|
|
“Do not lay your hand on the lad, or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me” (Genesis 22:12).
FROM TIME TO TIME WE ARE TESTED IN WAYS THAT MAKE IT CLEAR WHAT KIND OF PERSONS WE ARE. When, for example, Abraham’s faith was tested by the command to offer his son Isaac, God could say, “Now I know that you fear God.” This is not an easy statement to fathom. But whatever may have been manifested to God by Abraham’s ordeal, we can be sure of this: Abraham learned a good deal about HIMSELF. After his agony, Abraham would have known his own faith in ways that were impossible before.
When we face difficulty, we find out what we are really made of. In times of ease, we think we know ourselves and we say what we believe in words that sound right to our own ears. And we’re not being deliberately deceptive. But A. W. Tozer probably had it right when he said, “Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God.”
There are two things about us that need to be tested. One is THE VALIDITY OF OUR PRINCIPLES. It is something to have meditated on our principles; it is something else to have field-tested them. We need the value of a faith that has found its beliefs to be consistent with reality, on the battlefield as well as in the church pew. And God invites us to test His truths in this very way. “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). But also, OUR ALLEGIANCE TO OUR PRINCIPLES needs to be tested. And frankly, this often requires a trial by fire. “Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it, a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not” (Henry Fielding).
If it is through suffering that we learn our own mettle, then suffering is not altogether undesirable. James said, “My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials” (James 1:2). Perhaps most of us will find that we can’t actually WELCOME difficulty, but we can at least give thanks for its USEFULNESS. There are some very practical, as well as eternal, reasons why we need to understand ourselves, and if it takes hardship to help us understand, then so be it. Even if an ordeal shows that we’re less than we’ve made ourselves out to be in the past, the sooner we face the truth, the better we can make godly choices for the future.
“Adversity introduces a man to himself” (Anonymous).
“. . . the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe” (Ephesians 1:18,19).
WHY DO WE CONTENT OURSELVES WITH ONLY A SIP FROM THE LIMITLESS OCEAN THAT IS GOD? It must be a source of sadness to our Creator that we don’t even desire to know Him more fully nor to enjoy a greater measure of His goodness and glory. As the God who “is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20), He must surely marvel at our failure even to WANT the greater things He is able to give us. Our hearts have become pitifully small receptacles for His grace.
As finite creatures, we can never experience all that God is, but that fact is no excuse not to GROW in our experience of Him. And if we’re not growing in this way, we should look first at our own expectations. James diagnosed our problem when he wrote, “You do not have because you do not ask” (James 4:2). Since God is greater than even our greatest dreams, it is the meagerness of our true desires that holds us back. We’re far too easily satisfied, and we “do not know what we should pray for as we ought” (Romans 8:26). So Charles Spurgeon gave good advice when he said, “We are poverty itself, and only All-Sufficiency can supply us . . . Be great in your experience of His all-sufficiency.”
When it comes to seeing and experiencing more of God, we are certainly hindered by too little DESIRE. But we’re also hindered by too little ABILITY. We don’t have the spiritual vision to see any more than the smallest fraction of God’s power, and so we see very little of what could be ours if we truly sought Him. This failure of vision should be on our minds when we pray. Nothing we can ask of God is more important than for the “eyes” of our understanding to be enlightened. We simply will not SEEK Him as we should until we SEE more clearly “what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe.” These are things of such glory that when we see them, we’ll want hearts and hands more capable of receiving them.
“If we be empty and poor, it is not because God’s hand is straitened, but ours is not opened” (Thomas Manton).
“. . . to love Him with all the heart, with all the understanding, with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is more than all the whole burnt offerings and sacrifices” (Mark 12:33).
IF WE SEEK GOD DILIGENTLY, WE WILL FIND “WORSHIP” TO BE ONE OF OUR LIFELONG CHALLENGES. Even when our desire is to improve the quality of our worship, it is not easy to get the emphasis in the right place and keep it there. We tend to lose our balance.
One mistake we often make is presuming that God will be honored by anything that we choose to define as worship. Unfortunately, our age is characterized by a bold, self-centered approach to worship, one that feels free to offer God whatever is currently fashionable in religious circles, however devoid of scriptural precedent that may be. But God has always retained the right to say what honors Him and what does not. It is urgent that we regain the kind of reverence that will bow before God and wait for Him to tell us the actions by which He desires to be worshiped. True worship centers on the perfect glory of the King, not on the changing tastes of His somewhat rebellious subjects, and we dare not try to create God in our own image.
