Our Extremity, God's Opportunity - Simpson

Days of Heaven on Earth by A.B. Simpson
Wednesday, January 30, 2013

How did God bring about the miracle of the Red Sea? By shutting His people in on every side so that there was no way out but the divine way. The Egyptians were behind them, the sea was in front of them, the mountains were on both sides of them. There was no escape but from above.

Someone has said that the devil can wall us in, but he cannot roof us over. We can always get out at the top. Our difficulties are but God's challenges, and many times He makes them so hard that we must get above them or go under.

In the Providence of God, such an hour furnishes us with the highest possibilities for faith. We are pushed by the very emergency into God's best.

Beloved, this is God's hour. If you will rise to meet it you will get such a hold upon Him that you will never be in extremities again; or if you are, you will learn to call them not extremities, but opportunities. Like Jacob, you will go forth from that night at Peniel, no longer Jacob, but victorious Israel. Let us bring to Him our need and prove Him true.

Scripture
Cast down, but not destroyed—2 Corinthians 4:9

This reminds me of something Greg Gordon (SermonIndex) posted about the valley that God wants us to cross.

Here is an excerpt from that post :

But then we find that our path with Him takes us to a strange place and there is a deep ravine in front of us which seems to block the way. We find ourselves lined up with others along the edge of a deep valley, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, with Jesus having moved to the opposite side bidding us to come to Him. Try as we may, there is only one way to get there, we must descend into that pit and endure all that is waiting there for us that we might know His fullness on the other side.

As we look in the bottom of that deep valley and we see a cross with our name on it waiting for us. Like Pilgrim in Pilgrims’ Progress, we must decide if we will go on. Many at this point decide that the price is too great and they retreat back to the comfort zone of the familiar, the green pastures and still waters, but their growth in Christ is held in check from that point on. They scurry back down the path to Christian city, seeking refuge from that awful sight, but Jesus just isn’t there like He once was because we have failed to obey Him as or Lord. Many who should know better try to comfort us and tell us that this lesser existence is normal and our Christianity is supposed to be this way. So they do all they can to make our church experience pleasing and comforting to our rebellious souls.

Here's the link to that post : https://www.sermonindex.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=48003&forum=34&1

Amen brother!

God knows how to get us out of our comfort zone, but we still have a choice to make of either going God's way, which is the way of the cross, or our way, which is holding on to the self life.

"Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God." (Acts 14:22).

Mike