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

Zac Poonen, Living By Faith

I know I've never learned this. I've recognized that for a LONG time. Trying to live the Christian life is SUCH a struggle and I know I'm missing the life of faith, that's the only thing that can explain it. But understanding this much doesn't make it any easier to enter into that life of faith.

I love to read the literature of the Holiness and Higher Life people who generally do emphasize that the life of holiness is completely by faith and may go into great detail trying to get that across to the reader, and yet I continue to struggle and continue to be exhausted by the struggle and always a failure at it. Yet not struggling isn't the solution either.

I certainly don't see this faith in the majority in the churches, just as I don't see the Higher Life even sought let alone lived. Some even teach that there is no such thing as a "higher" life, and leave their congregations content with a "faith" that amounts to very little spiritual power.

But I've always known there is more, even if it may be really what the NORMAL Christian life SHOULD be, "higher" only in the sense that the average Christian life is sub par. In any case, those who have been through revivals as well as the "higher life" people describe it, while neither the Reformed nor the fundamentalists seem to know it exists, the life I'm looking for, there on the other side of the glass as it were, that life of power through the kind of faith that makes all things possible.

Anyway, today I got an email on this very subject from a ministry I subscribe to. I hope it will change me as I ponder it, as I've been hoping for so long, but my faith that it will is of course low although I know it's the only way.

WORD FOR THE WEEK 14 November 2010
Christian Fellowship Church, Bangalore, India
http://www.cfcindia.com
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Living by Faith

Zac Poonen

Many Christians, through the ages, have sincerely sought after holiness and victory over sin by taking up their cross and denying themselves. But they have often found the Christian life to be a "hard grind" instead of the glorious life that the Bible describes. Their failure has been this that they never understood the life of faith under the new covenant. They sought to be holy by the principles of the old covenant and thus missed what God had for them.

2 Corinthians 3:6 tells us that the new covenant is a ministry of the Spirit that brings life, whereas the old covenant was a ministry of the letter that brought death! And if we walk according to the letter of God's commandments - even in the new covenant - it will still bring death. Only if we live by faith and allow the Holy Spirit to lead us, will we enter into the "life of Christ".

Since Jesus has now ascended on high and sent the Holy Spirit to this earth, our life can be far more glorious than that of any Old Testament saint. So if we find ourselves living under condemnation, depression and gloom today, it must be because we are still living by old covenant principles (2 Cor.3:9).

There were two things that Jesus emphasised frequently in His ministry - faith in God and the power of the Holy Spirit.

Adam missed this life of faith in the power of the Holy Spirit when he chose the tree of the knowledge of good and evil instead of the tree of life (Gen.2:9). He chose to have the knowledge of good and evil resident within himself, instead of being dependent on God for it.

The tree of life represents the life of faith under the new covenant while the tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents a life of self-effort under the old covenant. If Adam had chosen the tree of life he would have lived by faith - in constant dependence on God. Then the Holy Spirit would have given him Divine life. But instead, he chose to live in dependence on himself, independent of God. And so he died. All unbelievers live like this - without constant dependence on God. Unfortunately many believers live this way too.

All religions teach their followers to do good and to avoid evil. Christians who seek after holiness also do good and avoid evil. And in their pursuit of holiness, they usually end up making finer and finer distinctions between good and evil, through various rules and practices!! Yet most of them still never come to a genuinely holy life. Why? Because they seek it by works and not by faith.

For 1500 years God taught the Israelites through the Law, what was good and what was evil. But obedience to the good works commanded by the Law did not lead a single Israelite to partake of eternal life. Living by any set of rules and regulations - however high the standard - will never lead anyone to genuine godliness, even today.

True holiness is the life of God in the soul of man - and God has to give this to us as a gift. We can never attain to it. We must receive it by faith. Paul said that in the days when he was unaware of the Law's demands, he felt he was "alive". But when he understood the demands of the Law of God, he became so aware of the wrongs in his life that he felt "dead" (Rom.7:9)!! This is the experience of many who are born again too. They appear to be happy and "alive" as long as they hear only about the forgiveness of their sins. But as soon as they hear about victory over sin and obedience to God's commandments, they feel condemned and miserable and "dead".

But Paul did not stop with the old-covenant law - and neither should we. God showed Paul another law - the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. This was the law that finally set him free from sin ( Rom.8:2).

Many seek to be holy by doing good. Remember that Eve ate of the tree because it looked good!! She wasn't seeking to do something evil!! She ate the fruit, not because she wanted to become like the devil, but because she wanted to become like God - for that was what the devil had promised her (Gen.3:5). People who live according to the Law also make the same mistake today - thinking that they can be like God through external good works.

Much of the good that we see in the lives of many Christians comes, not from genuine holiness, but from a good upbringing. Many of these Christians are upright, but they don't have a passionate hunger after God. They spend their lives accumulating Bible knowledge, but without any revelation from God. As a result, their lives are not much different from the lives of some good unbelievers around them. All such believers have missed something vital that God wants them to have - the Divine nature.

