Look To Him—And Keep on Looking

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One who does not know Him or truly love Him may take those beautiful, precious promises of His and cleverly twist them into a license to love what the Lord hates, or to do what should never be done—‘whose end will be according to their works.’
 
But every one truly born of God in Christ Jesus, having the Holy Spirit and yearning to do the will of the Father from the heart, is more than welcome to take those very same promises and plead them boldly before the throne as if they were spiritual promissory notes written in the very blood of the Messiah—and receive in exchange for their penitant confession: pardon, cleansing and peace with God through Christ Jesus.
 
If you are His and yet you feel like a complete failure in some area or are struggling with a besetting sin or walking through a wilderness season that seems like its never going to end, I want to encourage you: He is with you. He is for you. He does not love you any less now in the midst of your failings, than he did when He first called you out of darkness and made you a new creation.
 
You are just as precious to Him right now reading this post as you were then, when you first came to Him. Don’t run away in shame from the One who can save you and cleanse you from sin. Sprint to the throne of His grace. He is your life, your Hiding Place.
Immerse yourself in His Word, seek His face, worship and adore Him in the midst of your helplessness and need for He is worthy and He will do for you what you could never do, if you will look to Him—and keep on looking.
 
 
“So Moses made a bronze serpent, and put it on a pole; and so it was, if a serpent had bitten anyone, when he looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.” (Numbers 21:9)
 
“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:14-15)
 
 
“For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” (Hebrews 4:15-16)
 
 
“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9)

Looking to The One Who The Winds and Waves Obey

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At one time John Wesley found himself on a ship with some Moravian believers in the midst of a terrifying storm at sea. His life was dramatically impacted by observing in them an inexplicable peace amidst otherwise intense panic. Not unlike Paul and Silas who (at midnight in a prison cell) were praying and singing hymns to God, these Spirit filled believers were singing the high praises of God in the midst of the storm.

Wesley wrote in his journal:

“In the midst of the Psalm wherewith their service began, the sea broke over, split the main-sail in pieces, covered the ship and poured in between the decks, as if the great deep had already swallowed us up. A terrible screaming began among the English. The Germans calmly sung on. I asked one of them afterwards; ‘Were you not afraid?’ He answered, ‘I thank God, no.’ I asked: ‘But were not your women and children afraid?’ He replied mildly: ‘No, our women and children are not afraid to die.’” The storm was boisterous, but the Moravians kept praising God. Finally, the storm subsided.”

John Wesley was never the same, and he would eventually come to know this same peace that he had observed in those Moravian brethren.

A.W. Tozer once said, “’A scared world needs a fearless church.” By the power of the Holy Spirit in these last days, may the world behold in us the beauty of a peace which passes understanding, a calm that cannot be explained, a love that casts out all fear. May they see in us evidence of a citizenship that is in heaven—not of this world. And may this cause them to long not only for this peace, but for the Author of peace Himself, the God who has purchased us by the blood of His Son.

As the return of Jesus the Rightful Ruler of this world draws near, and as the birth pains increase, may our attention be not on the storms but on the One who the winds and the waves obey. As Oswald Chambers once said, “On the top of those very billows which look as if they would overwhelm us, walks the Son of God.”

May the Holy Spirit give us eyes for Jesus only.

May the Lamb receive the reward for His sufferings in our lives.

Carry on With What The Lord Tells You

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“One day I was at a conference with Dr. V. Raymond Edman. . . He told us of an experience he had while he was in Ecuador as a missionary. He hadn’t been there long before he was sick and dying. He was so near death that they had already dug his grave. He had great beads of sweat on his brow and there was a death rattle in his throat. But suddenly he sat straight up in bed and said to his wife, “Bring me my clothes!” Nobody knew what had happened.
Many years later he was retelling the story in Boston. Afterward, a little old lady with a small, dog-eared, beaten-up book, approached him and asked, “What day did you say you were dying? What time was it in Ecuador? What time would it be in Boston?” When he answered her, her wrinkled face lit up. Pointing to her book, she said. “There it is, you see? At 2 a.m. God said to get up and pray – the devil’s trying to kill Raymond Edman in Ecuador.” And she’d gotten up and prayed.
Duncan Campbell told the story of hearing a farmer in his field who was praying. He was praying about Greece. Afterward, he asked him why he was praying. The man said, “I don’t know. I had a burden in the spirit and God said, ‘You pray; there’s someone in Greece that is in a bad situation.’ I prayed until I got a release.” Two or three years later the farmer was in a meeting listening to a missionary. The man described a time when he was working in Greece. He had been in serious trouble. The time? Two or three years ago. The men compared notes and discovered that it was the very same day that God had burdened a farmer, on a little island off the coast of Scotland, to pray for a man in Greece whose name he didn’t even know.
It may seem the Lord gives you strange things. I don’t care. If the Lord tells you something, carry on with what the Lord tells you.”
— Leonard Ravenhill

