I was reading a post on a site I frequent quite often, and the scripture the author had quoted, and his post, really convicted me. The post was entitled, ONE BODY.
{This is not the first time I have been convicted on this issue! In fact, my closest brother in Christ has said many things about the Lord’s Love, over the years, which have convicted me, but I have evidently put that conviction off until now.}
As I read, I began to realize that in my rush to share what is on my heart and mind, I, too often, am lacking in the Love and Grace of my Lord! And for someone such as me, who has been forgiven a great, great deal, I should be the first person among all people to show the Lord’s Love and Grace to others. So, before I proceed, let me first make amends to all of my brothers and sisters in Christ:
I am sorry if I have been insensitive, unloving, and lacking in the Grace of God! I ask for your forgiveness and patience. I would also ask you to pray, if you would, for the Lord to reveal Himself more fully to me. And that I become as nothing so that He may have His way with me; that I truly, beyond mental ascension, come to not only know that the Lord’s Life Lives in me, but that I also come to fully experience that indwelling Life. I cannot get this done of my own desire, design or volition. I do not have the power to change myself, only the Lord, in me, can change me!
Here is the scripture that convicted me so:
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, 16 that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3: 14-19)
This scripture is even more convicting today! I am beginning to realize, even more than before, that my knowledge of the Lord has been, for far too long, based on scriptural doctrine, for the most part: doctrine that applies to our lives here and now (politically, socially, etc), and in the future (prophecy). Where I have been lacking, sorely, is in the knowledge of the Lord (truly seeing Him), and the experience of His Love which surpasses knowledge, so that His love could flow through me to others. Thus I find, sadly, that, at this moment, I have become nothing more, in reality, than a noisy gong, an obnoxious clanging cymbal who is seeking to serve others, but devoid, to a great extent, of the real strength of the Lord’s Love:
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. (1 Corinthians 13)
The Apostle Paul’s following description of the Lord’s Love is how I want to Love but am failing so badly:
Love is PATIENT, love is KIND and is NOT JEALOUS; love DOES NOT BRAG and IS NOT ARROGANT, 5 DOES NOT ACT UNBECOMINGLY; it DOES NOT SEEK ITS OWN, IS NOT PROVOKED, DOES NOT TAKE INTO ACCOUNT A WRONG SUFFERED, 6 does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but REJOICES WITH THE TRUTH; 7 BEARS ALL THINGS, BELIEVES ALL THINGS, HOPES ALL THINGS, ENDURES ALL THINGS.
8 LOVE NEVER FAILS; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part; 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. 11 When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. 13 But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; BUT THE GREATEST OF THESE IS LOVE. (1 Corinthians 13)
I could move a mountain before I could ever achieve this kind of Love by my own power! It is overwhelming to me as I read it. In fact, this verse from Romans 7 keeps popping into my head, over and over again:
Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!
Wretched man that I am, my only hope is the Lord!
From this day forward, I will continue to write, as I sense I have been led, but I will write with the prayer, and faith, that the Lord will instill in me His Love; and that His Love will, then, come through in my writing. I must contemplate and pray over these scriptures, because, without the Lord’s Love, I am nothing:
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. 10 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. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. 13 By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. 14 We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world…
We love, because He first loved us. (1 John 4)
“We love, only because He first Loved us.” Father, help me to not only remember Your Truth, but to also be eternally altered by it, so that all things You would have me accomplish, according to Your will, would be done in Your Love! Amen
My Dear Brother, thank you for sharing this conviction that the Lord has pierced your heart with! I know much about what you are sharing here, as I too struggle with such innate hardness and coldness. I pray constantly that the meekness and love and gentleness of the Lord would replace these qualities in me, especially towards those purchased by the precious blood of the Lamb!
I have been and will certainly continue to join with you in this petition to our Father that His Son would be be formed in you and increased day by day, moment by moment!
