Abide in Me… —John 15:4
{CHAMBERS} “The
Spirit of Jesus is put into me by way of the atonement by the Cross of Christ.
I then have to build my thinking patiently to bring it into perfect harmony
with my Lord. God will not make me think like Jesus— I have to do it myself. I
have to bring “every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2
Corinthians 10:5). “Abide in Me”— in intellectual matters, in money matters, in
every one of the matters that make human life what it is. Our lives are not
made up of only one neatly confined area. Am I preventing God from doing things
in my circumstances by saying that it will only serve to hinder my fellowship
with Him? How irrelevant and disrespectful that is! It does not matter what my
circumstances are. I can be as much assured of abiding in Jesus in any one of
them as I am in any prayer meeting. […] Our Lord’s inner abiding was pure and
unblemished. He was at home with God wherever His body was. He never chose His
own circumstances, but was meek, submitting to His Father’s plans and
directions for Him. Just think of how amazingly relaxed our Lord’s life was!
But we tend to keep God at a fever pitch in our lives. We have none of the
serenity of the life which is “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).”
{ELGIN} Peggy Lee, for some reading this, the name
means nothing, sang a song in 1969 called “Is that all there is”. A refrain in this song goes “Is that all
there is, is that all there is. If that's all there is my friends, then let's
keep dancing Let's break out the booze and have a ball. If that's all there is” The Jesus said something similar in Luke 12. “18 “Then
he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger
ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. 19 And I’ll say to myself,
“You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink
and be merry.”’ 20 “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your
life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for
yourself?’
It is easy to lose spiritual perspective as we live these
lives of ours. We forget that we live in
a new context with new priorities and a new perspective on the life that happens
around us and to us. Yesterday, at work, we were told that one of the
engineers, about 50 years old, died suddenly on Monday. He had not felt well over the weekend and
Monday night, he died. I can assure you
that was not what he planned for Monday night.
It rattled a lot of the guys who are his age because to reminded them of
their mortality. As I told them, life is
a vapor. (Hebrews 9:27) "It is given unto every man, once to die and then the judgement" I can assure you that by the
end of this week, the majority will have stopped thinking about their own
mortality and will be right back in the “grind”. That is analogous to how many Christians are
when they suddenly become aware of their own spirituality. After a couple of days they “get over it”. Sadly to their detriment. How about you. Are you busy living your life totally unaware
of the higher calling that God has placed on you as one of His children? I want to encourage you to think about
that. Make the most of the days the Lord
has given you. Make the most of those days for Him.
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