BUT IT IS HARDLY CREDIBLE THAT ONE COULD BE SO POSITIVELY IGNORANT! by Oswald Chambers

sermonindex Jan 29, 2009

~~[b]~~BUT IT IS HARDLY CREDIBLE THAT ONE COULD BE SO POSITIVELY IGNORANT![/b]
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"Who art Thou, Lord?" Acts 26:15

"The Lord spake thus to me with a strong hand." There is no escape when Our Lord speaks, He always comes with an arrestment of the understanding. Has the voice of God come to you directly? If it has, you cannot mistake the intimate insistence with which it has spoken to you in the language you know best, not through your ears, but through your circumstances.

God has to destroy our determined confidence in our own convictions. "I know this is what I should do" - and suddenly the voice of God speaks in a way that overwhelms us by revealing the depths of our ignorance. We have shown our ignorance of Him in the very way we determined to serve Him. We serve Jesus in a spirit that is not His, we hurt Him by our advocacy for Him, we push His claims in the spirit of the devil. Our words sound all right, but our spirit is that of an enemy. "He rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of." The spirit of our Lord in an advocate of His is described in 1 Corinthians 13.

Have I been persecuting Jesus by a zealous determination to serve Him in my own way? If I feel I have done my duty and yet have hurt Him in doing it, I may be sure it was not my duty, because it has not fostered the meek and quiet spirit, but the spirit of self-satisfaction. We imagine that whatever is unpleasant is our duty! Is that anything like the spirit of our Lord - "I delight to do Thy will, O My God."

RobertW Jan 29, 2009

This is very good. Chambers always had a way of cutting something down to the bone. I feel the Lord saying this very thing in my heart. We have to abandon our fears of the consequence of obeying a loving and merciful God and just ~~[i]~~obey[/i].

Thanks for sharing this Bro. Greg.

wayneman Jan 29, 2009

This is illustrated throughout the book of Acts. Time and again the Lord tells his servants to do something that they're not so sure is a good idea. "Not so, Lord..." said Peter on one occasion. But then he obeyed the Word of the Lord and God's purpose was accomplished.

There is a perception that God is bound by self-imposed spiritual laws, and that he will always respond in pre-programmed ways to certain human actions, as if He is just waiting for man to initiate things before His will can be accomplished. But in fact, revival comes when God initiates and man responds. We have to smash this heresy that God is an automaton who always responds a certain way to certain stimuli. God is not a static deposit of divine power waiting to be tapped by man; God is free, and He doesn't do things our way, He does things His way.