. . . come, follow Me —Luke 18:22
Where our individual desire dies and sanctified surrender lives. One of the greatest hindrances in coming to Jesus is the excuse of our own individual temperament. We make our temperament and our natural desires barriers to coming to Jesus. Yet the first thing we realize when we do come to Jesus is that He pays no attention whatsoever to our natural desires. We have the idea that we can dedicate our gifts to God. However, you cannot dedicate what is not yours. There is actually only one thing you can dedicate to God, and that is your right to yourself (see Romans 12:1 ). If you will give God your right to yourself, He will make a holy experiment out of you— and His experiments always succeed. The one true mark of a saint of God is the inner creativity that flows from being totally surrendered to Jesus Christ. In the life of a saint there is this amazing Well, which is a continual Source of original life. The Spirit of God is a Well of water springing up perpetually fresh. A saint realizes that it is God who engineers his circumstances; consequently there are no complaints, only unrestrained surrender to Jesus. Never try to make your experience a principle for others, but allow God to be as creative and original with others as He is with you.
If you abandon everything to Jesus, and come when He says, "Come," then He will continue to say, "Come," through you. You will go out into the world reproducing the echo of Christ’s "Come." That is the result in every soul who has abandoned all and come to Jesus.
Have I come to Him? Will I come now?
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Is This Verse in Your Bible?
Hunched over his desk, penknife in hand, Thomas Jefferson sliced carefully at the pages of Holy Scripture, excising select passages and pasting them together to create a Bible more to his liking. The "Jefferson Bible". A book he could feel comfortable with.
What didn't make it into the Jefferson Bible was anything that conflicted with his personal worldview. Hell? It can't be. The supernatural? Not even worth considering. God's wrath against sin? I don't think so. The very words of God regarded as leftover scraps.
Christians rightly shudder at such arrogant presumption. And no true Christian would be so bold as to attempt to create his or her own Bible, blantantly omitting whatever they don't prefer.
But if we are honest, we too may have to admit that we have a Bible of our own making--ametaphorical one, perhaps, but a cut-and-paste job just the same. For if we ignore any portion of God's Word--whether unintentionally, conveniently, or deliberately--we too are guilty of Jefferson's offense.
Sadly, I've been guilty on more than one occasion. I've opened my Bible and moved quidkly to the encouraging and assuring passages, trying to avoid the difficult and challenging passages along the way.
Here's one verse I find easy to ignore. It's the simple, provocative words in 1 John 2:15:
"Do not love the world or anything in the world".
There's nothing subtle about this sentence. It's abrupt and to the point--only ten words. It is catagorical: "Do NOT love the world." It's comprehensive: "Do not love ANYTHING in the world." And it's intrusive, strategically aimed at whatever we desire mose: "anything in the world."
It forbids worldliness in no uncertain terms.
First John 2:15 isn't a verse we tend to underline when we come across it in our daily Bible reading. We're not inclined to put "Do notlove the world" on an index card and reherse it during our daily commute. We don't hear many sermons on this verse and its prohibition of the sin of worldliness.
We read, we live, as if it doesn't belong in our Bible.
Clip. Clip. Clip.
Before we know it, we have a Bible like Jefferson's, and 1 John 2:15 is nowhere to be found.
http://www.amazon.com/Worldliness-Resisting-Seduction-Fallen-World/dp/1433502801
Posted by Anonymous