Leonard Ravenhill, Revival Praying

I love Leonard Ravenhill as much as any of the many great Christian teachers I'm collecting on this blog and want to post some from his book, Revival Praying. I wish I could be as obedient to his advice as he teaches we should be and I know I should be. It's miserable to know what you should do and find yourself failing to do it at every turn. However, what he teaches is so absolutely necessary if there is any hope of the Church becoming what we are meant to be I can only post such exhortations as his and hope they set a fire under me as well as anyone else who happens to read them. And they DO inspire me. My prayer life is much the better for such readings even if I fail most of the time to get anywhere near the vision of what the true Christian ought to be.

He quotes his mentor, Samuel Chadwick (The Path of Prayer) in his Preface:

"Brethren, the crying sin of the Church is her laziness after God."

And goes on to say in his own words:

Prayer demands will power. Prayer recognizes unfinished business with and for God. Prayer is a battle for full-grown men, fully armed and fully awake to the possibilities of grace. I write here by constraint, for my spirit is sore, my heart sick at the slothfulness with which we tarry in prayer. My head hangs low that Communists will give more for their dying cause than we will give for the living Christ. [This book was published in 1962

He spends the first few pages chronicling the sin and corruption of America in those days and the apostasy and weakness of the Church in its response.

The world has lost the power to blush over its vice; the Church has lost her power to weep over it. [p. 22]

And he ends his Preface with:

Hear me! Every church without a prayer meeting condemns us; every Bible daily unopened condemns us; every promise of God unusued condemns us; every lost neighbor condemns us; every lost heathn condemns us; every dry eye among us condemns us; every wasted minute of our time condemns us; every unclaimed oppoertunity for God condemns us.

In 1962 he is seeing the barbarians at the gate, in the form of Khrushchev and the threat of Communism, and the daily dying of millions into a Christless eternity. How much farther the barbarians have come in our own time and the millions go on dying and the Church goes on in the same weakness and irrelevance.

Never was there a need for the trumpeters on Zion's walls to sound a louder blast to sleeping believers than at this moment. [p.27]

If that was true in 1962 so much the truer now.

Where is our faith? Where is our sense of mission to this world? It's not that we have none, it's that we have nothing near what we could and should have.

I have said before that one of these days someone will read the Bible for the first time, believe it, and act on it with a daring, simple faith

Many of us when we first believe have something of that fire of faith, but it is quickly quenched among the multitudes of older believers who regard it as fanaticism. But I do think of Bakht Singh who had such a response to his first encounter with the Bible and maintained his simple powerful faith for the rest of his life, which included such exploits as expecting his ticket to be paid for when he got to the airport or the train station for a trip on business for the Lord, and according to the resports it always was paid for through nothing but faith. The power we should have as believers in the God of the Bible is just about never seen among us, so such incidents stand out as unusual when they should be common.

Faith honors God. God honors faith and goes wherever faith puts Him. Faith, Biblical faith, can do all that God can do. (Because its sole desire is God's glory, it would not ask anything amiss -- 1 John 5:14.) Faith's supreme longing is for the return of the glory that has departed from the sanctuary. Its ambition is not colored by the clay vessel. Faith is wedded to the love which "seeketh not her own." Faith longs for an overthrow of the powers of darkness. Faith yearns that the world might know the message of redeeming love, and aches for enslaved millions to be unfettered from the chains of sin.

...What are we Christians doing? To use a very tattered phrase, are we just "playing church"? With all our revival campaigns, are we getting folk into Biblical regeneration? Is it really a comfort to knw that the recent converts will become just like us? What if they are as lazy and self-excusing in the matter of personal devotion to Jesus and active engagement in soul-winning as the rest of our listed church members? ...Surely we need some injection into the Church of the living God immediately.

Then he gets into the conditions for prayer:

The path to the new individual and collective power [the Church needs] would be as follows: First, renunciation of all known sin; Secondly, sorrowful confession that we have failed so much and have been satisfied so long with the status quo; Thirdly, a seeking of God's face in earnest prayer; And finally, Bible study, in order to uncover the promises of God directed to this desperate age and our needy churches.

In making a request of God, the first thing we have to be sure of is this: Is our relationship right? Once we are convinced by the witness of the Spirit that we are blood-related to the Father and not at variance with others, we can come with boldness to the throne of grace. Soiled hearts that operate soiled hands can not plunder the resources of God, for God's command is "Be ye clean that bear the vessels of the Lord." Assured that we are joint-heirs with Christ of the fabulous riches of God, what manner of persons we ought to be! Is there any excuse at all for our present poverty? When He longs to give full vision, is there any reason why we should still be seeing men as trees walking? With the promise of the mighty Holy Ghost to empower us, is there any self-defense when we stagger under the load and fail to "put to flight the armies of the aliens"? Has God failed? Is God unwilling to bless? No! Ten thousand times no! [p.32]

...Men of faith see -- they see the unseeable. Men of faith know a dimension that is unknown to those who pray only routine prayers.

[to be continued]

Pondering the practicalities of improving the practice of prayer

William Law's advice for daily prayer (as spelled out in his Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life)is probably only really doable by someone in his position, independently wealthy with no need to work, and unmarried with no family responsibilities. He dedicated his life to serving the Lord with prayer and the use of his wealth for the poor, and he had the time for it.

He recommends praying six times a day, at 6 and 9AM, at noon, and at 3, 6 and 9PM, and he suggests topics he considers appropriate for those times. He doesn't prescribe how LONG each session should be, but the way he words it here and there hints that maybe he actually has in mind a whole hour at each session. Six hours a day! I'll be doing VERY well if I can arrange for two sessions of an hour each, or more sessions at fifteen minutes or so.

Many have written that the more you do the more you CAN do so it's mostly a matter of getting started.

