Posted on 09/10/2013 5:47:35 PM PDT by Vision
Worshiping in Everyday Occasions. We presume that we would be ready for battle if confronted with a great crisis, but it is not the crisis that builds something within us— it simply reveals what we are made of already. Do you find yourself saying, “If God calls me to battle, of course I will rise to the occasion”? Yet you won’t rise to the occasion unless you have done so on God’s training ground. If you are not doing the task that is closest to you now, which God has engineered into your life, when the crisis comes, instead of being fit for battle, you will be revealed as being unfit. Crises always reveal a person’s true character.
A private relationship of worshiping God is the greatest essential element of spiritual fitness. The time will come, as Nathanael experienced in this passage, that a private “fig-tree” life will no longer be possible. Everything will be out in the open, and you will find yourself to be of no value there if you have not been worshiping in everyday occasions in your own home. If your worship is right in your private relationship with God, then when He sets you free, you will be ready. It is in the unseen life, which only God saw, that you have become perfectly fit. And when the strain of the crisis comes, you can be relied upon by God.
Are you saying, “But I can’t be expected to live a sanctified life in my present circumstances; I have no time for prayer or Bible study right now; besides, my opportunity for battle hasn’t come yet, but when it does, of course I will be ready”? No, you will not. If you have not been worshiping in everyday occasions, when you get involved in God’s work, you will not only be useless yourself but also a hindrance to those around you.
God’s training ground, where the missionary weapons are found, is the hidden, personal, worshiping life of the saint.
Oswald Chambers (1874-1917) was born July 24, 1874, in Aberdeen, Scotland. Converted in his teen years under the ministry of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, he studied art and archaeology at the University of Edinburgh before answering a call from God to the Christian ministry. He then studied theology at Dunoon College. From 1906-1910 he conducted an itinerant Bible-teaching ministry in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan.In 1910, Chambers married Gertrude Hobbs. They had one daughter, Kathleen.
In 1911 he founded and became principal of the Bible Training College in Clapham, London, where he lectured until the school was closed in 1915 because of World War I. In October 1915 he sailed for Zeitoun, Egypt (near Cairo), where he ministered to troops from Australia and New Zealand as a YMCA chaplain. He died there November 15, 1917, following surgery for a ruptured appendix.
Although Oswald Chambers wrote only one book, Baffled to Fight Better, more than thirty titles bear his name. With this one exception, published works were compiled by Mrs. Chambers, a court stenographer, from her verbatim shorthand notes of his messages taken during their seven years of marriage. For half a century following her husband's death she labored to give his words to the world.
My Utmost For His Highest, his best-known book, has been continuously in print in the United States since 1935 and remains in the top ten titles of the religious book bestseller list with millions of copies in print. It has become a Christian classic.
Absolutely no flaming! These daily threads are intended to be devotional in nature. If a particular day's offering says nothing to you, please just go on and wait for the next day. Consider these threads a DMZ of sorts, a place where a perpetual truce is in effect and a place where all other arguments and disagreements from other times and places are left behind.
I can attest from personal experience that reading from Chambers daily will almost certainly change - not one's faith - but one's perspective of his/her own faith, and open up new vistas in your spiritual life. If - when - this happens to a reader of these threads, and they choose to share what has happened within them - we are treading on hallowed ground. Be respectful.
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The tests of life are intended as occasions in which we might learn something of the Lord as vs. the ungodly world. Tests do not have to be completely passed to prove useful, and the Lord can redeem utter failures that are honestly brought to Him with gracious second chances. But the better the faith brought to the tests the more useful they will be.
The only way to learn something is to practice it. It's not possible to become prepared for spiritual battle without engaging in it at some level, just like an athlete must practice daily to win competitions.
Oddly, we see the tests the Lord puts in front of us as impediments to our spiritual growth instead of opportunities to practice for what He has in mind later.
The OT events are a spiritual prelude to the NT events. So something like this fits nicely when that framework is kept in mind. Anyhow I got something to take care of here, got to go.
The Lord showed me that with this verse when I was praying about something I have been dealing with and wondering why I haven’t had an answer.
Yet.
It’s to teach me spiritual warfare. Their physical enemies are the counterpart of our spiritual enemies, the forces of evil we battle in the spiritual realm (Romans 8)
Also, your answer may well BE cooking up, but the recipe isn’t a microwave recipe.
That’s funny that you should use that symbolism.
My issue is a mast cell disorder and food is the trigger. I live essentially on chicken and oats. I can do a few other items on occasion in small amounts.
I have been praying for and been getting prayed for for healing for years. Still waiting.
Well it sounds like you have a difficult health condition.
I think the good Lord has given me a spiritual hint, however, that “MIGHT” transform even a difficult condition. I’m not making any personal promises about the effect of doing this, and you may have already tried it. But if not, here it is. And if it works don’t praise me. Praise the Lord. I didn’t invent it. However it is from His own heart.