I recently shared the following question and perhaps this is related to your testimony in this post –
“Has everything that comprises us – spirit, soul and body – come under the lordship, influence, and inspiration of the Living Christ – our attitudes, opinions, ideas, values, perceptions, personality, moods, associations, beliefs, relationships, resources, circumstances;
ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING?
What, in fact, are we holding back as our own? Oh dear saints, beloved of the Lord, how we need such tremendous faith to lay it all down at His feet once and for all!”
To lose, to forsake, to be reduced, to allow the Holy Spirit to impart the very life of the the Father’s Son in us; to accept without qualification the complete abnegation of all that we are – Oh David my brother, how this this requires such great faith; such trust on a level that goes deeper than anything known in the realm of men and this world. We must turn to the Father as our Lord did in His physical life, in everything, turning all matters, great and small; all details pertaining to everything – we must let it all go, that the Christ would be formed in us, that He would grow to represent our very life and testimony on this earth.
Is this deep stuff? You better believe it is! Is it what is being offered to these precious souls bought with the blood of the Lamb in popular churches around this country and the world? Sadly no my brother, for the price for the many is too high! And who can argue with that – THE PRICE IS INDEED HIGH – IT IS EVERYTHING YOU HAVE, EVEN YOUR FUTURE IN THIS WORLD; everything you might have in this present life; everything the devil and his agents are offering you if only you will renounce the way of Christ and His Cross.
Like the Lord when He walked this earth in human form, we must fall back vicariously into the care of our Heavenly Father; we must present ourselves to Him with the very most we have to offer in terms of sacrifice and submission – our very selves.
The devil will always attempt to get us to question or impugn the faithfulness and love of our Lord; this is his tactic; his aim in all temptation. I will leave you with this excerpt from Austin-Sparks (The Law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus). Be encouraged my brother, be strong, trust Him and the perfect work He is doing within you. You are not alone. Indeed we are never alone!
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The Impugning of God’s Character
Then there was something further, a hidden insinuation, and that in respect of two things. Firstly, there was an insinuation regarding God’s love. Buried right deep down in this temptation there was a calling into question the love of God. The implication was that God, who professed to love, to be so solicitous for the good of His creatures, was really withholding the best and the highest and the fullest, was really holding their lives in a straitness which need not be, and which was arbitrary. Really God was not love, for a God who does that is not love. Now, I am not saying that all this was recognized, but I am saying that the whole of the Scriptures as well as of human history bears it out. Satan’s first basic, subtle, diabolical assault is always upon the love of God, and he never gives up that assault. You and I will never on this earth be in the place where we are altogether immune from the possibility of being tempted about that. Do you tell me that God is love? Look at this and that and that! What does it spell but limitation, and your having less than you could have and ought to have?
Then it was an insinuation as to God’s veracity; that is, as to whether God is true, whether God can really be trusted. “Hath God said…?” Now you see what happens. In the hour of temptation, God’s goodness is always impugned, and God’s truth is always brought into question, and all other tokens of His love, His veracity, are always obscured. The obvious answer to anybody alive and awake was, Oh no! look, look everywhere; everywhere there are evidences and tokens of God’s love: I have plenty of proof of the love of God if I like to contemplate it, if I like to sit down and think about it and weigh things up. But how many of you have ever done that in the hour of trial, and found your escape that way? Is it not true that, in the hour of trial, of temptation, of stress, of assault, all the blessings that have ever been are obscured? Somehow or other, a mist is spread over them, a fog bank, a smoke screen, and you only see your present adversity and the difficulty of the moment. You are obsessed with a question about God and His love and His faithfulness, His truth. I believe that this is why Jesus, in the final revelation, is called “Faithful and True” (Rev. 19:11). It is the great title of triumph in man; the triumph in man over all this work of Satan which raises for ever and aye the question as to God’s love and God’s truth. His title has as its foundation all that lies behind such words as these: “I am he that liveth; I became dead.” But wait a moment: listen to this cry: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” That is the hour of temptation, the hour of darkness for Him. How did He emerge from it? Not as one who has entertained and nursed Satan’s suggestion as to the breakdown of God’s love and the failure of God’s faithfulness, but victor over the sum of his suggestions and insinuations in an hour such as you and I will never know. He comes forth and becomes the embodiment of those features, faithful and true.
