Saturday November 16th, 2013 “1st Voice” ________________________________________ My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers (1874-1917) “Still human!” “Whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” 1 Corinthians 10:31. ________________________________________ My determination is to be my utmost for His Highest. ________________________________________ To be an Uncommon Believer….Let the “First Voice” You Hear in the Morning….Be the Voice of the LORD. ________________________________________ ISAIAH 50: 4 The Lord GOD hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned. 5 The Lord GOD hath opened mine ear, and I was not rebellious, neither turned away back. ________________________________________ Run Today’s Race: “God will put you through many mills that are not meant for you, mills you would not be put through but that He wants to make you good bread for His little ones to eat. You can see now the meaning of that hard place you have been in.”… Oswald Chambers ________________________________________ My Utmost for His Highest: by Oswald Chambers (1874-1917) ________________________________________ “Still human!” “Whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.” 1 Corinthians 10:31. The great marvel of the Incarnation slips into ordinary childhood’s life; the great marvel of the Transfiguration vanishes in the devil-possessed valley; the glory of the Resurrection descends into a breakfast on the sea-shore. This is not an anticlimax, but a great revelation of God. The tendency is to look for the marvellous in our experience; we mistake the sense of the heroic for being heroes. It is one thing to go through a crisis grandly, but another thing to go through every day glorifying God when there is no witness, no limelight, no one paying the remotest attention to us. If we do not want medieval haloes, we want something that will make people say—‘What a wonderful man of prayer he is!’ ‘What a pious, devoted woman she is!’ If you are rightly devoted to the Lord Jesus, you have reached the sublime height where no one ever thinks of noticing you, all that is noticed is that the power of God comes through you all the time. ‘Oh, I have had a wonderful call from God!’ It takes Almighty God Incarnate in us to do the meanest duty to the glory of God. It takes God’s Spirit in us to make us so absolutely humanly His that we are utterly unnoticeable. The test of the life of a saint is not success, but faithfulness in human life as it actually is. We will set up success in Christian work as the aim; the aim is to manifest the glory of God in human life, to live the life hid with Christ in God in human conditions. Our human relationships are the actual conditions in which the ideal life of God is to be exhibited.[1] ________________________________________ Prayer is not just an exercise routine God has us on; It’s our business, Our only business. Prayer is our holy occupation. Plain and simple: ________________________________________ OUR HOLY OCCUPATION REQUIRES SILENCE: ________________________________________ “Do I look forward to getting alone with God every day?” “How can I make prayer a more joyful experience for myself and for God?” “What prayers did God answer in a better way than I expected by not giving me exactly what I prayed for?” “What things might God be withholding from me for my own good and for the good of His kingdom?” “GOD GRANT we may learn more and more of the profound joy of getting alone with God in the dark of the night and toward the early dawn.” “SOME PRAYERS are followed by silence because they are wrong, others because they are bigger than we can understand.” ________________________________________ Chronological Reading- Thru the Bible in One Year: Today’s Scriptures: Acts 1-3. biblegateway/passage/?version=NKJV&search=acts+1-3 ________________________________________ Prayers That Avail Much: November 16 “Heavenly Father, thank You for showing me the principle of binding and loosing in prayer. You have given me authority and power to bind the works of the devil on the earth and to loose Your works into the earth. Ill loose health for sickness and disease. Ill loose prosperity for lack. Divine direction to the person who is floundering in his/her life. Love for bitterness, hate and ill-will. Help me to use the authority You have invested in me for bringing Heaven into the earth, in Jesus Name. Amen.” Matthew 18: 18. Daily Confession: “In Jesus Christ, I have been given power and authority to dismantle all of the power of the enemy. Nothing the devil plans can harm me.” (Luke 10: 19.) ________________________________________ “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much!”