He Wants us to Want Him Just For Himself

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“When the Lord Jesus Christ is at liberty to fill me and fill you and live in us His own life, His primary purpose is not to make us successful, not to make us notable, not to even bring us into outward peace or calm, for He promised frankly that it would send a sword and distress, and many difficulties and problems would confront us, and you have no reason to think you will have any more general acceptance in your day than He had in His day.
The idea that if you are filled with the Spirit you are immediately going to be an outstanding success is totally contradicted by our Lord.
The idea that if you are filled with the Spirit you are immediately going to be an outstanding success is totally contradicted by our Lord, and that you are immediately going to do this or that or some other preset prototype of thinking dictates. Oh, no. Not at all. Not necessarily. You may have… You see, it was not only Peter. It was also Stephen. Stephen was stoned. It was not only Peter delivered from the prison. It was James beheaded inside of the prison. And James was just as full of the Spirit as Peter was. Stephen was just as full of the Spirit as Peter was.
And so, being filled with the fullness of Christ simply insures that God’s longing from eternity past is going to be fulfilled in you. So, I would speak a word this morning for God, saying, He has interest in us. Let us not view Him as a means to anything, but the sublime, glorious, supreme end, and desire Him for His own sake, for what He will get out of us, and leave the matter of what we get out of Him entirely to His hands and to approach it entirely from the standpoint of almost indifference.
Really, what difference does it make whether He gives you this token or that token. If you have Him, you have all He is. And thus it behooves us to recognize that when David saw Him exalted and enthroned, he then could say In Thy presence is fullness of joy. And the fullness of joy that is going to come to you as a Christian is not from your achievement, from your success, from your prominence, from your being known, or used or accepted; the fullness of joy that will come to your heart will only be there when your realize that He has in you what He wants. And then you will rejoice, not because He has made you happy, but that somehow you, stained by sin, and ruined by the fall, have been instrumental in making Him happy.
Now there is a great price for this. He said, “My name is holy. I dwell in the high and holy place. With him that is of a broken and a contrite a spirit, to revive the hearts of the broken and to revive the spirits of the contrite ones.” (Isa. 57:15 )
And so it behooves us to recognize that the means whereby He is going to fill us with Himself is on the level of our brokenness. When we come to that place with the Apostle that we are broken by the Cross, I am crucified with Christ, then we have made it possible for Him. You see, He won’t force us to the Cross. He will present it to us, but it is our choice as to whether or not we will walk that extra step which is going to mean that we are pierced by the circumstances God has put in our way. We can avoid the circumstances, but if we avoid them, we avoid the Cross, and if we avoid the Cross we deprive the Lord Jesus of what He is after.
So when it comes to that point, we are prepared to say, Well at any expense, at any price, or cost, I want Him to be glorified in my life. Then it will be as John said, “He must increase; I must decrease.” (John 3:30) And it will be, with Paul, “The things I counted gain to me, I count loss to Christ.” (Phil. 3:7) And so we find that there is a tremendous price, but oh my there is such blessed fruit. For when He fills you with His own fullness He Himself becomes the supreme satisfaction of your heart. A human being is made for God, and the fulfillment of humanity is to be filled with the fullness of God. No one knows the dignity, the honor, the glory of being a human being until he has been filled with the fullness of God, and walks in that fullness.
Now this is not that we make God an instrument for anything, but that this is simply the purpose for our being, the reason for our being. And the great desire of my heart for us as a people today is this, that there is going to rise up within us a passionate longing that Jesus Christ will in us see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied, that He will get out of us that which He wants.
Do you know He died out of longing for you, and He longs to be longed for. He wants to be wanted, not for anything He will bring or give, but just for Himself. He made us for Himself.
Now I believe that when this becomes our unified and common desire that there is no limit to what He will do, for if we look at what we want Him to do for us, we have gotten our eyes off of the source. But when we say, O Lord, the only interest of our hearts is what you get out of us, then it is amazing what He can do. And so for the sake of those about us, around us, and on every side, let us desire above all else that we might enter into His presence and the fullness of what His presence means, for there and there only is the fullness of joy. This is a wonderful life, to be filled with the fullness of Christ, worth everything.
…Do you know He died out of longing for you, and He longs to be longed for. He wants to be wanted, not for anything He will bring or give, but just for Himself. He made us for Himself. Now He wants us to want Him just for Himself. Do you know Him at all? Have you had any beginning contact with Him? Oh, does not your heart hunger to know Him better? And with the apostle Paul, you can say, ‘All the things I counted gain to me, I count as refuse that I may know Him..’ “
— Paris Reidhead

Joy Comes In The Morning

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“His thoughts said, The way is rough.

