you have totally quenched Him.
But if you will go on through the crisis, your life will become a
hymn of praise to God. Never become attached to anything that
continues to hurt God. For you to be free of it, God must be
allowed to hurt whatever it may be.
2003 RBC Ministries-Grand Rapids MI, 49555-0001
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Brian Masinick, mailto:masinick@yahoo.com
Home page: http://www.geocities.com/masinick/
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