He suggests Praise and Thanksgiving for the 6AM prayer, with the reading or chanting of certain psalms; Humility (the cultivation of humility and confession of lack of humility) for 9AM; prayer for universal love, and intercession for the people in your life for noon. Then Resignation is the subject of the 3PM prayer, "resignation" being the old-fashioned word for acceptance of everything the Lord brings into your life, contentment with thanks and praise, and "rejoicing in all circumstances," or willing what God wills, the ultimate expression of trust in God. Confession of sin is for 6PM and meditating on Death for 9PM.

I think I'd combine his prayers for the virtues of humility and universal love and resignation in one session, and combine thanksgiving and confession with other topics of my own, but otherwise I have other things I want to concentrate on. The state of the church is a big one, which includes prayer for revival, and "understanding the times" is another big one. If I ever could give specific times to my prayers I'd give each of these topics their own "hour" (even if that hour is only fifteen minutes). Right now I just pray my whole prayer list in one session whenever I sit down for that purpose. I haven't been able to come up with a way to apportion the topics on my list over the day as he suggests, but maybe a natural apportioning would come with time. Of course his method doesn't have to be followed at all, it's just that it appeals to me as a way to pray at length for important things.

If I'm honest I have to admit that I have plenty of time, no family responsibilities and only 20 to 30 working hours a week, at home too, so that I can apportion the time as I please. I have no excuse not to devote the remaining time to prayer. If I worked at it diligently eventually I might even be able to organize my day to provide for regular hours of prayer as Law advises. It's quite clear, however, that my prayerlessness has nothing to do with practicalities. I suspect that even for the busiest of people the problem is always motivation or commitment. Once the commitment is made the time takes care of itself, some forms of busyness get dropped because you come to see that they are not serving any good purpose anyway, and others get taken care of in less time at better times.

The biographies of some of the most dedicated saints often show a prodigious dedication of time to the Lord even in the busiest life. That's how the spiritual power they are known for was won. I forget who it was who worked a twelve-hour day then came home and studied the Bible and prayed for something like another six to eight hours and slept for only the few hours left. He was young. Could I get my sleep needs down at all? Maybe I could, maybe a lot of it is simply habit, and time with the Lord invigorates too. Do I have the excuse of not being young? It's probably best not to explain away anything but put it in the Lord's hands.

At the moment making a regular schedule does seem to be beyond me, I must admit. I haven't been able to sleep at regular times for years now. Just when I think I may be getting onto a reasonable sleep schedule I find myself lying awake for hours, and back I go to sleeping during the day, which I'd rather not do. I end up working during the night, and I pray only when I'm awake and not having to work and there's nothing else I really have to do. In other words, not nearly enough.

Prayer is crucial, the more the better, and fasting with prayer some of those times just as crucial. I know this, I know it I know it I know it, but doing it is SO hard. Sometimes I'm just sitting and thinking Why can't I be praying right now? Getting started seems impossible sometimes.

But at least I'm getting a prayer list worked out. Just to give the barest outline:

For myself: The virtues Law recommends, and healing for arthritis pain and other physical problems.

For friends and family and neighbors: Salvation and God's blessings.

For the church: An increase in the spirit of prayer above all. Just what I'm writing about here and want for myself. Honestly facing disobedience in the church and purging it.

Understanding the times: Right now I really want to understand the Rapture claims, meaning the expectation of the removal of the church from earth as a separate event at some time before the Second Coming. There is a lot that supports it but still enough to keep me from completely accepting it. I'm definitely a Futurist as far as prophecy goes. About all I know for sure is that I can't accept Amillennialism or Preterism. I wrote some about this on the End Times Monitor blog a while back.

Cultivating a High View of God

There is a modern chorus some churches sing that goes "Our God is an awesome God, He reigns from heaven above, with wisdom, power and love, our God is an awesome God." The words are true and it's fun to sing but it's a bouncy little ditty that manages to reduce the message to something much less than awesome by its sheer bounciness, its shallow cheerfulness.

The word "awesome" carries none of the feeling it ought to any more, but comes across more like the expressions "groovy" (that's how old I am) or "cool." Words can be cheapened and cheapen the reality they denote. The greatest truths can be trivialized, God Himself can be reduced to something less than worthy of worship simply by the words we use and the attitude we cultivate, and it seems to me this happens all too often among today's Christians.

If God is awesome we should be properly awed, even overcome with a sense of His majesty. Most of what we do in worship and devotion isn't going to lead us in that direction. We need a truly high view of God if we are going to worship Him rightly. The thought of Him should prompt deep adoration, and it should include a fear of the Lord that keeps us from profaning Him.

Our souls must "magnify the Lord." I've collected a few quotes about this.

Luke 1:46: And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord

From Brother Lawrence (1610-1691): The Practice of the Presence of God:

First Conversation: The first time I saw Brother Lawrence was on the 3rd of August, 1666. He told me that God had done him a singular favor in his conversion at the age of eighteen. During that winter, upon seeing a tree stripped of its leaves and considering that, within a little time, the leaves would be renewed and, after that, the flowers and fruit appear; Brother Lawrence received a high view of the providence and power of God which has never since been effaced from his soul. This view had perfectly set him free from the world and kindled in him such a love for God, that he could not tell whether it had increased in the forty years that he had lived since...

We should feed and nourish our soul with high notions of God which would yield us great joy in being devoted to Him.

From William Law (1686-1761), A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, Chapter 14, where he is giving instruction in early morning devotions:

When you begin your petitions, use such various expressions of the attributes of God as may make you most sensible of the greatness and power of the divine nature ...

For these representations of the divine attributes which show us in some degree the majesty and greatness of God are an excellent means of raising our hearts into lively acts of worship and adoration.