But having said that, we must hasten to say this also: even the scriptural actions by which God has instructed us to worship Him mean virtually nothing if they don’t proceed from a heart of true love. And here is where we quite often fail, despite our sometimes scrupulous attention to the details of worship. We see worship simply as a set of respectful motions God has required us to go through, and we forget that it is our heart that He is really after. If our hearts are not warmed by gratitude and love, then our worship will fall short of real reverence.
Even in our human relationships, we understand that the highest kinds of honor are those where respect is combined with love. We may appreciate the respect of casual friends, but we’re much more deeply touched when it comes from the heart of those who know us best and love us most. In the case of God, He not only loves us, He desires to be loved BY us. What He seeks from us is perhaps best described by an old word that we don’t hear much anymore: ADORATION. Our praise grows toward perfection when the King before whom we bow is also the Father whom we love.
“I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love” (Henry Ward Beecher).
“The soul of a lazy man desires, and has nothing; but the soul of the diligent shall be made rich” (Proverbs 13:4).
WE MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT OUR DESIRE FOR GOD, AND THE THINGS WE DO MUST BE DONE WITH DILIGENCE. “You have need of endurance,” we are told, “so that after you have done the will of God, you may receive the promise” (Hebrews 10:36). In regard to God, diligence is not merely advisable. It is necessary.
Of course, diligence ALONE will not result in a right relationship with God. We may tackle the question of God with desire and determination, but if we’re acting on the basis of misinformation, then our hard work will only produce a more diligent form of idolatry. As A. W. Tozer pointed out, “Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.” And as Stephen R. Covey has suggested, if we’re guided by a mistaken map, then diligence will just get us to the wrong place more quickly. So wherever intellect is concerned, our seeking of God must be steered by a real commitment to objective truth.
But make no mistake about it: intellect and emotion will not get the job done either, if they’re not accompanied by an active WILL. We may know that certain things ought to be done and we may even desire to do them, but it is a decisive, hard-working will that separates the dreamers from the doers. Knowledge is a serious thing. James even went so far as to say, “To him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin” (James 4:17).
Jesus distinguished true worship from false in these memorable words: “The hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him” (John 4:23). So worship that is deficient in either spirit or truth is something less than true worship. But even so, God must still be WORSHIPED! Intellectual truth and emotional desire can carry us only so far. At some point, a commitment must be made. And not only made, it must be carried out. Thinking and feeling alone are not enough.
“Reason comes to the foot of the mountain; it is the industrious will urged by the passionate heart which climbs the slope” (Evelyn Underhill).
For love is as strong as death, jealousy as cruel as the grave;
Its flames are flames of fire, a most vehement flame.
Many waters cannot quench love, nor can the floods drown it.
If a man would give for love all the wealth of his house,
It would be utterly despised.
(Song of Solomon 8:6,7)
LOVE IS A “DANGEROUS” THING. It is the most powerful character force that we know of, and it leaves nothing unchanged. For better or worse, love shapes our character and determines our destiny. Either it lifts us to heaven or it drags us to hell. We may be moved toward God or we may be driven into miserable exile, but love will not leave us where we are.
Two things determine what love will do to us. One is the choice we make as to the OBJECTS of our love. If we focus our love upon God and our fellow human beings, love will purify us. But if we allow our love to settle upon either ourselves or the merely material things of creation, then the effect of love will be to destroy us. For example, to those driven mainly by the love of money, James wrote, “Your gold and silver are corroded, and their corrosion will be a witness against you and WILL EAT YOUR FLESH LIKE FIRE” (James 5:3). The fire of love will bless us or blight us, depending upon whether the objects of our love are higher or lower.
But also, our MOTIVES for love are critical. If we love primarily for what we can get in return, we will find that love turns out to be a destructive force. But if we learn to love for what we can GIVE, the outcome will be radically different. Jesus taught that it is “more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). And this difference in motive is decisive even when it comes to God. The love of God has a positive effect only when we give our love to Him for His own sake. Whatever benefits we hope to receive, our love for God Himself must run deeper than our desire for any of His blessings. We must not love God for what we can get out of Him.
So let us be careful — very, very careful — about WHAT we love and WHY. The freedom to choose these things is a part of our glory as personal beings. We’re made in the image of a God who is perfect love, and we flourish only when we love Him rightly. If we fail to love Him rightly, it may be that we will still know some sort of love. But that love will be our undoing.
“Love is the fire of life; it either consumes or purifies” (Anonymous).
“Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma” (Ephesians 5:1,2).
