Comments(0) That last post concluded the ‘Fighting Chance’ message by Oswald Chambers. For now we will take a break from Oswald, although it probably won’t be permanent, because I recently purchased the Complete Works of Oswald Chambers.
If you would like to continue reading from the book The Servant As His Lord, you can buy it here or here, you will be blessed!
Comments(0) The Following is an excerpt from The Fighting Chance, part of The Servant As His Lord, a book by Oswald Chambers. Highlighted by Ian Smith.
The Frontier Battle Lines
‘For I am persuaded that neither… things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creation, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ Romans viii. 38-39 (R.V. marg.).
In these verses Paul does not mention the ordinary trials of life; he mentions the imperiling experiences which thousands have gone through these past years, distress and anguish which hold the eyes too much awake to sleep, tribulation and tears and lacerates everything; but, he says, the love of God is untouched by these experiences. That love renders impotent the strength of our most formidable enemy. Any of the elemental ministries, life, death, things, present, things to come, may kill the castles but by human love; may remove and shatter them like an incoming tide, their strength is overwhelming, but they are powerless to touch the love of God in Christ Jesus. When one reads the Apostle Paul, language seems completely beggared in the attempt to express his devotion to Jesus Christ. Faith itself, with Paul, seems to be lost sight of and merged altogether in his personal intimacy with Jesus Christ; his is the very faith of the son of God, which is not conscious of itself. Remember, this is not meant only for the Apostle Paul, it is for everyone of us. God grant that the Holy Spirit may so kindle all our natural powers, so invade us with the power of God, that we may begin to ‘comprehend what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height’ of the love of Christ for our souls.
The Infinitely Great
‘nor height’. For generations the telescope has been made the means of terrifying us instead of bringing God nearer to us. Those who deal with the great secrets of the universe imply that our planet is such a tiny spit in the tremendous universe that it is a piece of stupid conceit on our part to thing that God watches over us. And to make our planet the centre where God performed the marvelous drama of His own history of the Incarnation and Atonement is absurd, they say. But watch a simple-minded person, one who is right with God and is not terrified by the reasonings of men, as he looks at the stars and exclaims, ‘when I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained; what is man, that Thou are mindful of him?’ It is said not in despair, but in adoring wonder. Then watch the man who is not right with God. The sight of the infinitely great to him pushes God right out of it, until God becomes a great first Cause, a remote cold principle. The far-flung battle lines reach beyond the stars to the very throne of God, and deeper down than the deepest depths of hell; they may test and storm, they may spread seas and space, but, says Paul, ‘I am persuaded that they are not able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’
The Infinitely Little
‘nor depth’. Look at the world either through a telescope or a microscope and you will be dwarfed into terror by the infinitely great or infinitely little. Naturalists tell us that there are no two blades of grass alike, and close inspection of a bee’s wing under a microscope reveals how marvelously it is made. What do I read in the Bible? I read that God of heaven counts the hairs on our heads. Jesus says so. I read that the mighty God watches the sparrows so intimately that not one of them falls to the ground without His notice. I read that the God who holds the seas in the hollow of His hand and guides the stars in their courses, cloths the grass of the field. Through the love of God in Christ Jesus we are brought into a wonderful intimacy with the infinitely great and infinitely little.
The Infinitely Possible
‘nor any other creation…’ The Apostle Paul knew better than most of us that there are principalities and powers and ordinances behind the seen universe that may at any moment flash forth as an uncanny spiritual ‘airship’, or burst up from the deep as a terrific supernatural ‘submarine’, terrifying us out of our wits. But, he says, no matter what the different creations may be, ‘I am persuaded that neither… height, nor depth, nor any other creation shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ Paul is not boasting, he is speaking from his own absolute certainty that the Cross of Christ has in it the very secret heart of God. We belittle and misrepresent the love of God when we see it merely on the surface. It is easy to think imperially, easy to thing big thoughts and dream big dreams. But Jesus Christ is not big thoughts and big dreams. He is a tremendously big Savior for little insignificant creatures such as we are. Through the atonement God Almighty can place you, my poor, weak, timid, sin-tossed brother or sister, where nothing can touch you or harm you. No wonder the Apostle Paul goes down to the lowest depths and climbs to the highest heights, and shouts in triumph- ‘we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us!’
If this great God is ours, what about our bodies, can He keep them in trim? What about our minds, can He keep our imaginations stayed upon Him so that we are able to say without hysterics – ‘Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea’? Every now and again an attack from the unseen realm may surprise us and take us off our guard, but if we are right with God, what do we find? We find God on guard, and we are amazed and stand back and say, ‘Why, this is wonderful! - ‘Kept by the power of God.’
‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?’ At the end of all trials, and when there is no more trial, the love of God is not finished; it still goes on. ‘… having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end.’ This is the great theme that keeps the soul of the saint undaunted in courage. It does not matter where a man may get to in the way of tribulation or anguish, none of it can wedge in between and separate him from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
Let me close with a simple illustration. Children are sometimes afraid in the dark, fear gets into their hearts and nerves and they get into a tremendous state; then they hear the voice of mother and father, and all is quietened and they go off to sleep. In our own spiritual experience it is the same; some terror comes down the road to meet us and our hearts are seized with a tremendous fear then we hear our own name called, and the voice of Jesus saying, ‘It is I, be not afraid’, and the peace of God which passeth understanding takes possession of our hearts.
Comments(0) The Following is an excerpt from The Fighting Chance, part of The Servant As His Lord, a book by Oswald Chambers. Highlighted by Ian Smith.
The Natural Manoeuvres
‘For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life… shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ Romans viii. 38, 39.
Paul has catalogued the things over which we are more than conquerors- tribulation, anguish, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword; now he seems to strike another note, a note of defiance- ‘for I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life… shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord’.
He conjures; he marshals before him; he names over in all their greatest horror every conceivable trouble which afflicts the soul of man; he calls them up and he passes them in review before him and bids them do their worst, and sets them all at defiance… Life is an infinitely worse thing than death, more terrible, more appalling. -Dr. David Smith.
The Great Dread – Death
Death is a great dread. It is easy to say that God is love until death has snatched away your dearest friend, then I defy you to say that God is love unless God’s grace has done a work in your soul. Death means extinction of life as we understand it; our dead are gone and have left an aching void behind them. They do not talk to us, we do not feel their touch, and when the bereaved heart cries out, nothing comes back but the hollow echo of its own cry. The heart is raw,, no pious chatter, no scientific cant can touch it. It is the physical calamity of death plus the thing behind which no man can grasp, that makes death so terrible. We have so taken for granted the comfort that Jesus Christ brings in the hour of death that we forget the awful condition of men apart from that revelation. Do not strip your mind and imagination of the idea that we have comfort about the departed apart from the Bible; we have not. Every attempt to comfort a bereaved soul apart from the revelation of Jesus Christ brings is a vain speculation. We know nothing about the mystery of death apart from what Jesus Christ tells us; but blessed be the Name of God, what He tells us makes us more than conquerors, so that we can shout the victory through the darkest valley of the shadow that ever a human being can go through.
The bible reveals that death is inevitable- ‘and so death passed upon all men’ (Romans v. 12). ‘It is appointed unto men once to die’ (Hebrews ix. 27). Repeat that over to yourself. It is appointed to every one of us that we are going to cease to be as we are now, and the place that knows us now shall know us no more. We make shirk it, we may ignore it, we may be so full of robust health and spirits that the though of death never enters, but it is inevitable.
Another thing- the Bible says that a certain class of man is totally indifferent to death ‘for there are no bands [pangs: R.V. marg.] in their death’ (Psalm lxxiii. 4). Over and over again the Bible points out that the wicked man, the Esau-type of man who is perfectly satisfied with life as it is, has not the slightest concern about death- because he is so brave and strong” No, because he is incapable of realizing what death means. The powers that press from the natural world have one tendency , and one only, to deaden all communication with God.
One other thing- the Bible says there are those who are intimidated to death, ‘… that through death He might bring to nought him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and might deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage’ (Hebrews ii. 14-15). The thought of death is never away from them; it terrorizes their days, it alarms their nights. Now read very reverently Hebrews v. 7: ‘Who… having offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto Him that was able to save Him from death…’ Who is that? The Lord Jesus Christ.
We cannot begin to fathom this passage; after years of meditation on it we come only to the threshold of realizing what Gethsemane represents. Jesus Christ can deliver from the dread of death- ‘that through death He might bring to nought him that had the power of death, that is, the devil’. Death has no terror for the man who is rightly related to God through Jesus Christ. ‘How blest the righteous when he dies!’ Were there any terrors in the passing of the Founder of the League of Prayer? It was a marvelous and glorious translation. ‘O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?’ – absolutely nullified, destroyed by the majestic might of Atonement.
