God Is Not Obligated To Us In The Way We Think

Devotion

Read Jeremiah 18:18 "Then said they, Come, and let us devise plans against Jeremiah; for the law shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet. Come, and let us smite him with the tongue, and let us not give heed to any of his words."

The spiritual blindness the Israelites were experiencing was simply gut wrenching and destructive. They were so deep in their presumptuous faith that no one, not even the messenger sent by God could get through them. They were all like a group of herd with no reasoning, going all in the same wrong direction while looking forward to it. They were so devoid of the capacity to see what was of God and what was of men that the message, which was meant to touch their hearts and bring repentance, was lost on them. Their harden hearts contained pure evil thoughts and deeds as such they have chosen the way of the false prophet, and ignored their God. The idea that they could be in the wrong was totally inconceivable to them. So, instead of examining themselves, change their lives around through repentance, they decided to get rid of the messenger.

Our behavior today has become similar to the Israelites. We, in the Western civilization are lost in our own narrow mindedness and the choice we made to stay out of His light we are incapable of seeing what is right in front of our noses.  Like the Israelites we feel if we say things with our mouths go through some rituals in His name, then, we are excused to do as we please, and walk away from Him and His Word to never become what He intended for us to be. When it is convenient for us, we quote some Words in the Bible to show to other people that we are in touch with our spirituality. Somehow, in our feeble mind, we think we deserve a medal because we think we “speak the truth.” In the meantime, we have no idea in our soul to what extend this truth we are claiming that we know and quote all the time is actually a being. The truth is no less than Christ crucified that permeates the soul. It is not just a word that we toss around in our own understanding. The truth is real, the truth is alive, the truth is the ascended Christ

PRAYER: Christ forgives our hard hearts and bring us to a place where we learn to live out a full Gospel like you intended it to be. Revive our heart and help us to walk away from that false sense of security that permeates our lives.

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Why Desires Are Not Good Enough For God?

This is an excerpt of my book  “Apprehended & Apprehending”

Chapter 7 title “Our noble desires are not enough”

I can recall wanting a healthier body for the past thirty years, but in my mind, the pain it takes to keep a workout discipline outweigh my desire for an ideal body. In the same way our desires to live out a life of intimacy with Christ is honorable, but that’s all there is to it if we do not take it further with a childlike faith and attitude in Christ. We cannot be content with simply praying a good life to happen as if by magic. No, we must seek diligently for Him.

Look what His Word says to us in Proverbs 8:17,

“I love those who loves me, and those who seek me find me.”

No need for interpretation, it’s clear. It takes faith to seek for Him—more so, it takes love for Him and the dismissal of man’s approval and attitude towards us while we seek Him. Any desire to get closer to God, if not moved by an action of our faith in Him, will remain just what it is—a desire. All over the Bible, we can see that desires are not enough to live the Christian life. When we read the Scriptures, we see that we are on a journey of becoming. If all we had to do was to wait—while going through the motions and accumulating head knowledge with our intellect—then there would not be any need for the Holy Spirit. Why would we need His help? God’s plan is for the Holy Spirit to help us become what our Father in Heaven wishes to see us become during life right here on earth. We know it is a journey of becoming, because Paul told us in Ephesians 4:13,

“Until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness

of Christ.”

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Why Shoud I Follow Hard After God?

This is an excerpt of my newly released Christian book 

"Apprehended & Apprehending"

Taken from the chapter 5 of the book

We follow hard after God because we have become aware of the need for a deeper life in Him, with Holy hunger. He initiates this pursuit to a point where we hunger so much that nothing can satisfy us anymore unless we get hold of Him in the depth of our beings. This awareness of Him seeking for us causes a chain reaction as the chase begins. At the beginning, it is not that difficult because we are head over heels in love with Him. I remember being apprehensive, wondering how I managed to fall in love with Him simply because I did not know Christians could fall in love with God. In this hot pursuit, you will soon realize that it takes everything you possess in your heart, soul, and spirit to follow hard after Him because of the intensity, the urgency, the zeal, and so on. Soon, you find out pursuing hard after God is about claiming your inheritance through the rigid preparation of an heir in the making. Eventually, this pursuit led me to the wilderness with Him where you become exhausted but you are to persevere and endure. As you continue the chase you live with the attitude and the full knowledge that you are indeed the King’s precious child.

