Friday, November 29th, 2013 Approved unto God including Facing Reality Oswald Chambers ________________________________________ God’s The vows of God are on me, and I may not stay To play with shadows, or pluck earthly flower, Till I my work have done. And rendered up account. The Disciplined Life (2 Timothy 2:3) The first requirement of the worker is discipline voluntarily entered into. It is easy to be passionate, easy to be thrilled by spiritual influences, but it takes a heart in love with Jesus Christ to put the feet in His footprints, and to square the life to a steady going “up to Jerusalem”† with Him. Discipline is the one thing the modern Christian knows nothing of, we won’t stand discipline nowadays. God has given me an experience of His life and grace, therefore I am a law unto myself. The discipline of a worker is not in order to develop his own life, but for the purposes of his Commander. The reason there is so much failure is because we forget that we are here for that one thing, loyalty to Jesus Christ; otherwise we have no business to have taken the vows of God upon us. If a soldier is not prepared to be killed, he has no business to have enlisted as a soldier. The only way to keep true to God is by a steady persistent refusal to be interested in Christian work and to be interested alone in Jesus Christ. A disciplined life means three things—a supreme aim incorporated into the life itself; an external law binding on the life from its Commander; and absolute loyalty to God and His word as the ingrained attitude of heart and mind. There must be no insubordination; every impulse, every emotion, every illumination must be rigorously handled and checked if it is not in accordance with God and His word. Our Lord Himself is the example of a disciplined life. He lived a holy life by sacrificing Himself to His Father; His words and His thinking were holy because He submitted His intelligence to His Father’s word, and He worked the works of God because He steadily submitted His will to His Father’s will†††; and as is the Master, so is the disciple.† The Disentangled Life (2 Timothy 2:4; Numbers 6:2-3) A disciple of Jesus must know from what he is to be disentangled. The disentanglement is from things which would be right for us but for the fact that we have taken upon us the vows of God. There is a difference between disentanglement for our own soul’s sake and disentanglement for God’s sake. We are apt to think only about being disentangled from the things which would ensnare us—we give up this and that, not for Jesus Christ’s sake, but for our own development. A worker has to disentangle himself from many things that would advantage and develop him but which would turn him aside from being broken bread and poured out wine in his Lord’s hands. We are not here to develop our own spiritual life, but to be broken for Jesus Christ’s sake. There is much that would advantage and develop us and make us more desirable than we are, but if we have taken the vows of God upon ourselves, those considerations must never enter in. Paul argues in this way: If anything in me, right or wrong, is hindering God’s work and causing another to stumble, I will give it up, even if it is the most legitimate thing on earth (see 1 Corinthians 8:13). People say, “Why cannot I do this?” For pity’s sake do it! There is no reason why you shouldn’t, there is neither right nor wrong about it; but if your love for Jesus Christ is not sufficient to disentangle you from a thousand and one things that would develop you, you know nothing about being His servant. The appeal made in Christian work nowadays is that we must keep ourselves fit for our work, we must not; we must be in the hands of God for God to do exactly what He likes with us, and that means disentanglement from everything that would hinder His purpose. If you want to remain a full-orbed grape you must keep out of God’s hands for He will crush you, wine cannot be had in any other way. The curse in Christian work is that we want to preserve ourselves in God’s museum; what God wants is to see where Jesus Christ’s men and women are. The saints are always amongst the unofficial crowd, the crowd that is not noticed, and their one dominant note is Jesus Christ. The Detached Life (2 Timothy 2:4; Leviticus 21:12) The worker must live a life detached to God, and the illustration of the detached life is that of a priest who intercedes. The reason so few of us intercede is because we do not understand that intercession is a vicarious work. It is not meant to develop us; it is vicarious from beginning to end. The detached life is the result of an intensely narrow moral purity, not of a narrow mind. The mental view of Jesus Christ was as big as God’s view, consequently He went anywhere—to marriage feasts, into the social life of His time, because His morality was absolutely pure; and that is what God wants of us. In the beginning we are fanatical and we cut ourselves off from external things, until we learn that detachment is the outcome of an inner moral purity, inwrought by God and maintained by walking in the light. Then God can put us where He likes, in the foreign field or anywhere, and we will never be entangled—placed there, but detached. Whenever we make our personal convictions the standard for a society or a class, we take them the first step away from Christ, and that will happen every time the light we are walking in is not the light of God. It is enough to make the heart of a stone bleed to see royal souls turning away from God in their very eagerness to serve Him, and entering into worldliness instead of standing absolutely detached. The Discerning Life (2 Timothy 2:6; Isaiah 28:23-28) The worker has to have discernment like that of a farmer, that is, he must know how to watch, how to wait, and how to work with wonder. The farmer does not wait with folded arms but with intense activity, he keeps at it industriously until the harvest. When someone comes to you with a question which makes you feel at your wits’ end, never say, “I can’t make head or tail of it.” Of course you cannot. Always take the case that is too hard for you to God, and to no one else, and He will give you the right thing to say. When you are being taught by God to discern, you will deal with the case in the way that God has prompted you to and you will speak with discernment. When you are used of God it is not because you discern what is wrong, but because the Holy Spirit gives you discernment, and as you speak you realise in what an amazing way the words meet the case, and you say, “I wonder why I said that?” Don’t wonder any more, it was the Spirit of God inspiring you. When we are used, we never know we are used, and the times we expect to be used, we are not. We have to keep our heads out of the rush of things in order that the Spirit of God may discern through us. The discernment for the worker himself is I am God’s, therefore I am good for no one else; not good for nothing, but good for no other calling in life. “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” If you have taken on you the vows of God, never be surprised at the misery and turmoil that come every time you turn aside. Other people may do a certain thing and prosper, but you cannot, and God will take care you do not. There is always one fact more known only to God. The one word to be written indelibly on each one of us is “God’s.” There is no responsibility in the life that is there, it is full of speechless child-like delight in God. Whenever a worker breaks down it is because he has taken responsibility upon himself which was never God’s will for him to take. “Think of the responsibility it will be for you!” There is no responsibility whatever, saving that of refusing to take the responsibility. The responsibility that would rest on you if you took it would crush you to the dust; but when you know God you take no responsibility upon yourself, you are as free as a child, and the life is one of concentration on God. “Cast that He hath given thee upon the Lord” (Psalm 55:22 rv mg). The thing that interferes with the life with God is our abominable seriousness which chokes the freedom and simplicity which ought to mark the life. The freedom and simplicity spring from one point only, a heart at rest with God and at leisure from itself. None of this is experience, it is a life; experience is the door that opens into the life. When we have had an experience the snare is that we want to go back to it. Leave experiences alone, let them come or go. God wants our lives to be absolutely centred in Himself. “We cannot kindle when we will the fire which in the heart resides,” God gives us marvellous hours of insight, then He withdraws them, and we have to begin to work out “with aching hands and bleeding feet” what we saw in vision, and few understand this. To be continued….
Posted on: Fri, 29 Nov 2013 10:09:59 +0000
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