WE ARE CALLED TO LOVE OUR LORD. Indeed, we are COMMANDED to love Him. Yet this is no ordinary command. While it requires us to do something, our duty is not so much the DOING of something strenuous as it is the ALLOWING of something wonderful. In the matter of love, we should see God as taking the initiative and ourselves as having the opportunity to respond to Him.
The apostle John wrote, “In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:9,10). When we’re tempted to doubt God’s intentions toward us, we need look no further than the Cross to see what His desire for us really is.
In one way or another, sin always amounts to a refusal to let God love us. It’s a pushing away of the good that He desires us to enjoy, a selfish resistance to His goodwill. And this is great folly. Nothing in life is more foolish than to reject our Creator’s love because we think we can get a better deal somewhere else. The wiser we are, the sooner we’ll let Him love us.
Paul’s prayer for his Christian friends in Ephesus was this: “that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:17-19). To “know the love of Christ” and to be “filled with all the fullness of God” ought to be our highest aspiration. And we come closest to this aspiration when we’re “rooted and grounded in love.”
So then, what does it mean to pursue the love of Christ? More than our pursuing Him, it means allowing ourselves to be pursued BY Him. It’s the choice to accept His benevolent will, ceasing to run away from the great love that He has desired to give us for so long. To learn what real love is, we must lay down our rebellion.
“Surrender to the love of that heart which was pierced to purchase your redemption” (Charles Haddon Spurgeon).
“But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard this, they tore their clothes and ran in among the multitude, crying out and saying, ‘Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men with the same nature as you, and preach to you that you should turn from these useless things to the living God, who made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all things that are in them’” (Acts 14:14,15).
THE TURNING THAT GOD REQUIRES OF US IS A MATTER OF HUGE IMPORTANCE, BUT VERY FEW OF US LOOK AT IT IN THE WAY IT SHOULD BE LOOKED AT. Turning to God is something we view with reluctance. We see it as being very difficult and probably quite unpleasant. Some even seem to see it as unnatural. In truth, however, the God who calls us to repentance is calling us simply to let go of the “useless things” that have been holding us back. The things that we’re being asked to leave out of our lives are merely our liabilities, things that in the long run can never do anything but hurt us. What kind of fools are we to refuse God, the ultimate source of all satisfaction, in order to hold on to “empty things which cannot profit or deliver” (1 Samuel 12:21)?
One reason we’re so reluctant to let go of our sins is that we fail to see the depth of satisfaction that is available to us in God. Our sins are like the water from the well in Samaria. “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again,” Jesus said, “but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst” (John 4:13,14). Next to the empty things in which we invest ourselves, God is a satisfaction so superior as to defy comparison. If we ever saw, even for an instant, what it might mean to “never thirst,” we would give all the world to have that gift.
Yet we have no adequate appreciation of what God can be to us. “Divine Love, if we were satisfied with You, we would climb to the highest heavens. If we were smart enough to leave everything to You, we would achieve the summit of holiness” (Jean-Pierre de Causade). God has never required anything but what will do us good, and what He forbids is only what will disappoint us. Before it’s too late and the time for our turning is past, we need to open our eyes to what can be ours. Can we not see the astounding wonder of the “exchange” we’re being offered?
“We find it difficult to give up our desire for things that can never satisfy us in order to purchase the One Good in whom is all our joy — and in Whom, moreover, we get back everything else that we have renounced besides!” (Thomas Merton).
“Therefore He says: ‘Awake, you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light’” (Ephesians 5:14).
LIKE THOSE WHO LIE IN BED NOT SUMMONING THE WILL TO ARISE, WE SOMETIMES MAKE OUR LIVES MORE DIFFICULT, AND OURSELVES MORE MISERABLE, BY NOT DECIDING WHAT TO DO ABOUT GOD. Shrinking from the difficulty of this great decision, we plunge ourselves into the much greater difficulty of indecision.
It has been said that we face a basic choice in life: either we accept the pain of DISCIPLINE right now, or we suffer the pain of REGRET later on. If we take what seems to be the course of least resistance, ducking our difficult choices when they first come up, what we find in the long run is that our lives sink in a swamp of discouragement and deep sadness. Rather than accumulating a treasury of memories that enrich our later years, we find that we’ve built a museum of regrets. We live out our last days plagued with the pain of decisions unmade and duty undone. Contrary to the devil’s lie, there is nothing easy about laziness. It turns out to be the hardest taskmaster of all. The most troubled person in the world is often the one whose highest aim was to avoid trouble.