The Real Object in View
Well, here is this double insinuation, blinding to all the mercies and all the goodness of God. Then you see this further hidden thing. It was Satan’s subtle, hidden way of putting God out of His place and getting into that place himself. It is very clear when you think about it. That is exactly what happened. God was deposed and Satan put in His place, and that is exactly what Satan was after. You see, he came in, as he usually does, with what was a question about God, and then, found an ear open, a listening ear – oh the peril, the disaster, of an ear inclined to Satan, a parleying with Satan! Christ Jesus never did it. Finding an ear open to his question, he swiftly moved, and followed up that small advantage with a statement which was a lie, a positive lie: “Ye shall not surely die.” He is trying to get down to the convictions now, to drive home the superficial advantage, to register something deeper down. “Ye shall not surely die.” That, again, is not left, but is followed at once with something else, a truth in a wrong position. “God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof… ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Perfectly true! Did not God say later on, “The man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.” But that truth was in its wrong position, and the terrible, the dire consequences were not revealed. The fact of knowing is not the point, but the becoming possessed of knowledge by a way that is contrary to God, knowing in a way which puts you apart from God, which alienates from God and alienates God from us. It is knowing at the instigation of Satan with a subtle, hidden intention to make independent of God; and when once man has become independent of God, Satan has secured his end: He is in the place of God.
Now, beloved, this is the way of death, and it is all summed up in one word: the way of death is a way that turns from God to self and to independence; independence of judgment, independence of desire, and independence of will. Hence “The soul that sinneth, it shall die”; mind, heart, will. Independence of God is the way of death; having a mind of our own, having a judgment of our own, holding to our own position, clinging to our own conclusions. Oh what a realm that opens up! It opens up the whole question of the sovereign Headship of the Lord Jesus in respect of the Church, which is His Body, and forbids individual members of that spiritual Body to be in any way in independence. It touches, of course, much more than that. The way of death is Adam’s way, toward self in the matter of judgment, toward self in the matter of desire, toward self in the matter of will.
Christ the Exemplar of the Way of Life
Now, this brings us to Christ, to see life working in the last Adam in the opposite position to that of the first Adam, to see the way that He took. Oh, always remember Satan’s object in temptation. It was true in the case of the Son of God and it is true in the case of every one of us. We must get right down to the thing that Satan is after. I feel that a very great deal of our explanation and exposition of the temptations of the Lord Jesus has not gone far enough. It has stopped short of the ultimate point, and, while it may be helpful, it misses the mark. We must recognize that the all-governing object in Satan’s tempting of the Lord Jesus was death, nothing less than that. He was out for His life. He was out to make it impossible for Him to be the life of men. He was out, so to speak, to stop the stream of life at its very spring. The temptations always had in view the question of life. Satan was out for death. That is why he is described in the Word as “him that had the power of death” (Heb. 2:14); something that he is wielding against the sons of God. But see Christ’s way. His way was ever from self and from independence to the Father, to God. One of the sublime things to be noted in His life is that; how always, without hesitation or reservation, He turned from self to the Father, from any proposed line of independence to dependence upon the Father. Nothing out from Himself was His life attitude. It was a fixed thing with Him: no consulting of self, no consideration for self, no self-arguments, no self-desires, no self-will; but ever with Him it was, “not my will, but thine…”; “I am come to do thy will”; “I delight to do thy will, O my God”: utterly away from self and from independence to God. You see, that lies right at the heart of the temptations at the beginning of His ministry. The temptation was to act of Himself, out from Himself, independently of God, but He brought the issue back every time to the one point: God has made known His mind in the matter: God has expressed Himself in this connection: it is written, it is written, it is written. God is the final court of appeal in every matter, not my convenience, not my comfort, not my advancement, not my good, not my self-realization, not my purpose; not even my life, nothing but the Father.