God is not first of all trying to make us do good, but to make us trust in Him so that He can give us His nature. In His eyes, the righteous are not those who do good but those who live by faith (See Romans 4:5 and Habakkuk 2:4). In Habakkuk 2:4, God contrasts two groups of people - those who believe in the Lord and those who are proud. Those who are proud cannot live by faith. The reason many do not accept God's gifts freely, by simple faith, is because they are too proud to accept anything freely. They would rather earn their forgiveness and their holiness by doing something themselves.

Satan tells Christians even today (as he told Eve) that they don't need to depend on God to know the difference between good and evil. He tells them that they can know the difference through their conscience or by reading the Bible. But many unbelievers also live by their conscience - and live fairly decent lives. A Christian can live like that too - but he won't be righteous in God's eyes. Many believers begin their Christian life right - by trusting God alone for their justification. But then like the Galatian Christians, they seek to become perfect through their own efforts (Gal.3:3). They evaluate their spiritual worth by how much they have done for God or by the results they have seen in their ministry. And they feel satisfied. But when people asked Jesus how they could do the works of God, He did not tell them to do good works. He told them to believe in Him (Jn.6:28-29)! Without faith it is impossible to please God.

There are many paradoxes in the Christian life and here is the first one that we encounter when we are saved: We know that Jesus justifies us so thoroughly that we now stand before God just as if we had never sinned - for God promises never to remember our past sins against us (Heb.8:12). At the same time we are also told never to forget our past sins, lest we become blind and shortsighted (2 Pet.1:9)!!

So, on one hand we see that God does not remember our past sins and on the other hand we are told never to forget them!! How are we to live with this apparent contradiction?

Only by being MORE conscious of the fact that the blood of Jesus has cleansed away our past sins, than we are conscious of those sins themselves.

Read that last sentence once again, for this is one of the most important principles of the Christian life. If you believe it, this truth can liberate you.

There is no humility in feeling guilty about our past sins. That is unbelief, not humility, and is an insult to the blood of Christ. Such unbelief does not glorify God in any way. Paul called himself "the chief of sinners" even after being a Christian for 30 years (1 Tim.1:15). Yet at the same time he also said, "I am conscious of nothing against myself" (1 Cor.4:4). Both facts were true. This assurance is what gives us great confidence before God and great boldness against Satan's accusations and against the fears with which Satan tries to frighten us.

The most popular books in Christian bookshops today are those that deal with faith and the Holy Spirit. But most of these books lead Christians into a counterfeit faith and into counterfeit experiences. The "faith" that these books teach is faith to become wealthy and healthy - not to become holy and spiritual. Christians are told that they can get whatever they want from God, if only they can believe sufficiently. Such teaching is fundamentally opposed to the teaching and the practice of the first apostles and to that of godly missionaries (of the 19th and early 20th centuries) who sacrificed their lives for the promotion of the kingdom of God.

Genuine faith is that which enables us to overcome the world (1 Jn.5:4) - the world being "the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh and the pride of life" (1 Jn.2:16). As Jesus overcame this world, we too can overcome it. (See John 16:33 and Revelation 3:21). When we overcome the world, we will no longer be deceived by Satan telling us that the pleasures that come through health and wealth are superior to the pleasure that comes through fellowship with God.

God wants us to taste the pure pleasure of fellowship with Him. That alone can drive away the desire for other pleasures (Psa.16:11). Many are trying hard to overcome the attraction of sinful pleasures by human means. But only when we taste fellowship with God can we be truly set free. Faith in God and the power of the Holy Spirit can set you free from every bondage that Satan ever put upon you.

Do you find yourself unwilling to give up some particular worldly pleasure that attracts you. Then cry out to the Lord, like Peter did when he was sinking in the sea, saying - "Lord save me". You will find that God gives you not only the desire to be free from sin, but also a hatred for it!! In the new covenant, it is God Who works in us both to desire and to do His will (Phil.2:13). What a wonderful gospel the new covenant is!!

The life of Jesus is not something that we can imitate. We must partake of it through the Holy Spirit. Most Christians do not experience this because they are not poor in spirit. That means that they do not live their lives with a constant awareness of their need of God. They are self-confident and independent. Jesus invited only the thirsty to come to Him and drink. To walk by faith we must be constantly thirsty (poor in spirit), always aware of our need of the Holy Spirit's power. There must be a constant cry in our hearts (even if unspoken) to be filled with the Spirit and to experience His power. Those who come to Jesus and drink, will find rivers of living water flowing out from their innermost beings (a life in the fullness of the Holy Spirit - Jn.7:37-38). Thus the weakest believer can experience the glory of this life of faith in the new covenant and become as strong as the strongest. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.