What is the reason that most people are so much affected with this petition in the Burial Service of our church, "Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Savior, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death." It is because the joining together so many great expressions gives such a description of the greatness of the divine majesty as naturally affects every sensible mind.

Although, therefore, prayer does not consist in fine words or studied expressions, yet as words speak to the soul, as they have a certain power of raising thoughts in the soul, so those words which speak of God in the highest manner, which most fully express the power and presence of God, which raise thoughts in the soul most suitable to the greatness and providence of God, are the most useful and most edifying in our prayers.

When you direct any of your petitions to our blessed Lord, let it be in some expressions of this kind: "O Savior of the world, God of God, Light of Light, Thou that art the Brightness of Thy Father's Glory and the express Image of His person, ...Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and End of all things...that has destroyed the power of the Deveil, that has overcome death... the Judge of the quick and the dead ...

For such representations, which describe so many characters of our Savior's nature and power, are not only proper acts of adoration but will, if they are repeated with any attention, fill our hearts with the highest fervors of true devotion.

I needed this email from Zac Poonen's ministry. I think I need to get off the internet for a while or at least pull way back from it. I'm always embroiled in controversies just from being on the internet. I'm sloppy with money although I have so little you'd think I'd be scrupulous about every penny. I'm good at keeping track of it but not making the best decisions how to use it. As for the tongue, it does get away from me and that's very bad. The internet is the kind of company that encourages that of course, not that it should be my excuse, just means I need to pull back from it. Anyway, this is a good email to meditate on.

Message body WORD FOR THE WEEK 9 October 2011
Christian Fellowship Church, Bangalore, India
http://www.cfcindia.com
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God Has a Remnant in Every Generation

Zac Poonen

There is great spiritual decline today. But, in the midst of all this, God has a few who have a heart for Him. They are not all found in one denomination. They are found in all the denominations – men and women who love God and are seeking to honour Him in all things. They are genuinely filled with the Holy Spirit and do not get involved in controversies. They are very careful in the use of their tongues and are very faithful with money. God is gathering such people together in these days as His remnant.

The remnant prepared the way for the coming of the Lord Jesus. When the Lord was born, there was a small remnant - Simeon and Anna in the temple, John the Baptist, the shepherds, and a few wise men from the east. Today also there is a remnant in Christendom who are preparing the way for the coming of the Lord.

Zephaniah highlights some characteristics of this remnant.

"I will purify the lips of the people” ( Zeph.3:9). The speech of the remnant will be pure. Isaiah was convicted of his speech when he saw the glory of the Lord. I speak often about our speech and about our attitude to money - because the prophets spoke much about these two subjects. If we are careful with our mouth and our money, we can become the Lord’s spokesmen.

“All of them will call on the name of the Lord and serve Him shoulder to shoulder” (Zeph.3:9). The remnant will be united as one body and serve the Lord bearing His burdens - shoulder to shoulder.

“I will remove all the proud and arrogant people from among you. There will be no pride on My holy mountain. Those who are left will be the lowly and the humble” (Zeph 3:11,12). The remnant will comprise only of humble people, because the Lord would have removed all the proud ones. That is another question people ask me, “Brother Zac, why do you speak so much about humility?” Because that is what the Bible speaks of, from cover to cover.

“Those who are left will trust in the name of the Lord” (Zeph 3:12). The remnant will be a people of faith.

“The people will do no wrong to each other, never telling lies or deceiving one another. They will live peaceful lives" (Zeph 3:13). The remnant will be a peaceful people who never tell lies or deceive anyone or harm anyone.

“Sing, O daughter of Zion; shout aloud! Be glad and rejoice with all your heart! For the LORD Himself will live among you! (Zeph 3:14,15). The remnant will be a happy people who have found their perfect security in the Lord’s love for them.

“The LORD your God is in your midst, A victorious warrior. He will exult over you with joy. He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy” (Zeph 3:17). God rejoices over this remnant. He does not find joy over people who live in sin. Can a father rejoice in a child who has cancer, leprosy and tuberculosis? No. Neither can God find joy in people who live in sin and who don’t want to be healed. But God does find joy in this holy remnant. With great gladness He shouts over them and sings a song over them. This is the one place in Scripture where it says that God sings over His people. There are many places where we are exhorted to sing a song of praise to God. But here it is God Who is singing a song over us. What a challenge it is to be the type of person whom God can rejoice over.

“He is silently planning for you in love” (Zeph 3:17 – Paraphrase). The Lord plans for us in love and He has pleasant surprises planned for us in the days to come, because He is our loving Father.

“I will save the weak and helpless ones. I will give glory and renown to those who were mocked and shamed. I will give you a name of distinction. They will praise you as I restore your fortunes before their very eyes” (Zeph 3:19,20). The remnant consists of a people who are weak and helpless in themselves. The Lord Himself deals with their enemies and gives His people glory and distinction in the final day.
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Some downer thoughts on the higher life

Have to report that I got discouraged with this blog a while back. Meant to do a post saying why but put that off too.

I'd already been thinking along these lines and then I heard a sermon on Christian radio exploring the scriptures on prayer which made it only too clear that conditions must be met that are hard to meet for prayer that really lays hold of God.

This could of course get into some depth but really the main thought is pretty simple:

There IS a higher Christian life than the life most of us lead, and many of the books I've highlighted here do hold it forth to us. But there are conditions involved and most of us aren't qualified for it and aren't going to be able to get qualified either.*

Discouraging thought, no? Took the wind out of me when it hit me.

Kind of took the wind out of me right now as I wrote this. So I think I'll leave it here for now.

