GOD’S WORD FOR MAY 27

OUR PERSONAL PROMISES;

  JESUS, YOU…… GIVE ME GOD’S TREASURE AND LIGHT IN MY EARTHEN CONTAINER –2 Cor 4:7

     JESUS, YOU…… MADE PEACE THROUGH YOUR CROSS —Col 1:20

   JESUS, YOU…… GIVE ME DESIRES TO MATCH YOUR GOOD PLEASURE – Phil 2:13

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THE WORD FOR TODAY

From Andrew Murray’s  beloved classic 1800’s book, “Abide in Christ” ~ we’re beginning chapter 16, entitled, “Forsaking all for Him”

Philippians 3:8-9

“Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith;”

Wherever there is life, there is a continual interchange of taking in and giving out, receiving and restoring.  The nourishment I take is given out again in the work I do, the impressions I receive, and in the thoughts and feelings I express.  The one depends on the other – the giving out ever increases the power of taking in.  In the healthy exercise of giving and taking is all the enjoyment of life.

It is so in the spiritual life too.  There are Christians who look on its blessedness as consisting all in the privilege of ever receiving; they do not know how the capacity for receiving is only kept up and enlarged by continual giving up and giving out – how it is only in the emptiness that comes from the parting with what we have that the divine fullness can flow in.  It was a truth our Savior continually insisted on.  When He spoke of selling all to secure the treasure, of losing our life to find it, of the hundredfold to those who forsake all, He was expounding the need of self-sacrifice as the law of the kingdom for Himself as well as for His disciples.  If we are really to abide in Christ and to be found in Him – to have our life always and wholly in Him – we must each in our measure say with Paul:

“I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord …that I may win Christ, and be found in Him.” (Philippians 3:8-9).

Let us try to see what there is to be forsaken and given up.  First of all, there is sin.  There can be no true conversion without the giving up of sin.  Yet, owing to the ignorance of the young convert of what really is sin, of what the claims of God’s holiness are, and of the extent to which the power of Jesus can enable us to conquer sin, the giving up of sin is but partial and superficial.

With the growth of the Christian life, there comes the need for a deeper and more entire  purging out of everything that is unholy.  It is especially when the desire to abide in Christ uninterruptedly, to be always found in Him, becomes strong that the soul is led to see the need of a new act of surrender in which it accepts and ratifies its death to sin in Christ afresh and parts indeed with everything that is sin.

 Availing himself, in the strength of God’s Spirit, of that wonderful power of our nature by which the whole of one’s future life can be gathered up and disposed of in one act of the will, the believer yields himself to sin no more – to be only and wholly a servant of righteousness. 

He does it in the joyful assurance that every sin surrendered is indeed –room for the inflowing of the presence and the love of Christ!

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