Tuesday, May 30, 2017

To Accept God's Call You Must Embrace The Spiritual And Abandon The Natural



Lord, I will follow You, but... —Luke 9:61

{CHAMBERS} “Suppose God tells you to do something that is an enormous test of your common sense, totally going against it. What will you do? Will you hold back? If you get into the habit of doing something physically, you will do it every time you are tested until you break the habit through sheer determination. And the same is true spiritually. […] every time you will turn back at the true point of testing, until you are determined to abandon yourself to God in total surrender. Yet we tend to say, “Yes, but— suppose I do obey God in this matter, what about…?” Or we say, “Yes, I will obey God if what He asks of me doesn’t go against my common sense, but don’t ask me to take a step in the dark.” […] Trust completely in God, and when He brings you to a new opportunity of adventure, offering it to you, see that you take it. We act like pagans in a crisis— only one out of an entire crowd is daring enough to invest his faith in the character of God.”

{ELGIN}  (Proverbs 16:9) We make plans .. God orders our steps. (Proverbs 3:3-6) Trust God don’t trust your own wisdom.  There is a principle that I have learned over time.  God never asks you to do something that you can do by yourself. You will always need God to do it.  Why? Because it is a spiritual act not a natural one.  Oh, it may have the form of the natural, but if God is in it, that is the limit of the natural, its form.

When the young man told Jesus he would follow Him but he needed to first bury his father, Jesus said let the dead bury the dead. (Luke 9:60)  When the rich young man asked about what he needed to do to have eternal life, Jesus said “sell have you have and give it to the poor”  (Mark 10:21)  The problem with obedience is the depth of our love of God and faith in God.  God asks us to abandon natural understanding and embrace the spiritual understanding.  If we did, obedience to the call of God would be natural and immediate.  You would not have to lay the fleece out six ways from Sunday before you submitted to what you knew to be God’s call the first time.

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