Conformity to Christ, beloved, is the supreme factor in the law of life in Christ. That is the law of life in Christ – always away from self and our own souls unto God; away from our own reasoning, our own desiring, our own willing. That is conformity to the image of God’s Son. That is very practical. When we speak of being foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son, we may perhaps think that this is some secret, hidden, imperceptible thing which is taking place under the hand of the Holy Spirit without our knowledge, but that is not the truth. That conformity to the image of God’s Son comes in along the line of definite choice, deliberate choice. It comes through following the law which governed the Son of God – ever away from self to God, away from all independence of mind and heart and will to Him. And God presses the test in a very practical way.
This, then, is “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.” What is this first aspect of the law of the Spirit of life as brought out in Adam and in Christ? It is a law of an initial, a full, a continuous and a final subjection to the Lord. That is the way of life. Satan says that is the way of curtailment, the way of limitation, the way of losing things: God says that is the way of life. Satan’s way proved a way of death and the life was cut off and held in reserve for such as would take the way of life, or who would establish God’s fixed principle of life. He is Lord, He is sovereign. It is established beyond question or doubt or argument. God is love and God is true. Move one hair’s breadth from that and you move from life. Hold to that whatever it means and you go through into life.
Thanks, Wayne, for your words of encouragement and prayers!
You said,
This is it! And at the same time, we are called to “rest” in Him. So that is what I’m going to do, as you stated here,
Yes! That is what I have done, and will continue to do, and so I will trust the Lord with my soul’s salvation (sanctification), and all else:
Dear brothers, reading about your travails and victories I would like to ask you to pray for me as I only recently came to believe in the blessed principle of eternal salvation by grace and the salvation of the soul through the works of the faith. Sadly, the pastor and the elders opposed this truth, although without bitterness and harsh words but I can see Satan is behind this opposition just like he was when I was wrestling with it when it was first presented to me by brother Tom Finley. It took me 4 long years to accept it so I know what my poor brothers from the church are going through. I thank God who is giving me patience not to be rash with them just as God and brothers Tom and John Smith were with me. I also thank God for directing me to your websites, brothers (I mean livingwalk, seekingyahweh, seekersofchrist and all the other links you have included. I am from a small distant ex-communist country called Bulgaria and consider it a privilege to be in communion with you, albeit virtual. Please brothers, pray for the success of my mission, which in fact is not mine but the Lord’s. I have a burden and I am convinced that with the prayers of those (that is, you) through whom God enlightened me with that truth, my brothers here will no longer preach God’s Word inconsistent and crippled.
Thank you for your love and care.
Yours in Christ,
Ivan
Ivan, my brother in Christ,
I will most certainly pray for you, and those around you, and I know W. E. Smith, Tom, and the others will also! I thank the Lord for your sharing this with us! I think I can speak for the others when I say, I thank God that my writing here is evidently not of my flesh, nor is it without His purpose being accomplished. I thank the Lord for that, since this is, at the moment, the only real way for me to serve others (illness, etc).
We must be aware, and beware, that the evil one is on the prowl seeking to destroy those of us who have been chosen out of the many called:
We have invited this persecution into our lives, my brother, by not remaining satisfied with the Spiritual deadness, and scriptural confusion, of the nominal “church”; and by seeking, with all of our minds, and hearts, the Christ’s purpose in us. So the evil one must, now, pursue us to keep us from being completed, fully, in Christ!
We will pray that your brothers and sisters will listen to the truth you have been given! Please keep us updated, so that we may know what is happening with you!
May God bless and strengthen you, Ivan! You are not alone!
I thank God for you!
DB