Posted on 08/13/2014 6:04:05 PM PDT by Vision
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). When-ever 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.
Oswald Chambers (1874-1917) was born August 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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very beautiful, but i don’t understand it. can anyone explain?
My reading is that to avoid quenching the Spirit Who indwells us we must have restraint in a crisis and trust Him.
Indeed, especially in times of crisis, it is best to put our full trust in Him. That means not to trust ourselves too much, but to listen to the Spirit Who indwells us. There are times when it is simply best to kneel in prayer, then to stand up and "let go and let God" ....
I do believe we are living in such times. The current crises are personal, sociocultural, and geopolitical in nature. The best thing to do under the circumstances is to live in God's Truth, in openness to His Holy Spirit.
This sort of thing really does require self-restraint.... Plus you have to learn how to listen....
Then start, and keep praying.
May our Lord ever bless the United States of America, and you and all your dear ones.
Thank you ever so much for your splendid insight, dearest sister in Christ!
This is all very close to my heart right now.
God speaks into your inner man I believe all the time, but there is a constant jabber of other voices too, including our own. Learning to discern His voice from the cacophony is job one.
One important step is to simply tune out the media noise machine, that seems to help a lot. Time spent in prayer obviously helps, and then finally putting what you believe you have heard to the test is another. Once you believe you’ve had confirmation, then act.
I wouldn’t presume to speak for anyone else, but this is what occurs to me.
It takes practice to discern his voice through the noise. Not just listening carefully but acting on it to confirm what you’ve heard. Else it all fades back into the background noise. Thats my reading of it at least. Your experience may give you a different insight...
I think that unless we deliberately set aside time to spend with God and learn to recognize His voice then, that we won’t recognize it at other times, especially in the moment of crisis.
And I also agree that if the first time we go through something, we miss it, God brings it to bear on us again. He’s such a God of second chances.
Praise Him for that.
I think that the quenching comes, though, through disobedience more than failing a test. At least that’s the way I always understood what quenching was.
I’ve also found that sometimes God smacks me upside the head, so to speak.
I agree. I have experienced this several times. Only in aftermath do I realize what God was trying to do sometimes. And a couple of very significant times, he brought it around again and the second time I got it right.
I always had the theory that He tries the easy way first and if we resist and won’t listen then, then He has to do it the hard way.
It’s kind of forced me to pay more attention to what’s going on in my life and see if the things that are happening to me are something God is trying to work in me.
And that’s a good thing.
I agree we are in just such a time now and join with you in prayers for our country. And I pray for you, dearest sister in Christ, and all your loved ones.
Praise God for His persistence and patience!!!
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