 The only way Christ can completely apprehend us is if we join Him on the journey and do our share through total surrender. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that Christ does not have the ability to apprehend us without our help, but this is how He has chosen to work. He will not override our will to love Him and join Him in this journey. Neither am I saying that a lip service job of surrender will do. He is not interested in having a half-baked surrender that is done on a case by case basis. Either one of these wrong methods is a rejection of the terms of His covenant with us. He wants our all with no reservations.  When we understand what Christ has done for us, we understand His immeasurable grace, love, mercy and goodness. We cannot help but run back to His feet and surrender ourselves. When we start enjoying the life we have in Him through faith, we understand how lucky we are compared to those who are perishing. When we learn the sweetness of living in His bosoms we also realize how silly we were for having resisted Him for so long as well as for the time we wasted away from Him. Only then do we see the gravity, the ignorance, the blindness, the loss, and the present and future pain of living in the Devil's claws. As we recognize what we have in Him, we enjoy the freedom we have, willingly becoming His prisoners and His bondservant. What a life! What a God! What a wonderful paradox we live through Christ!

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Knowing Him In The Power Of His Resurrection

This Is an Excerpt of chapter 5 from the newly released book 

“Apprehended & Apprehending” which is based on Philippians 3:10-12

...... For those who love Him, death is not death; it is rather this coveted life you have found in Him that you go forward to claim with so much joy and anticipation. Death is simply a continuation of this life you have come to know in Him. Your being able to see Him with your spiritual eyes builds a craving to go to Him in death in order that you might live eternal life. It means everything the moment you come to know Him and be in Him.

We too are expected to lay down our lives for the sake of the Gospel. The incentive to do so is that Christ did it first so that we can learn through Him. We should offer our lives for the edification of the Church, for our brothers and sisters in Christ, and for the Gospel to reach the un-reached. However, this does not mean we go and chose something to do on our own just because the need is there. It does not mean we expose ourselves recklessly either. As He works His cross within and your identification is grounded in His work, then you cease to live and work out of a sense of duty because the driving force behind everything that you do and all that you are is in the power of His resurrection and His life in you. This life brings you to a point where you can say with confidence 'I get God' because you are found in the middle of His purpose.

 In this day and age, we have people left, right, and center choosing to do “stuff” for Him, they build churches, become teachers, go to the mission field, put on healing shows and so forth. But we do not have enough people wanting to come to Him just because He is who He says He is! Christ’s example showed us that we need to acquire intimacy with the Father, and then we can go in His name, having been prepared by Him. Shame on us! We claim to love Him, yet like the Pharisees, we have become masters at substituting Him. There is a difference between being His worshipers and a fan of His. The work that is acceptable to God is an extension of who we are in Him. How can we sacrifice ourselves for the truth when the truth is not even in us? How can we give ourselves to the Master’s cause when we do not have the full meaning explained to us by the Holy Spirit through living a deeper Christianity in Him?



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The Fellowship Of His Sufferings

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This Post is From The 4th Chapter of My Newly Released Christian Book 

"Apprehended & Apprehending"

Chapter Title: The Fellowship of His Sufferings

.......If you truly receive Him in your heart and you immediately die afterwards, then you are indeed saved, and at judgment time, God will judge and reward you according to His own sets Standards. Remember God is God, He said to Moses in Exodus 33:19,

“ … For I will show mercy to anyone I choose, and I will show compassion to anyone I choose”

It is not our place to corner Him by using the story of the thief on the cross. Besides, the event of the thief on the cross is so much deeper than meets the eyes.

The next big thing we should consider is that Scriptures teach us there is no such thing as being saved and having the pause button on our Christian life perpetually pressed until He comes. Christ had a lot of followers who did not really believe in Him but wanted something from Him. We also know from Scriptures that a relationship with Him is a dynamic one. Therefore, if indeed we have received Him, we need to do the next best thing He asks of us, which is taking up our cross and go on with Him as His follower. The choice is clear here. So, instead of examining God, I would suggest that we learn to examine our actions, motives, and attitudes first. It is incomprehensible to see how many professed Christians simply dismiss some of the examples we have in the Bible as to how God will be dealing with His own people who are not able to hold fast in the faith. In Matthew 25:1-13, we have the story of the 5 foolish virgins who did not have oil, which incidentally, represented the work of our faith, the faith that keeps you going forward with Him. We also have the Parable of the Seed in Luke 8:13, and what about the Parable of the Talents and the demise of the last servant in Matthew 25:30? Sadly most of us do not understand how important it is to live Christianity with a spiritual balance that is found solely through an exchanged life WITH and IN Christ (1 John 3:1-3 & Colossians 3:3-4.) the exchanged life simply means that He has become your whole life while your life is in Him. Strangely when this is known to your soul, you can see this paradox with your spiritual eyes and it all seems so simple.