The Greatest Danger – Life
Life is far greater danger than death. I want to say something, crudely, but very definitely: the Bible nowhere says that men are damned; the Bible says that men are damnable. There is always the possibility of damnation in any life, always that possibility of disobedience; but, thank God, there is also always the possibility of being made ‘more than conqueror’. The possibilities of life are awful. Think – are you absolutely certain that you are not going to topple headlong over a moral precipice before you are three years older? Look back on your life and ask yourself how it was you escaped when you were set on the wrong course – the tiniest turn and you would have been a moral ruin? Disease cut off with a tremendous fell swoop your companions – why did it not cut you off? The men with you in your youth who were so brilliant – where are they now? Out in the gutter some of them, all but damned while they live. Why are you not there? Why am I not there? Oh, it does us good, although it frightens us, to look at the possibilities of life. May God help us to face the issues.
Unless a man’s peace and prosperity are based on a right relationship to God, it may end in a sudden and terrible awakening. We never know whether the next moment is going to bring us face to face with green pastures or a hurricane. The Bible reveals that here is a ruling principle at work in the world that hates God, and when we take sides against that principle there is the very devil to face. That is the Apostle Paul’s argument here. When we are born again into the heavenly kingdom, then come tribulation and anguish, then come persecution and famine, then come nakedness , peril and sword; then comes life, and then comes death – mocking us with paradoxes and puzzles we cannot explain. The possibilities and perils of life are enormous. It is only when some such considerations get hold of men who are bound up in ‘a show of things’ that they begin to see the need for Jesus Christ’s Redemption.
The Greatest Deliverance
I have been drawing a very dark picture, you say. I have not. It is not within the power of human tongue or archangel’s tongue to state what an awful fact death is, and what a still more awful fact life is. But thank God, there is the greatest deliverance conceivable from all that life may bring and from all that death may bring. Jesus Christ has destroyed the dominion of death, and He can make us fit to face every problem of life, more than conqueror all along the line.
Let God have His way, and He will turn the drama of your life into a doxology, and you will understand why the Psalmist breaks out with the words, ‘Oh that men would praise the Lord for His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men!’ Jesus Christ can make the weakest man into a Divine dreadnought, fearing nothing. He can pant within him the life that was in Himself, the life Time cannot touch. ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth hath everlasting life’, that is, the life Jesus had, so that a man can face all the powers of hell with a conqueror’s tread. Heroics? No, heroism. Heroics sound all very well on a stage, or on a paper, but heroism works in the flesh and blood, and Jesus Christ makes us flesh-and-blood dreadnoughts. Not all the power of the enemy can fuss or turn aside the soul that is related to God through the Atonement.
Comments(0) I have been challenged by listening to K.P. Yohannan to live a simple life of self-denial for the work of the cross. I live in so much excess, fast food and entertainment. I need to pray to control my appetites, to put my resources in the hands of Jesus. I have been such a bad steward!
I want to pray and fast for Pentecost, after listening to brother K.P. I am even more convicted of my need to gain self control in my life. Thank you!
Comments(0) The Following is an excerpt from The Fighting Chance, part of The Servant As His Lord, a book by Oswald Chambers. Highlighted by Ian Smith.
The Big Meaning
‘Even as it is written, for Thy sake we are killed all the day long; we were accounted as sheep for the slaughter.’ Romans viii. 36.
Anaesthesis means insensibility to pain, and there is such a thing as spiritual anaesthesis- God put you to sleep while the thing hurts. Some Christians do not seem to know that they are going through things, they are so wonderfully upheld by the life and power of God within, and when you begin to sympathize with them, they look at you in amazement- ‘Why, what have I been through?’ They had never realized that the battle was on. The danger is to get taken up with external tribulations and trials and when we come to the end of the day to say, ‘Thank God, I have just got through!’ Where is ‘the unsearchable riches of Christ’ about that? The grace of God will make us marvelously impervious to all the onslaughts of tribulation and persecution and destitution because we are seated in heavenly places in Christ Jesus and cannot be awakened up to self-pity. God sends His rough weather and His smooth weather, but we pay no attention to either because we are taken up only with the one central thing- the love of God is Christ Jesus.
Where are you placed if your circumstances? Is it tribulation and anguish that are perplexing you? It is nervous trouble that is overcoming you, the nameless dread that comes from nerves that are all on fire and jangled? I firmly believe there is no type of mental or nervous disease over which Jesus Christ cannot make us more than conqueror as we draw on His Resurrection life. Is your battlefield the moral one? Persecution, systematic vexation, in your home because you have got right with God? Persistent ridicule from those you work with because of your obedience to Jesus Christ? Jesus Christ can make you more than conqueror there. Remember, morality is produced by fight, not by dreaming, not by shutting our eyes to facts, but by being made right with God: then we can make our morality exactly after the stamp of Jesus Christ.