The prayer associated with this is deceptively simple. However, you have to do it yourself; nobody else can do it for you. This is not intended to be some literal formula, but it is the gist of the meaning. “Dear Heavenly Father. I offer my body and my soul to You along with all its current ills and pains. I offer it all to you, the good and the bad. Please be exalted now in this body of mine, no matter what has gone before, so that I in turn may exalt You and You may be exalted in this sad world. I trust Your totally omnipotent power that can conquer the toughest territory and that can move mountains, if that is what it takes to exalt Your name. In Your Son Jesus, my Savior’s name I pray... Amen.”
And if you only get a little improvement at first... don’t stop. Exaltation of the Lord drives Satan away more than a roomful of “exorcists” can.
Mix it up with praise songs, too. In general, brag in Satan’s face about how the Lord has saved your soul. The powers of hell cannot tolerate such treatment for long.
When I am at home or on the road, I have worship music playing constantly.
I am getting into the word more than ever also.
I will give your suggestion a shot.
I know the God CAN heal me. It hasn’t happened yet. He did tell me a few months ago, when I was praying for the situation, that *I am working on something greater*.
OK. In that case, either I just need to wait it out or need to figure out if there is some part I play in it, if there’s something I need to get first. If that’s the case, pray that I’d *get8 it.
Well, keep in mind that exaltation might or might not mean quick healing, especially if the warning you perceived was genuine, but that’s truly the core of what the Lord is about. You can’t hit the bulls eye of His will any more centered than this. But typically, when the Lord is exalted in a difficulty situation it brings the one-two punch of bringing blessings and of ridding curses. Go for it boldly allowing for anything an omnipotent God can do. The thing that you might need to get is faith. Faith is ceasing from saying no to God, to make room for the embrace of yes.
By the way, one way of saying no to God that torpedoes blessings is cursing. I try hard now not to damn any person or thing. There will be a time when damnation comes to ones who are obstinate refuseniks towards God to the end, but we are not privy to identifying information ahead of time. God is busy telling us of the divine equivalent of hopeful desire and we are coming at things on a worldly level of oh woe, how hopeless. NO, not hopeless. NOT if we let God’s blessings in.
By the way, follow the chapters at the end of Job. After God has let the devil mow down Job’s fortunes and make Job suffer, what does God do... does God immediately pick Job up and give him a hug... nope God gives Job a penetrating lecture! About how great He is!
What was lacking here in Job was faith. And sometimes the SMALL blessings clutter up our mind and we believe we are fine when we aren’t. Because God wants to give us BIG blessings. And they can’t come unless we believe. Sometimes God’s favors are painful!
I didn’t see what God told me as a warning as much as an explanation.
I am also, with all due respect, on a crusade against the *you just need greater faith* theology.
Jesus told us that if we had faith the size of a mustard seed, we could move mountains. Faith is the activating *principle* as it were, but it’s not the size of my faith that makes it effective, it’s the size of the God I have faith in that makes it effective.
Honestly, I’ve prayed for stuff with almost no faith that God would do it, and it happened. Likewise, I’ve prayed for stuff I was sure God would act on and He didn’t.
I will pray and leave the results to God. He can do it. And if He doesn’t on my schedule, The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.
I know that my Redeemer lives and in my flesh I will see Him.
I think the “greater faith” meme can be used wrongly, when it’s focused on superficial things.
But I didn’t and do not recommend superficial things. Since when is God’s exaltation superficial?
I.e. your well intended fight against a spiritual abuse might be spilling over to contaminate a genuine spiritual use. In general God does allow suffering to illustrate our need for Him, and He may fulfill by literally removing the suffering or He may fulfill in a different manner. And no value judgment on the person should be inferred. Value judgments on persons are foolish anyhow when we are talking about persons connected to the Cross.
illustrate => illuminate
Well, I’ve run into more than my share of those making value judgments about my affliction and have not found any of it to be Scriptural and also found that it could be very damaging to the person afflicted.
I’ve heard of cases of people who’ve been in that situation where they were just devastated and it really did a number on their faith. I was well grounded enough to know better, but still the constant, well for lack of a better word, accusation that it was somehow my fault that I had not received the healing yet, only added to my struggle with it. It did not help AT ALL. On the contrary, it made trying to deal with it all the harder.
Well I sure don’t want to lay a guilt trip on you, but at the same time I may have inadvertently lent myself to a situation where Satan laid his lies on you to that effect thick and heavy and if I did I sure regret it.
God may well answer the prayer for exaltation in some OTHER manner than lifting your current illness but which will still prove a distinct blessing. I don’t want to claim if prayer along the lines I suggested doesn’t work then you did something wrong. That’s just lousy theology, as the pastor of my previous church would say. But sometimes it’s possible for us to take things said by other people personally by mistake when it’s Satan who is actually putting spin on what was said that the speaker never intended. Trials are trying....
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