His Father said, But every step bringeth thee nearer to thy home.

His thoughts said, The fight is fierce.

His Father said, He who is near to his Captain is sure to be a target for the archers.

His thoughts said, The night is long.

His Father said, But joy cometh in the morning.”

— Amy Carmichael

“Lovest Thou Me?”

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“Let it come to you now as from Jesus. Forget that it is spoken by the minister, or written in the text. Hear it only as spoken by Jesus, by that same Jesus who has redeemed you from death and hell by his most precious blood. He addresses it to you rather than to others…

I want the enquiry to come to my own soul and to yours this morning, as if Jesus really stood before each one of us, and again said, “Lovest thou me?”…No outward religiousness renders this enquiry needless. Are we professors of religion, are we very constant in attending to outward forms of worship? Do we enter very heartily into all the public exercises of God’s house? Yes, but there are thousands who do that, hundreds of thousands who do that every Lord’s-day, and yet they do not love Christ!

…We know others to whom the end-all and be-all of religion is an orthodox statement of doctrine. So long as the preaching is according to the confession of faith, and every word and act is piously correct, they are well pleased; but no love to Jesus ever stirs their bosoms; religion to them is not an exercise of the heart at all — it is mere brain work, and hardly that. They know nothing of the living soul going out towards a living person, a bleeding heart knit to another bleeding heart, a life subsisting on another life and enamoured of it. We know brethren who carry this very far, and if the preacher differs from them in the merest shade, they are overwhelmed with pious horror at his unsoundness, and they cannot hear him again: even if he preach Christ most preciously in all the rest of his discourse, it is nothing, because he cannot sound their “Shibboleth.”

What is orthodoxy without love, but a catacomb to bury dead religion in. It is a cage without a bird; the gaunt skeleton of a man out of which the life has fled. I am afraid that the general current of church life runs too much towards externals, and too little towards deep burning love to the person of Christ.

If you preach much about emotional religion, and the heart-work of godliness, cold-blooded professors label you as rather mystical, and begin to talk of Madame Guyon and the danger of the Quietist school of religion. We would not mind having a little spice of that, even if we were blamed for it, for after all the realizing of Christ is the grand thing. The faith which is most blessed is faith which deals most fully with the person of Jesus Christ, the truest repentance is that which weeps at a sight of his wounds, and the love which is most sweet is love to the adorable person of the Well-beloved.

I look upon the doctrines of grace as my Lord’s garments, and they smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia. I look upon his precepts as his sceptre, and it is a rod tipped with silver; and I delight to touch it and find comfort in its power. I look upon the gospel ordinances as the throne upon which he sits, and I delight in that throne of ivory overlaid with pure gold; but oh, his person is sweeter than his garments, dearer than his sceptre, more glorious than his throne; he himself is altogether lovely, and to love HIM is the very heart’s core of true religion.

…You may have all the externals of outward religiousness, and yet the secret of the Lord may not be with you. It will be vain…to love the wedding-feast but not the Bridegroom. Do you love HIM? that is the question. “Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?”

 — Charles Haddon Spurgeon, 1876.

Help From Heaven

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“Once near Kailas, I asked directions to the nearest village. Out of spite, the villagers deliberately sent me down a dangerous jungle path. As night came on, I came to a river that blocked my path..I could hear the sounds of wild animals nearby. With no way to cross the river, I sat down and prayed, thinking that the end of my life was at hand.

When I looked up, I saw a man on the other side of the river beside a fire. He called to me: “Do not be afraid! I am coming to help you.” I was astonished to see him wade purposefully across the swift river. Coming up to me, he said, “Sit on my shoulders and have no fear.” As easily as before, he walked straight across the current with me on his back. He set me down on the far bank, and as I walked beside him, both he and the fire disappeared.”

— Sadhu Sundar Singh

Look to Jesus

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“When you come to the edges of yourself and you see the limits of your love, your generosity, and your willingness to give of yourself…instead of despair, just whisper a prayer to the God who loves you. He’ll do for you, in you, and through you what you cannot do for yourself. He never rolls His eyes or breathes a heavy sigh when it He looks at you. He loves you. May you–right in the midst of your limits and your need–look to Jesus who intends to finish what He started in you. May you focus more on His goodness than on your ‘badness’ because He’s better than you know and loves you more than you can comprehend. Walk freely today, knowing you (like the rest of us) are a work in progress. And you get to be; without the condemnation. Blessings on your day this day!”