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*There are many who have no interest in any supposed higher Christian life, even if they know something about it, and there are also those who put it down as not a true expression of Christianity and love to make owlish pronouncements about how No, there ISN'T anything "more." So I'm disagreeing with them in claiming that there is such a life and it is worth aiming for. Andrew Murray knew that life, so did John Wesley, so did Watchman Nee (though he insisted it was really the NORMAL Christian life, not something above and beyond it). And so did many others, including many who have been saddled with the label "mystics" which implies something occultic or similar to charismania which is very far from the truth. It may fit some who come under that label (such as Hildegarde of Bingen just to be clear about what I mean -- and a great deal of the contemporary movements that teach something they call "contemplative prayer" which also isn't what that term used to designate either) but there are plenty it doesn't fit, they are simply people who fell so deeply in love with God that they occupy their every moment with loving Him and learning about Him and obeying Him and seeking His presence, and the result of such a dedicated life is knowledge of God, hearing from God, and often supernatural powers -- powers the early church had, nothing weird or new. Charismatics go off into the weird and new and that's where discernment is sorely needed these days, but the TRUE "mystics" are simply true lovers of God, true followers of Jesus. But these true followers of God remain very few among the many.

But most don't care and won't share my discouragement at finding how hard it is to meet the conditions of the "higher life" anyway. Sure makes ME sad to think I will never get straightened out enough to live that life though, and also makes me sad to think this also applies to my hopes of revival. WE AREN'T QUALIFIED FOR REVIVAL. (I hope I'll yet discover I'm wrong).

Zac Poonen on the Body of Christ

The Body of Christ, a great idea rarely encountered in reality that I know of.

WORD FOR THE WEEK 21 August 2011
Christian Fellowship Church, Bangalore, India
http://www.cfcindia.com
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The Reality of the Body of Christ

Zac Poonen

Under the new covenant, God has not intended that we should be lone Christians living by ourselves - even if we are living in victory over sin. God's will is that there should be a Body of disciples of Jesus manifesting His glory together.

There is a difference between a Body and a congregation. A congregation is no better than a secular club. The club may be a good club, where people care for one another and help one another. But a Body is more than that. In the Body of Christ, each member is first of all inwardly connected to the Head and then inwardly and inseparably connected to the other members. These members must grow in oneness until their unity is like the unity of the Father and the Son (Jn.17:21-23).

Satan opposes the building of such a Body anywhere on earth, for he knows that such a Body can rout him, put him to flight, and destroy his kingdom. Jesus said that it is against the church that the gates of Hell would not prevail (Matt.16:18). The gates of Hell may prevail against a lone individual Christian. But they cannot prevail against the church. That is why Satan's attacks on spiritual unity among believers are far stronger than his attacks on purity.

Where any two disciples of Jesus are firmly united in oneness of mind and spirit, whatever they ask for will be granted, for in two such disciples is found an expression of the Body of Christ (Matt.18:18-20).

In fellowship with other believers, we will discover the selfishness and utter corruption of our flesh much more quickly and more deeply than if we lived all by ourselves. It is only through fellowship with others who have a flesh that our rough edges can be smoothened out.

Many believers merely spin theories about the church and the Body of Christ. But we must be among those who seek reality. There are enough theories about the church in Christendom. We don't have to add to that number with one more theory or doctrine about the Body of Christ. Let us demonstrate the reality of the Body in our mutual relationships in our local church, and thus demonstrate to the world and to Satan that the Body of Christ is a reality on earth.
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Lack of spiritual power, my fault, the church's fault both

My posts on this blog seem to be about levels of spiritual growth I feel I can never attain, or the fact that the churches don't teach us anything about such experiences. I could say a great deal more about both of these preoccupations and now that I've identifed them maybe that's what I will be doing in a more focused way.

There must be churches somewhere who do this teaching. It's in books after all.

Right now I'm reading back and forth in some books about prayer I've had for years, books I've read and partly read, and started to read and put down, books that have generally left me feeling I can never do that, but as usual hoping the Lord will find some way to use them to inspire me. For years I've read about prayer warriors who are able to pray for hours on end, who have very specific experiences they describe of feeling called to pray about a certain concern on a moment's notice, even sometimes something they know nothing about, and praying until they have the experience of knowing that God has answered the prayer, and finding out some time later that at that very time the concern was dealt with by God. They talk about "praying through" a concern, they talk about "wrestling" in prayer, or "battling."

These are people who take their cue from God. And that's how it should be. We are supposed to pray HIS will, not our will, be done. How many do this and where are they and why isn't this taught in the churches?

There's another question related to this that frequently comes up, that is: How can I know what God's will is? I have to say I'm thoroughly disappointed in the usual answers we get.

The question is really, How do I learn to HEAR FROM God about His will in the specifics of situations I encounter in my own life and the world around me?.

The question is not How can I learn to obey what scripture reveals of God's general will, His commandments, and so on. It may well be that the question is often asked prematurely, before God's general will has become our guide, but that is not what is said.

Sometimes you get the answer that if we stay in God's word He will communicate with us there. And He does, and often His communications are quite specific to situations. BUT this is still not addressing the question as it is meant, concerning our direct communications with God. He is the vine, we are the branches, that implies something pretty direct.

Most of the answers one gets from today's pulpit imply that there is no such thing as hearing from God so specifically and personally.

Why do we have the Holy Spirit then? Just sort of to be there in the background, believed in but never experienced, never to be an active part of our lives in any way we can be conscious of, just there to ensure our salvation and keep us persevering despite our lack of awareness of His presence?

No.

SO much more I want to say about this, SO tired. Back later.

Some problems with Puritan John Owen's "Spiritual-Mindedness"

This is to be a half-baked post I must admit -- at least the first part of it is. It's about an impression I've been having that I haven't studied out enough to understand well so I have to give my impression provisionally. But it is a strong impression.