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Life On Earth Has Never Been About Us!

When God deemed you privileged enough to experience what it means to live a life on earth according to his purpose, it is something personal and powerful. I remember in 2005 when I began to go though the wilderness torments, just for a moment which even today seems a life time flashed before me, He showed me how that everything He was going to put me through had nothing to do with me and it was not about me. That was the strangest thing to see how all the pain, the loss, the hardships, and all the adversities even though they were happening to me were not about me. Of course back then I assumed that the episode that I was going through was going to last only a few months. I am glad God did not show me the whole path that I was going to go through for seven years in the wilderness. I would have been spooked and miss out on righteousness, knowledge, wisdom, patience, Agape love, intimacy, faith and all that I have found through going  forward with Him.

I still remember how baffled I was to live out the beauty of being born for a purpose, yet I was puzzled as to how did we manage to make things so much about us. This vision God showed me was not meant just for me. Through it, I understood that God was totally misunderstood by us. I felt like a human being was more like an experiment that has gone wrong. Through the capabilities He put in us, we used them to turn against Him. Each one of us was meant to be a tiny part of a much bigger picture. We are like the tiny pixels that make up the element of a digital picture. Or another comparison would be the tiny fibers of a thread that is used to put together and weave a canvas

We have nothing; absolutely nothing we can offer God that would satisfy Him. The reason is that nothing that we possess belongs to us. Every breath we take, our finances big or small, our possessions, our children, our knowledge etc, all belong to Him. Even the first commandment that is so dear to His heart, we cannot even come close to loving Him if He does not put His Agape Love in our heart, He cannot accept our love because our love is not a selfless love. The only prize possession we possess and that He is after is us coming back to Him so that we can be put back into a relationship where once again He is the Master. The only way possible to do that is through a surrender of the self back to Him.  He wants us to do it, because we recognize who we are in Him. In our helplessness we have come to realize that without Him we are incapable of taking care of ourselves.  He alone has the schematics of our lives. Anything else we create on our own is apart from Him and His vision for us.

Through this revelation, God wanted to impart to me the fact that my life was not about me at all. He succeeded. It is funny, all these years I have been so busy focussing on learning to live a life where He was given His proper place (my Creator) and role (my Master) that I forgot to look at this experience in any other way. That is until this morning when I started reading Oswald Chambers devotional

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Oswald Chambers' "My Utmost for His Highest"

Devotional for November 5

Partakers Of His Sufferings

"Rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings." — 1 Peter 4:13

If you are going to be used by God, He will take you through a multitude of experiences that are not meant for you at all, they are meant to make you useful in His hands, and to enable you to understand what transpires in other souls so that you will never be surprised at what you come across. Oh, I can't deal with that person. Why not? God gave you ample opportunity to soak before Him on that line, and you barged off because it seemed stupid to spend time in that way.

The sufferings of Christ are not those of ordinary men. He suffered "according to the will of God," not from the point of view we suffer from as individuals. It is only when we are related to Jesus Christ that we can understand what God is after in His dealings with us. It is part of Christian culture to know what God's aim is. In the history of the Christian Church the tendency has been to evade being identified with the sufferings of Jesus Christ; men have sought to procure the carrying out of God's order by a short cut of their own. God's way is always the way of suffering, the way of the "long, long trail."

Are we partakers of Christ's sufferings? Are we prepared for God to stamp our personal ambitions right out? Are we prepared for God to destroy by transfiguration our individual determinations? It will not mean that we know exactly why God is taking us that way, that would make us spiritual prigs. We never realize at the time what God is putting us through; we go through it more or less misunderstandingly; then we come to a luminous place, and say - ' 'Why, God has girded me, though I did not know it!"

Copyright Statement
Taken from 'My Utmost for His Highest', by Oswald Chambers. © l935 by Dodd Mead & Co., renewed © 1963 by the Oswald Chambers Publications Assn., Ltd., and is used by permission of Barbour Publishing, Uhrichsville, Ohio. All rights reserved.