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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