When I read John Owen or some of the other Puritans, Jonathan Edwards too at times, although I'm impressed with their thoroughness and sincerity and their personal experience of what they are writing about as well, I nevertheless sometimes end up feeling so hopelessly unsavable in the light of their writings I nearly lose heart. I've had this experience many times over the years, to the extent of believing I'm not saved and trying to learn how to get saved if I'm not. I'm still vulnerable to this doubt despite the fact that I have many reasons to be sure I am saved. If I am not saved all I can do is hope that the Lord will come in revival and save me. There are always some in any revival who have been Christians all or most of their lives who discover in revival that they have never been saved and get saved then.

If I AM saved, as I most likely am, then these doubts are being laid on me from an external source, and there does seem to be plenty of it in the Puritan writers. You could think from reading Owen (say, his Spiritual-Mindedness) that if you ever act from the flesh, from pride or selfish motives, that is proof that you are not spiritually-minded and therefore unregenerate / unsaved. Sometimes the effect of reading him or similar writings is so dispiriting I get into such a gloomy state of anxiety I'm useless for some time.

This last time I put it down and went back to the "higher life" people. They seem to more clearly recognize that Christians continue to struggle with the flesh, and in fact much of their writing aims to teach how to put oneself under the ministry of the Holy Spirit to experience conviction and victory over the flesh and sins.

It was a joy and a relief to me after reading some in Owen to read in one of the hymns by the "mystic" Gerhard Tersteegen these lines:

Tell me, O God! If aught there be
Of self, that wills not Thy control;
Reveal whate'er impurity
May still be lurking in my soul!
To reach Thy rest and share Thy throne,
Mine eye must look to Thee alone.

O Love, Thy sovereign aid impart,
To save me from low-thoughted care;
Chase this self-will from all my heart,
From all its hidden mazes there;
Make me Thy duteous child, that I
Ceaseless may, 'Abba Father' cry.

Even someone who had spent most of his life in seclusion in the presence of God knows he still has unmortified self-will in his deceitful heart.

When you DO put yourself under the watchful eye of the Lord, it's amazing how many little sins He points out, some things you were vaguely aware of, some you had no clue about, and when He points them out it's remarkable that you actually do have the power to put them out of your life, if not always for love of Him certainly for righteous fear of Him, for fear of the pain of conscience. THAT is more spiritual-mindedness than some standard that eliminates all sinful and fleshly life in the soul as qualification for being saved.

We're rotten to the core, after all, by nature. How on earth can we become as perfectly spiritually-minded as Owen seems to require of us?

In a way I know I'm being unfair to him. I did read ahead some (I'd already read this book -- pencil markings attest to that although I hardly remember it), and find him dealing with the fact of continuing sin in the believer. Nevertheless, somehow he manages to give the impression earlier on that sin -- real sin -- only pertains to the unregenerate. I'm going to have to read this book again more thoroughly someday and see if my impression remains.

BUT OWEN TRULY DOES MISS WHAT SPIRITUALITY IS REALLY ALL ABOUT:
I did note some comments he made in the early part of the book that strike me as quite odd. The scripture where Jesus says those who believe on Him will become sources of living water, which is taken by the "higher life" people as promise of Holy Spirit power for witness and work, rightly it seems to me, is described by Owen (pp 11-12) as a fountain "bubbling up for our spiritual refreshment," the source of the spiritual thoughts he is discussing.

But Jesus isn't just promising us something for our refreshment and spiritual thoughts, Jesus is promising LIFE through the Spirit flowing from the inner being of believers outward to the dead world -- something that is demonstrable in those who have a great measure of that power -- not mere spiritual refreshment of the individual. Jesus is saying all life, all true conversion, all spiritual reality, comes from the Spirit Himself, and the Spirit is given by Jesus to flow from the innermost parts of believers. "The flesh profits nothing," Life comes only through the Spirit. The flesh is dead and can only propagate death, but the Spirit is life everlasting. Really the whole mission of the Christian life. Not just refreshing spiritual thoughts.

That's a problem with Owen. I believe he and the Puritans did have the Holy Spirit and wrote a great deal of important truth but I believe they miss the boat on some of the most important issues, THE most important issue in fact in this case.

He continues to show this spiritual obtuseness -- that is what it is -- when he says a few pages later (p.17) that "spiritual gifts are nothing more than a spiritual use of natural faculties." Anyone who has learned to sense the Spirit within even once in a while should know how wrong this is, but even the description of the spiritual gifts in the Bible should make it plain this is no matter of natural faculties at all. He has reduced the word "spiritual" to a carnal principle. The gift of tongues was certainly straight from the Spirit, no natural faculty could produce a foreign tongue in a person unfamiliar with it. The gift of healing certainly comes from the Spirit, no human faculty, and there's also a gift of miracles -- what human faculty could be made to produce a miracle? The gift of prophecy likewise comes straight from God, God's own speaking within the human spirit. To reduce it to mere learned exegesis of the Bible as some do is, again, to reduce the spiritual to the carnal. The Puritans do tend to be heavy on the intellectual side of things.

Likewise he reduces the concept of being "filled with the Spirit" to a MIND FILLED with spiritual thoughts under the influence of the Spirit." (p. 35) No, no, no, no, no. The Spirit is a living reality with Whom we CAN be truly filled -- He regenerates the human spirit and fills it, not the MIND but the spirit -- a reservoir of spiritual power that MAY then inform and transform the mind and emotions and all the rest but often doesn't as fully as should be the case because Christians are so badly taught about these things. The presence of the Spirit is something you can EXPERIENCE too, something decidedly separate from the mind and the soul in general. He is a spiritual power within born-again believers that is the bearer of LIFE, no mere propagator of "spiritual thoughts."

This is what the "higher life" people know that many of the other branches of the Church for the most part don't know -- Puritan, Reformed, Fundamentalist, and many others -- and this is a tragedy for the Church as the Holy Spirit is the WHOLE POINT OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE.