— Susie Larson

Fellowship With Christ

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“The others in the house played cards and danced or had what they called a good time until long past midnight. I could not pray with those noises in my ears. To get up early to pray was not the answer, for once I was up, my mind went rushing on to my schoolteaching, which, by the way, I was finding difficult.

At last I hit on the plan of asking the Lord to wake me up at two o’clock in the morning, after the house had settled to quiet, when I would arise for an hour’s prayer and Bible study. This worked wonders. Always a sleepyhead, it was wonderful to me to be awakened each morning, as I was, and in the quiet of that still hour Christ became so real to me that often I felt I could have touched Him, if I but put out my hand.

I was learning what Dr. A. W. Tozer calls “the awareness of His presence.” It satisfied me as nothing on earth had ever done, and filled me with a joy of communion that is inexpressible. It was in this Arabia that I learned fellowship with Christ, a living Person-to-person fellowship which henceforth became dearer than anything else in life to me.”

— Isobel Kuhn

Bridal Love

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“Jesus, who so often says “Whoever loves Me . . .” “Do you love Me?” is concerned about our LOVE!

He is concerned about a special kind of love. It is the love which is shadowed in the relationship between a bride and her bridegroom; that is, it is an exclusive love, a love which places the beloved, the bridegroom, above all other loves, in the first place. As a Bridegroom, Jesus has a claim to “first love”. He who has loved us so much wants to possess us completely, with everything we are and have. Jesus gave Himself wholly and completely for us. Now His love is yearning for us to surrender ourselves and everything that we are to Him, so that He can really be our “first love.”

…Jesus has the right to make such a claim upon our love, because there is no one like Him. No one is so full of glory, so full of royal beauty and powerful love as Jesus. His love is so overwhelming, so tender so intimate, so fiery and so strong. No human love could ever be compared with it.

…In Gethsemane, Jesus waited with such yearning in His heart for His disciples to stand by His side and show Him their love, but He sought and waited in vain. While He was in Bethany before His passion, He had also looked for love. There He found someone, who sympathized with Him and understood how heavy His heart was, because the time had come for Him to begin His road of sorrows. This was Mary. Her love had shown her how deeply grieved was His soul, and she did what she could do for Him. Her entire concern was to comfort and refresh Him. That is why she did not give her money to the poor (and so incurred the disciples’ reproach), but rather “wasted” it on Jesus Himself (Matt. 26: 8, 12). She wanted to comfort and refresh Him, because He was so grieved.

I shall never forget the time when it sank into my heart that because Jesus is the same today as He was yesterday, and because His heart is still suffering today, He is waiting for us to make Him happy and to refresh Him, yes, as the scriptures say, to be comforters for Him (Psalm 69:20). Since that time, my first concern has been Jesus Himself and not my ministry for Him, although I have throughout sought to fulfill that ministry. Now I was concerned about if one may express it this way the ministry unto Jesus. Since that time adoration has burned in my heart. I was grieved for Jesus’ sake, because He received so little love in words and songs of adoration. Since then adoration has never been lacking in my prayer life…

Jesus is yearning to have fellowship with us and to hear words of love drop from our lips. He is waiting for us. He wants us to be close to Him…Jesus is waiting for our love. As important as our sacrifices and our obedience to the commandments are for God (the rich young ruler sacrificed, and kept the commandments), they are not enough. Sacrifices and obedience do not necessarily yield the “eternal, divine life”. Love does not necessarily pulsate through them. Jesus is pulsating life and love and He wants to impart His nature to us. Therefore, only our love, which stems from the divine, eternal life which He has granted to us, is the proper response to His love for us. This love leads us to keep His commandments, which are His wishes for us. It will lead us to bring Him many gifts, and to offer Him sacrifices-but in a different spirit.

This love has radiant power. It radiates happiness and great joy. The Bridegroom is the Master of joy, who has been anointed with the oil of gladness above his fellows (Psalm 45: 7). His bride participates in this great joy. She belongs to Him, the Sun of love, Who shines forth in light and joy. She is united to Him in marriage. His joyful radiance falls upon her being. It is love which brings more bliss and joy than anything else into the world. The joy of an earthly bride is but a faint shadow of the true, eternal joy of the bride of the Lamb.”

— Basilea Schlink