Are You Serving On The Front Lines?

My Utmost For His Highest 

He commanded them that they should tell no one the things they had seen, till the Son of Man had risen from the dead. —Mark 9:9

{CHAMBERS} “Jesus said, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12). We must have a oneness with His risen life before we are prepared to bear any particular truth from Him. Do we really know anything about the indwelling of the risen life of Jesus? The evidence that we do is that His Word is becoming understandable to us. God cannot reveal anything to us if we don’t have His Spirit. And our own unyielding and headstrong opinions will effectively prevent God from revealing anything to us. But our insensible thinking will end immediately once His resurrection life has its way with us.[…] But so many people do tell what they saw on the Mount of Transfiguration— their mountaintop experience. They have seen a vision and they testify to it, but there is no connection between what they say and how they live. Their lives don’t add up because the Son of Man has not yet risen in them. How long will it be before His resurrection life is formed and evident in you and in me?”

{ELGIN}  One thing that always dismays me is when someone says they are something and they are in fact but not in deed.  After I had returned from Vietnam, I mustered out of the Army and started college on the GI Bill.  One day I saw a guy wearing an Army field jacket with a patch on the sleeve representing the unit I had served with, Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.  I asked him, “What team were you with?” He looked at me strangely and said “What are you talking about?” I said, “What advisory team were you with in Vietnam?” To which he replied “I wasn’t in the Army, I got this jacket at the Salvation Army.” He looked like he was like me, but he wasn’t.  At another time, years later, I met a guy wearing a Vietnam Veteran’s hat.  I asked him where he had served. He replied, “I was in the Navy.  I was on a ship off of the coast of Vietnam.” He had not even gotten his boots muddy.  He was a veteran, during the war, but had not been in conflict. He was more like me, but he wasn’t like me.

I know many people who act like they are Christian, maybe even think they are. (2 Timothy 3:5) “They have a form of godliness but deny the power thereof.”  They look like you but do not have the Spirit of God in them.  Then there are others that are born again, but they have not progressed   beyond the point of conversion.  They bear the name, but not the spiritual experience.  In many ways they still identify more with the world than with the Word.  (Matthew 5:18) “They praise Me (God) with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me” We have been saved from the old way of life and its desires and into a new life and its blessings.  We have been called into the spiritual battle as soldiers of the cross.  Not to fight with natural weapons but with spiritual weapons. (Ephesians 6:12) “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”  When someone asks did you serve? You can tell them, “I am serving”.  If they ask “Where did you serve?”  You can tell them “Wherever the Lord sent me.”  Perhaps you even have some battle scars to prove it. But more likely, the way you live your life will be even more telling.