There is no use denying that life in the real world makes demands of us, some of which are difficult. If we are to make any worthwhile progress, we must deal with our daily decisions straightforwardly. If they seem difficult this morning, they will seem even more so this afternoon. And by this evening, they may have become practically impossible. Concerning progress, Albert Schweitzer made this observation: “Progress always consists in taking one or another of two alternatives, abandoning the attempt to combine them.” The question of our commitment to God is hardly a trivial matter. To delay dealing with this issue is dangerous, and perhaps even disastrous. Do we not see the dishonor that is done to God by our procrastination? If it turns out that God is God and that we are indeed His creatures, we will want to have done more than stagger through life in a stupor. We will want to have lived, and lived decisively.
“I had two wills: one old, one new; one carnal, one spiritual. Their conflict wasted my soul. I was like a sleepy man unable to get up. God convinced me that his words were true, but the only answer I could give was the groggy word: ‘soon’” (Augustine of Hippo).
“I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth” (Revelation 3:15,16).
GOD IS STEADFASTLY PATIENT WHEN OUR HEARTS ARE WEAK, BUT WHEN WE INDIFFERENTLY GIVE HIM ONLY HALF OUR HEART, WE INSULT HIS LOVE AND INVITE THE FURY OF HIS JUDGMENT. Of all the things we may do, perhaps none is more serious than to drift into complacency and carelessness concerning God. If God were our enemy, we would at least give Him our full attention, but when we are halfhearted, we simply don’t care enough to make up our minds whether we love Him or hate Him. As conditions of the heart go, lukewarmness is one of the very worst.
There is more hope and more possibility for us when we’re actively fighting against God than when we’re only halfhearted. God saw, for example, more potential for good in Saul, the firebrand and persecutor of the church, than in his more complacent colleagues, most of whom were probably so wrapped up in their respectable routines that they saw nothing about Jesus Christ to get excited about one way or the other. When Christ appeared to him on the Damascus Road, He said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. It is hard for you to kick against the goads” (Acts 9:5). As long as he was kicking against the goads, Saul had a chance to feel the sharp consequences of his deeds. But those who neither devote themselves to God nor kick against Him are content. They feel nothing and are dead in the very worst sense of the word.
In the end, of course, there is no such thing as indifference to God. Jesus said, “He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters abroad” (Matthew 12:30). When it comes to God, there is no safe territory between love and hatred. Halfheartedness is simply one form of hatred, and it is the most repulsive as far as God Himself is concerned. For this reason, Jesus wishes to disturb us. “I did not come to bring peace but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). He came into the world not only to comfort the afflicted . . . but to afflict the comfortable.
God will have all, or none; serve him, or fall
Down before Baal, Bel, or Belial;
Either be hot or cold. God doth despise,
Abhor, and spew out all neutralities.
(Robert Herrick)
“By this is My Father glorified, that you bear much fruit; so you will be My disciples” (John 15:8).
WHAT DOES GOD DESIRE FROM US? Surely He desires our HANDS, as well as our HEARTS. He confronts us with this searching question: “Why do you call Me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do the things which I say?” (Luke 6:46). There is no such thing as true discipleship without fruit-bearing. The two ideas are inseparable. “You will be My disciples,” Jesus said, in the bearing of “much fruit.” In the Sermon on the Mount, He had said, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). We can hardly make a greater mistake than to think of the faith as something simply to be “experienced.” Those who are SAVED are those who must SERVE.
To become a Christian is to become involved in an active undertaking. Almost every scriptural analogy used to illustrate the relationship of God’s people is one that implies work or activity. Disciples are useful MEMBERS in the BODY, productive BRANCHES in the VINE, dependable SERVANTS in the HOUSEHOLD, etc. “Let our people,” Paul wrote, “learn to maintain good works, to meet urgent needs, that they may not be unfruitful” (Titus 3:14). Jesus Christ did not go to the Cross merely to confer an honorary status upon those who believe in Him. The text probably quoted most often to emphasize that our salvation is by God’s grace is immediately followed by this statement: “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10).
Our God has plans for us. His will is to weave us into the great pattern of His purpose in Jesus Christ and make us participants in the outworking of His intentions. If we seek God truly, we will not wander aimlessly in the realm of spirituality, but we will pursue a path that goes toward the doing of definite good things. The discipleship He seeks from us is not merely one that we enjoy, but one that produces results. We can be sure that whatever we do within God’s will, He is more than able to bring something good out of it. And so He tells us: “Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days” (Ecclesiastes 11:1).
“Our Father, You come seeking fruit. Teach me, I pray You, to realize how truly this is the one object of my existence, and of my union to Christ” (Andrew Murray).
|
|
