My son, do not despise the chastening of the Lord, nor be
discouraged when you are rebuked by Him. —Hebrews 12:5
{CHAMBERS} “It is very easy to grieve the Spirit of God;
we do it by despising the discipline of the Lord, or by becoming discouraged
when He rebukes us. If our experience of being set apart from sin and being
made holy through the process of sanctification is still very shallow, we tend
to mistake the reality of God for something else. […] and do not despise Him [the Spirit] when He
says to you, in effect, “Don’t be blind on this point anymore— you are not as
far along spiritually as you thought you were. Until now I have not been able
to reveal this to you, but I’m revealing it to you right now.” When the Lord
disciplines you like that, let Him have His way with you. Allow Him to put you
into a right-standing relationship before God. “…nor be discouraged when you
are rebuked by Him.” We begin to pout, become irritated with God, and then say,
“Oh well, I can’t help it. I prayed and things didn’t turn out right anyway. So
I’m simply going to give up on everything.” […] Am I fully prepared to allow
God to grip me by His power and do a work in me that is truly worthy of
Himself? Sanctification is not my idea of what I want God to do for me—
sanctification is God’s idea of what He wants to do for me. But He has to get
me into the state of mind and spirit where I will allow Him to sanctify me
completely, whatever the cost (see 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24).”
{ELGIN} (John
16:8) “And He [the Holy Spirit], when He comes, will convict the world
concerning sin and righteousness and judgment;”
The Holy Spirit, the Helper, is God’s presence in us. There is something “holy” in every Believer. God can have no part of sin and so, the
Spirit will make sin evident in us.
Often times, rather than see that as a good thing, we want to hide like Adam
and Eve in the Garden. You cannot hide
from God … and you cannot hide anything from God. “Confession” means to agree with God not
reveal something to God that He does not already know. The struggle we have with conviction is with
our flesh. It is because of our old
nature that we sin. It is because of our
sinful nature that we want to hide our sin.
Darkness wants nothing to do with the Light. We should embrace the feelings of conviction
and run, not walk, to the feet of Jesus.
The danger we face is that there are some things in our lives that we
want to hang on to. Things that we should
and must cast off, that cling to us or that we cling to. It would be great if we woke up the day after
our conversion and we were no longer tempted to sin. But that is not going to happen. For His reasons, God has chosen to refine us
and our will little bit by little bit.
I
have quoted this before, but it bears repeating. [John
Newton] “I am not what I ought to be — ah, how imperfect and deficient! I
am not what I wish to be — I abhor what is evil, and I would cleave to what is
good! I am not what I hope to be — soon, soon shall I put off mortality, and
with mortality all sin and imperfection. Yet, though I am not what I ought to
be, nor what I wish to be, nor what I hope to be, I can truly say, I am not
what I once was; a slave to sin and Satan; and I can heartily join with the
apostle, and acknowledge, "By the grace of God I am what I am."” A nearly perfect description of the Christian
life.
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