Revisiting the Higher Life writers

In my time off the internet because of computer problems (I'm writing on a borrowed computer and have to limit my time) I've been rereading some of the "higher life" books this blog is mostly about. It's an effort to revive myself spiritually and I'm very happy for the lack of internet distractions.

Reading these wonderful books brings a sad reminder of the low state of spiritual life in myself and in the church at large. Andrew Murray laments it in his day, Samuel Chadwick in his, Watchman Nee in his own indirect way as he carefully delineates the character of the spiritual life, which is enough to make it clear how few really live that life. And it's no better and most likely much worse in our time. It inspires me to pray for all the churches, as we all should be doing, as well as for revival from my own miserable condition.

I remember hearing a couple of fairly well known Reformed radio personalities saying how wrong all this higher life stuff is. There are many versions of this complaint but I'm remembering particularly their saying how in their younger days they'd "tried" to surrender absolutely to God and couldn't do it -- an allusion to Murray's classic book, Absolute Surrender. They'd concluded from their own failure that such all-out surrender is impossible and went over to the Reformed camp in reaction, where apparently holiness is something a Christian just sort of naturally and slowly acquires over a lifetime. No matter that Murray himself testifies that it is indeed possible and in fact a necessity, and reports that others have too, along with all the others who write in this same vein. But the Reformed branch seems to have entrenched itself behind a doctrine of its impossibility and therefore its non-necessity. The fundamentalist churches also seem to lack an appreciation for such writings but I don't know their reasoning on the subject. So great segments of the Church cut themselves off from the life of God that is so sorely needed.

I left the charismatic movement because there was just too much carnality masquerading as spirituality -- and very likely even the working of evil spirits at times -- and too little concern for spiritual discernment of the source of the phenomena they experienced, and went over to a Reformed church that had recently appeared in town because the preaching was systematic and Biblical and included exhortations to holiness that I also found disregarded in the charismatic environment. But every branch of the Church has its strengths and weaknesses. The charismatic churches are also the only place I ever experienced genuine spiritual life -- genuine spiritual fellowship I should say -- despite all the questionable and outright counterfeit spirituality; and the solid doctrine of the Reformed churches which is so comforting after the confusions of the charismatics also comes at the expense of spiritual life as it tends to dominate the whole life of the church. The charismatics err in the direction of experiential chaos to the point of irresponsibility, but the Reformed are truly in danger of snuffing out the Spirit altogether. The complaint of the charismatics that doctrine is not the essence or center of Christian life has validity, but so does the complaint of the Reformed in response that there is no true spirituality without true doctrine.

However, NONE of the denominations of the Church has anything to boast of at the moment as there hasn't been a genuine revival anywhere that I know of in a long long time so spiritually dead are they all. But revivals have occurred in all the denominations at one time or another, and "higher life" teachers have come out of all of them at one time or another. It always takes someone seeing the desperate lack of spiritual life and putting himself/herself out, you could even say actually taking himself to the altar, to the cross, to die for the church -- that's really what it takes -- and then God comes down. Someone who counts the cost and puts self on the altar to pray for God's intervention in the Church with lengthy wrestling prayer for all its members -- better all the elders of a church, as happened in the revival on the Isle of Lewis, or prayer meetings that attract people from all denominations that happened in New York more than a century ago and brought a huge revival. But it hasn't happened that I know of in quite a while -- anywhere in the West at least despite the fact that it's sorely needed. The revival in Saskatchewan in the 70s that Bill McLeod prayed for so avidly is possibly the last.

Reading in the Higher Life library one enounters over and over, as I say at the start of this post, laments about the condition of the churches. It comes from all denominations. I just happened to read this one by G D Watson in his book White Robes about the dismal condition of the Methodists in his time (the early 20th century):

When a church loses heart holiness, it must try ritualism, or machinery, or lyceums, or concerts, or festivals, or 'sacred dramas,' or oyster suppers, or something as a miserable substitute for primitive power. It has ever been that when the visible Church does not raise healthy children for God, she raises lap-dogs for the devil... Hundreds of Churches of Methodism have not enough holiness to produce revivals and clear, happy conversions; and as a substitute for revival and the Holy Ghost, they feel compelled to go at something. They must raise dainty pets, and spend all their strength on a trained choir or nursing a dainty manuscript minister, or working up little giggling, dissipating Church socials, or little Sunday school dramas, or a soul-starving literary lyceum, or a star lecturing course, or an old folk's concert, or some wax doll arrangement to atone for the Church's lack of purity and power.

God will never accept these little Church poodles as substitutes for holiness and Heaven-born children. The little petty idols being stuck up in some Protestant churches are just as abominable to God as the big idols stuck up in Romanism. [pp 85-6]

I've been in churches where there is a lot of this sort of thing, maybe even beautifully done classical Christian music as a performance, but it's still just a performance and the Church itself has no spiritual life. Converts are more like inductees to a social club than born again believers.

But a church doesn't have to go all out in that direction to show its lack of spiritual power. Any dependence on human means is a clue already, drumming up human sympathy for needed financial support being a very common one, instead of relying on God for the support. Is the project even one which He approves? Have they taken the time to find out? If it is, shouldn't He be expected to provide for it? I'm guilty as an individual of this same sort of spiritual failing, not trusting God for provision, not submitting all needs to Him, bowing to His will over my own. I wish I weren't. I know it's a symptom of spiritual weakness and I am making an effort now to overcome -- a big effort. But I do recognize the same symptom everywhere in Christendom, and pray more and more that the Lord will break us all and come down, convict us of our deadness first of all, revive us, empower us, inspire us and lead us. Watson goes on:

You can hear from Methodist pulpits many an innuendo against the old-time sobbing and crying at a mourner's bench, many an apology for modern Church vices, many a cold fling at entire sanctification, yet these men are devoted to the mere Church system, and that passes as a substitute for their personal holiness.