…James 5:16. ________________________________________ 2Timothy 2: 1-8; 2 Chronicles 7:14 ________________________________________ To submit prayer requests: E-Prayer’ (NHCC office: [email protected]) ________________________________________ Approved unto God including Facing Reality Oswald Chambers ________________________________________ The Student 2 Timothy 2:15 Practical Sphere of Work (2 Corinthians 11:9; 1 Timothy 4:13; 1 Thessalonians 2:9) The difficulty in Christian work to-day is that we put it into a sphere that upsets the reasoning of things—this sphere for sacred and that for secular; this time for activity and that for study. God will never allow us to divide our lives into sacred and secular, into study and activity. We generally think of a student as one who shuts himself up and studies in a reflective way, but that is never revealed in God’s book. A Christian’s thinking ought to be done in activities, not in reflection, because we only come to right discernment in activities. Some incline to study naturally in the reflective sense, others incline more to steady active work; the Bible combines both in one life. We are apt to look on workers for God as a special class, but that is foreign to the New Testament. Our Lord was a carpenter; Paul was a weaver. If you try and live in compartments, God will tumble up the time. Acknowledge Him in all your ways, and He will bring you into the circumstances that will develop the particular side of your life that He wants developed, and be careful that you do not upset His plans by bringing in your own ideas. Another danger in work for God is to make natural temperament the line of service. The gifts of the Spirit are built on God’s sovereignty, not on our temperament. We are apt to limit God by saying, “Oh, I’m not built like that”; or, “I have not been well educated.” Never limit God by those paralysing thoughts, it is the outcome of unbelief. What does it matter to the Lord Almighty of heaven and earth what your early training was like! What does matter to Him is that you don’t lean to your own understanding, but acknowledge Him in all your ways. So crush on the threshold of your mind any of those lame, limping “I can’ts,”—“you see I am not gifted.” The great stumbling-block that prevents some people being simple disciples of Jesus is that they are gifted—so gifted that they won’t trust in the Lord with all their hearts. You have to learn to break by the power of the Holy Spirit the fuss and the lethargy which alternate in your life, and remember that it is a crime to be weak in His strength. Poverty and Work (2 Corinthians 8:9) Our Lord Jesus Christ became poor for our sakes not as an example, but to give us the unerring secret of His religion. Professional Christianity is a religion of possessions that are devoted to God; the religion of Jesus Christ is a religion of personal relationship to God, and has nothing whatever to do with possessions. The disciple is rich not in possessions, but in personal identity. Voluntary poverty was the marked condition of Jesus (see Luke 9:58), and the poverty of God’s children in all ages is a significant thing. To-day we are ashamed and afraid to be poor. The reason we hear so little about the inner spiritual side of external poverty is that few of us are in the place of Jesus, or of Paul. The scare of poverty will knock the spiritual backbone out of us unless we have the relationship that holds. The attitude of Our Lord’s life was that He was disconnected with everything to do with things that chain people down to this world, consequently He could go wherever His Father wanted Him to. Providential Will of God (Proverbs 3:5-6) Remember you are accountable to no one but God; keep yourself for His service along the line of His providential leading for you, not on the line of your temperament. The servant of God has to go through the experience of things before he is allowed to go through the study of them. When you have had the experience God will give you the line for study; the experience first, and then the explanation of the experience by the Spirit of God. Each one of us is an isolated person with God, and He will put us through experiences that are not meant for us at all, but meant to make us fit stuff to feed others. How much time have you given to wondering what God is doing with you? It is not your business. Your part is to acknowledge God in all your ways, and He will blend the active and the spiritual until they are inseparable, and you learn to live in activities knowing that your life is hid with Christ in God. To be continued…. -~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~ Isaiah 40: 28: Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding. 29 He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. 30 Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: 31 But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you.” James 4: 8 -~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~ En Agape, Pastor Jim Menke [email protected] New Hope Christian Center 2240 Baty Road Lima, Ohio 45807 [1]Chambers, Oswald: My Utmost for His Highest : Selections for the Year. Grand Rapids, MI : Discovery House Publishers, 1993, c1935, S. 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Posted on: Sat, 16 Nov 2013 12:07:51 +0000
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