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But God can only reveal His will to a heart that is humble and tender and empty. God can only reveal His will in perplexities and special difficulties to a heart that has learned to obey and
God can only reveal His will to a heart that is humble and tender and empty.
honor Him loyally in little things and in daily life.
It is in hearts entirely surrendered to the Lord Jesus, separating themselves from the world, and even from ordinary religious exercises, and giving themselves up in intense prayer to look to their Lord, that the heavenly will of God will be made manifest.
us. There is a difference between the power of the Spirit as a gift and the power of the Spirit for the grace of a holy life. A
a man who is separated unto the Holy Spirit is a man who is given up to say: “Father, let the Holy Spirit have full dominion over me, in my home, in my temper, in every word of my tongue, in every thought of my heart, in every feeling toward my fellow-men. Let the Holy Spirit have entire possession.”
This holy partnership with the Holy Spirit in this work becomes a matter of consciousness and of action.
the Holy Spirit should have been honored! May God forgive me that I have allowed self, the flesh, and the will to actually have the place that God wanted the Holy Spirit to have.”
Peter was not in a fit state to follow Christ, because he had not been brought to an end of himself. He did not know himself, and he therefore could not follow Christ.
remember, before Christ could fill Peter with the Holy Spirit and make a new man of him, he had to go out and weep bitterly; he had to be humbled.
Then Christ had to say: “Get thee behind me, Satan; for thou savorest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men” (Matthew 16:22-23). There was Peter in his self-will, trusting his own wisdom, and actually forbidding Christ to go and die.
Peter trusted in himself and his own thoughts about divine things. We see later on, more than once, that the disciples questioned who should be the greatest among them. Peter was one of them, and he thought he had a right to the very first place. He sought his own honor above the others. The life of self was strong in Peter.
I do not think we can imagine the depth of humiliation Peter sank into then.
“We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29),
Again he tells us to be “subject one to another, and be clothed with humility” (I Peter 5:5).
It is the work of our blessed Lord Jesus to disclose the power of self.
No one else but Christ Jesus can give deliverance from the power of self.
A good many Christians are living a low life—a life of failure and of sin—instead of rest and victory, because they began to say: “I cannot, it is impossible.” And yet they do not understand it fully. So, under the impression, I cannot, they give way to despair. They will do their best, but they never expect to get on very far.
me.” Fall down and learn that when you are utterly helpless, God will come to work in you not only to will, but also to do.
The cause of the weakness of your Christian life is that you want to work it out partly, and to let God help you. And that cannot be. You must come to be utterly helpless, to let God work. He will work gloriously. It is this that we need if we are indeed to be workers for God.
child of God can live in the power of the Holy Spirit.
We are continually warned that this is the great danger of the Christian life, to go again into bondage.
a regenerate man—a man who knows that his heart and nature have been renewed, and that sin is now a power in him that is not himself.
The regenerate man is one in whom the will has been renewed, and who can say: “I delight in the law of God after the inward man.”
The will of man is nothing but an empty vessel in which the power of God is to be made manifest. Man must seek in God all that is to be.
is the regenerate I in its weakness seeking to obey the law without being filled with the Spirit. This is the experience of almost every saint. After conversion, a man begins to do his best, and he fails.
But if
we are brought into the full light, we no longer need to fail. Nor need we fail at all if we have received the Spir...
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God allows that failure so that the regenerate man should be taught his own utter inability. It is in the course of this struggle that the sense of our utter sinfulness comes to us. It is God’s way of dealing with us. He allows man to strive to fulfill the law so that, as he strives and wrestles, he may be brought t...
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It is a captive that cries: “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body I of this death?” He is a man who feels himself bound. But look to.the contrast in the second verse of the eighth chapter: “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” That is the deliverance through Jesus Christ our Lord, the liberty to the captive which the Spirit brings. Can you keep captive any longer a man made free by the “law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus”? But you say, the regenerate man did not have the Spirit of Jesus when he spoke in
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to work to do, but many Christians misunderstand this. They think because they have the will, it is enough, and that now they are able to do. This is not so.
the work of the Holy Spirit is to enable you every moment to remember Jesus, and to trust Him!
The Kingdom of God is “Joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17).
God has called the Church of Christ to live in the power of the Holy Spirit. But the Church is living, .for the most part, in the power of human flesh, and of will and energy and effort apart from the Spirit of God.
the beginning of the Christian life is receiving the Holy Spirit.
we are
to walk in the power of the H...
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I fear that if you take the preaching throughout the Church of Christ and ask why there is so little converting power in the preaching of the Word, why there is so much work and often so little result for eternity, why the Word has so little power to build up believers in holiness and in consecration—the answer will be: It is the absence of the power of the Holy Spirit. And why is this? There can be no other reason except that the flesh and human energy have taken the place that the Holy Spirit ought to have.
Religious self-effort always ends in sinful flesh.
Think how often there is strife among the members of churches, and how much there is of envy, jealousy, sensitiveness, and pride.
If it is our belief that God is going to have mercy on His Church in these last ages, it will be because the doctrine and the truth about the Holy Spirit will not only be studied, but sought after with a whole heart. It is not only because that truth will be sought after, but because ministers and congregations will be found bowing before God in deep abasement with one cry: “We have grieved God’s Spirit. We have tried to be Christian churches with as little as possible of God’s Spirit. We have not sought to be churches filled with the Holy Spirit.”
Because of either fear or unbelief. Lord, forgive us and wake up the church!
you fail because you do not accept the strength of God. God alone can work out His will in you. You cannot work out God’s will, but His Holy Spirit can. Until the Church and the believers grasp this, and cease trying by human effort to do God’s will, and wait upon the Holy Spirit to come with all His omnipotent and enabling power, the Church will never be what God wants her to be.
There is also a misunderstanding of God's will. The Lord's prayer defines His will--your Kingdom come; your will be done on earth as it IS in HEAVEN.
Let us bow in shame, and confess before God how our fleshly religion, our self-effort and self-confidence, have been the cause of every failure.
Why have I failed?” To such I always give this answer: “My dear friend, you are trying to do in your own strength what Christ alone can do in you.” And when they tell me: “I am sure I knew Christ alone could do it; I was not trusting in myself,” my answer is: “You were trusting in yourself, or you could not have failed.
See Leadership Blog "Moving Forward" written January 2018
Are you living as an anointed, Spirit-filled man in your ministry and your life before God?