Sad. Whatever one thinks of Methodist theology it has to be recognized that there was a time when that denomination was spiritually alive and it's sad to read Watson's description of what it had become in his day, many of them even embarrassed about their previous spiritual vitality. Today it's even worse than that.

Zac Poonen on being a soulish Christian versus a spiritual Christian

This one is worth listening to more than once.

The Self-Will Dies Hard

Have you ever had the Lord on your case in such a way that you know He's trying to break you and sometimes you try hard to be broken (yes, a contradiction there I know) but then you come back just as rebellious as ever and He clamps down again on you and you pray pray pray for the ability to yield and die to yourself and love your enemies, but then again it happens and again you are fighting it and asking Him to let up on you but once more He shows you that to be useful to Him you have to give in, so you try again to give in and He provides the spiritual support for a while, you even learn that He CAN provide the spiritual perspective you are looking for, a moment of loving your enemies, a moment of choosing against yourself, but the self dies hard and again you find yourself objecting and objecting and objecting and have to go through the same thing again. Don't you just wish the Lord would do it once and for all and get it over with? If it's up to me I can't do it, what can my will possibly do but oppose His until HE changes things? Do I have the most adamant self-will ever created? I must have.

Later: I realized -- also again -- that He loads such crosses on me when I most persistently ask for power, for personal revival, for usefulness. Makes perfect sense. No pain no gain works in the spiritual as well as the natural. No meekness no power, etc.

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Can understand this in the abstract just fine sometimes, can preach it too at those times. DOING it is what is hard.

Bunch of thoughts crowding in on it. How entirely the opposite this is from the advice of the Spirit Channelers I wrote about on the End Times blog yesterday. FOLLOW YOUR WILL (what you WANT to do) is THEIR advice. Of course, because your will is fallen and it will ultimately destroy you. If you are a Christian it will interfere with whatever God wants to do with you.

Also reminded me of Christian teachings I've heard to a similar effect. You know, "Don't ever ask the Lord for patience (or love or any other Christian virtue)" because He'll give you circumstances that provoke impatience in you until you learn to be patient (or give you people you can't stand or who hate and abuse you or drive you crazy until you learn to be loving toward them etc.) Well, yes, He will, that's what it's all about. Do you want patience or not? Do you want a loving spirit or not? Perhaps we should learn a formula here -- whatever Christian virtue you ask for EXPECT to first encounter nothing but obstacles that seem designed to thwart that desire, though they are really the WAY to its fulfillment if you yield to them.

And there's also the way some Christian groups are likely to interpret this kind of thing as the devil's interference. If they ask to be useful and find themselves thwarted by circumstances, persecutions, difficulties of any kind, they interpret them as the devil's work against their mission for God and don't even consider yielding to them, just start blasting them with rebukes and so on. Of course sometimes interferences ARE the devil trying to defeat you, at least I've heard that is so. I guess the question is then how do you tell the difference? I know I spent way too much time confused about that sort of thing back in Charismania-land. I'm coming to suspect that the most usual way the devil interferes is to make you think you have to rebuke such things as his work instead of recognizing that it's really the Lord's work of conforming you to His image.

Not that any of this rumination helps me with my own current task of submitting to a painful and odious situation.

Personal Revival

I liked this message:

Five ways to experience personal revival
Contributed by Ed Baswell Thursday, 03 December 2009
http://www.nwlanews.com/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=17299 http://www.nwlanews.com


Do you wish to be an instrument in the hands of God? Do you want to see God's power at work through you? Do you long for your prayers to be answered? If you do, then the barrier of sin between you and God must be demolished and a lifestyle of holiness and love for God renewed.

If you are a Christian, you are pardoned and placed eternally in Christ. But, Christians often allow sin to clutter up their lives. To be restored, to experience personal revival, spiritual surgery must take place. In this column, I'm going to share with you five ways to experience personal revival and we're going to start with a passage of Scripture. "Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor His ear too dull to hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He will not hear" (Isaiah 59:1-2).

The first step toward experiencing personal revival is to repent of every known sin. "Remember therefore from whence you have fallen; repent and do the first works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place--unless you repent" (Revelation 2:5). It is necessary to fully repent of all known sin against God. Get on your knees before Him and empty yourself before Him. Those sins that readily come to mind, repent of them, then ask God to bring to your mind sins that you commit that you may not even be aware of. You are seeking personal revival and one of the ways you are going to experience it is to forsake every known sin and ask God to reveal to you others sins in your life.

Step #2 on your way to personal revival is to forsake all questionable habits and activities. "For whatever is not from faith is sin" (Romans 14:23). What kinds of habits do you have that are sin? Are you in the habit of using foul language? Are you addicted to food or sex or drugs? Ask God to clean up your mouth. Ask Him to help you get free of a drug addiction. Ask Him to help you keep food and sex in the proper perspective.

Step #3 on your way to personal revival is to make right any wrongs between yourself and others. Do you need to apologize to someone in your family? There may be something between you and a family member that goes back many, many years. That may be the one thing, the one piece of business you need to take care of in order to experience personal revival. It's not even important any more who was right or who was wrong, it happened so long ago. In fact, you can't even remember the details of what happened any more. Isn't it time to make things right?

Step #4: commune with God in prayer and be personally instructed through His Word. I Thessalonians 5:17 says, "Pray without ceasing," and Psalm 119:107 says, "Revive me, O Lord, according to your word." How long has it been since you got away from everything and everyone and spent time with God in prayer? Maybe that's why you're not experiencing joy and satisfaction and fulfillment in your life. You've gotten to the point where you don't have a quiet time any more. You don't spend time in prayer and you rarely ever open your Bible during the week. Ask God to help you renew your commit to prayer and Bible reading.

Step #5 toward personal revival is to trust God to use you as his specially designed tool for revival in others. Once you've taken steps toward personal revival, you need to begin to focus on revival in others. Once you're where you need to be, then you must trust God to use you to bring revival into the lives of others. God can and will use you to make a difference in someone else's life.

I want to encourage you to review these five steps daily until your thinking conforms to holiness and your life is revived and useful. If you weaken in your desire and intensity for holiness, do not give up and return to a half-hearted, selfish life. Repent of your apathy and your lack of love for God. Holiness improves this life and the one to come.

Ed Baswell is a licensed and ordained minister and is the founder of Clarion Ministries, a teaching ministry designed to share Christ via the printed and spoken Word. http://www.nwlanews.com/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=17299 http://www.nwlanews.com Your home for news in Bossier and Webster Parishes Powered by Joomla! Generated: 9 April, 2011, 19:23

Bill McLeod also has an inspiring message on Personal Revival.

Faith vs Works with an aside on Calvinism vs Arminianism

I do enjoy pastor Zac Poonen's messages, which I get by email, although he is an Arminian and I'm a Calvinist so I have to make adjustments here and there as I read, such as in this message.
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WORD FOR THE WEEK 10 April 2011 Christian Fellowship Church, Bangalore, India http://www.cfcindia.com

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Salvation by Faith and Not by Works

Zac Poonen

In Exodus 12, we read about the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt. They were told to use a bunch of hyssop and to put the blood of an unblemished lamb on the lintel over their door and on their door-posts, to escape the angel of death. That is a picture of faith applying the blood of Christ to our hearts. Hyssop was a common plant that was easily found in Egypt. Faith too is very easy to find. The Israelites left Egypt on the 14th day of the first month of their new calendar – and the Lord Jesus was crucified on the same date about 1500 years later. God looked into the future and saw the day on which the Pharisees would crucify Jesus, and chose that date to deliver the Israelites from Egypt!

Here's the Calvinist case-in-point. God is made out to be weak in such a scheme as the above, in which he "looks into the future" to see what mere human beings are going to do, apparently unable to do anything about what they are going to do, and adjusts himself to them. This is not the omnipotent sovereign God of scripture. I understand that God's sovereignty is hard for many people to grasp and I am not going to call them heretics for that, but I'm also not going to just accept it if I have the opportunity of commenting on it. God DECREED both the date of the Lord's crucifixion AND the date of the exodus from Egypt. God oversees ALL history, nothing escapes Him. Every bit of it is His plan. And, thinking of this particular example, it's rather odd that God is thought of as able to decree the date of the Exodus but not the date of the Crucifixion -- as if the Pharisees were more powerful than God.

But pastor Poonen's message is a good one overall.

How were the Israelites delivered? Not by their good life or their good works. God did not go checking inside each house to see how each person there had lived during the previous 30 years. No.

This may be a bit nitpicky, but God doesn't have to "check" anything. He's omniscient, He already knows everything, every minute detail of everything happening in past, present and future simultaneously.

He only checked to see if they had faith to put the blood of an innocent lamb on their doors. When they dipped that hyssop into the blood and put it on their doors, they were saying, “I am not trusting in my good works or my religious activities to protect me. I am trusting in the blood of this innocent lamb. I believe therefore that the angel of death will not enter my house.” That’s the way of salvation.

No man can boast saying, “I was saved because I lived a good life.” No. The man who had lived a good life and the man who lived a bad life were both saved that night in Egypt, by the blood of the lamb. If somebody in Israel had thought, “I’ve lived a good life, so I don’t believe God will judge me,” and therefore didn’t put the blood of the lamb above his door, what do you think would have happened? The angel of death would have come in and killed his eldest son as with all the other homes in Egypt.

I know that many people have taken advantage of the truth of salvation by grace through faith in the blood of Christ, and lived carelessly saying, “It doesn’t matter how we live.” But that does not negate the truth that salvation is still not by works but by grace through faith.

Ephesians 2:9 says, “Not as a result of works, lest any man should boast.” But then the very next verse says that after we are saved, God has created us “unto good works”. So the full truth is this:

We cannot be saved by any number of good works that we may do.

But if our “faith” does not produce good works after we are saved, that would prove that our faith was not genuine.

That’s what James says: “Faith without (good) works is dead” (Jas.2:26).

After putting the blood on the door, the Israelites were all commanded to eat unleavened bread that night. That is a picture of our feeding on Christ Himself, the Bread of Life. It’s not enough that we trust in His blood, we must feed on His life too. We are “reconciled to God by His death and saved by His life” (Rom.5:10).

They were also told to eat the bread in their travelling clothes – with a readiness to leave Egypt at a moment’s notice. That is how we are to live in this world too - always ready to go, as soon as Jesus calls us up to meet Him. This world is not our home. We must be ready to leave at any time.

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For more information write to: wftw@cfcindia.com
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To read or download previous issues of "WORD FOR THE WEEK" please go to : http://www.cfcindia.com/wftw

Bakht Singh

And then there are stories like Bakht Singh's , whose encounter with his own sinfulness before the Law was mercifully brief and whose subsequent life of faith was unusually deep:

Tears were rolling down my cheeks and I was saying, "Oh! Lord, forgive me. Truly I am a great sinner." For a time I felt that there was no hope for me, a great sinner. As I was crying again the Voice said, "This is my body broken for you; this is my blood shed for the remission of your sins." So I knew that the blood of Jesus only could wash away my sins. I did not know how, but knew that the blood of Jesus only could save me. I could not explain the fact, but joy and peace came to my soul; I had the assurance that all my sins were washed away; I knew that the Lord Jesus was reigning in my heart. I just kept on praising Him.

You Must Be Born Again

We do not give birth to ourselves, we are not reborn because we believe. We believe because we are reborn.

-- Martin Lloyd-Jones