Remember, He is the Potter, we are the clay. Be good at it.
Jesus is Master. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that. Surely, we think, I can be in charge of that. Surely, He doesn’t have time to monitor my down times, times when I turn on the TV and veg out. Binge watching is popular now. What can it hurt? I’ll let you answer that question for yourself, and I will answer it for myself. One time I asked the Lord if there was anything about me that displeased Him. He answered right away: “You spend too much time with my enemy.” I have to continually watch over myself because the times I live in encourage disobedience, vengeance, evil, and so on. The list is too long to mention here.
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You can know a person, or you can know about a person. The difference between knowing Jesus and knowing about Jesus is the difference between life and death.
My uncle died at the age of eighty-nine. He had memorized the entire book of John. He taught Sunday School all his adult life. He knew practically everything there is to know about Jesus. But all that time, all that energy spent on his knowledge of the Lord, my uncle was simply a spectator of the life of Jesus. Fortunately, two weeks before his death, my uncle gave his heart to Jesus Christ and made Him his own personal Lord. Now for him the Scripture rings true: We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8). We must know Jesus personally, not just all about Him. Our relationship with our Lord is intimate, personal, best friends forever. Remember that, because just like a physical friend, our relationship with Jesus can grow dim, distant, and we can lose track of who He is for us. He is our perfect everything with all the perfect answers for our lives. Plan to sit at His feet and engage Him in conversation. That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him (Ephesians 1:17). Let’s grow up in Him. Let us know His voice, His nature, His personality, His thoughts for us. What has He planned for us? We can only grow in that knowledge. We can’t just have it dumped on us; we’re not ready. What we can do is grow in the knowledge of Him. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now and forever. Amen (2 Peter 3:18). I have someone I love dearly who is not true to her word. How can I ever trust her? Fortunately, I know Someone who is always true to His Word. Him I can always trust.
You will keep in perfect peace, those whose minds are stayed on You, because they trust in You (Isaiah 26:3). An old southern song: I woke up this mornin’ with my mind, stayed on Jesus! . . . Trust, indeed, is a heavy word and a subject we dearly need. From the day we are born till the day we die, we need to trust someone. That someone may change overnight, but the need will always be there. God created us to need each other, but He did not make us trustworthy for each other. That is a subject we must learn and learn well. Bold Faith Stands on the Shoulders of Quiet Hope Living in a constant state of Hope and Gratitude causes Faith to be substantial and to bring into being what we hoped for. Here’s a good state of hope to live in:
Lord, You will establish shalom (peace, prosperity) for me, for You have also done all my works for me (Isaiah 26:12). As long as I’ve been a Christian, I have heard arguments about Faith and Hope, disparaging the value of one or the other of these two words. There are those who want to throw Hope in the garbage bin. Others say faith is impossible, all we can possibly do is hope. I listen to such debates with fear and trembling because they are challenging the Word of God! Friend! Don’t ever challenge the Word of God; instead, spend your time studying and discovering the value of whatever it has to say! “God… has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds . . .” (Heb 1:1, 2).
Heaven help you if you have not heard the Son of God speaking to you. If you haven’t heard from Him, then you do not belong to Him. He says His followers will know His voice and will not follow another voice but will only follow after Him. Whether He is singing over us or speaking to us with words, believers in Him know His voice. He, of course, communicates with us in other ways, just like we communicate with our loved ones with gestures, body language, facial expression, and so on. God seems to communicate with us most commonly by the inward witness. Do you know what that is? In the pit of your stomach you just know that you know something that God has placed there. Some people say, “Follow Peace” because that’s what that inward witness feels like. It can also be likened to a ball of love occupying our belly. The Bible talks of a still, small voice which He uses. But He can also really shout! However, every communication we receive from the Lord is packed with love. Even if He is angry, His anger is filled with love. One of the things I really like about the life of a believer is that we are expected to live a life of joy.
However, if I look around, I see an awful lot of things that just are not joyous, nor do they call for joy, in fact, if we express joy in the middle of these tragedies, we’re seen as being disrespectful, irreverent even, senseless maybe, or naive, at best. Our elders teach us that life is somber, hard; our behavior must be subdued. We can look severe at any moment, but light-hearted joy must wait for the right moment. If these admonitions are true, why does the Bible tell us that the joy of the Lord is our strength? Let’s face it, we need strength throughout our life, day and night, grave moments and delightful moments. The first step in joy may just be looking around and ignoring the awful things and looking only at what brings joy. I’m working at looking at life through God’s eyes. Unlike what some Bible-thumpers say, I don’t see any evidence that God is always looking for what’s wrong, and that if we could see His face, it would be terribly sad with perpetual tears rolling down His cheeks. Those who have surrendered themselves to Jesus Christ and have received the Holy Spirit as their residential and constant companion, only those can legitimately call themselves Christian. If that is not you, please go to my website, pray the prayer you find there, and believe you receive God as your Father. www.martydelmon.com or www.martydelmon.fr When the church is trying to introduce people to Jesus Christ, we must be careful. We have been so glib about having people say the sinner’s prayer, and then whooping and hollering about a new member in the Body of Christ. Anybody can say words, repeating them after someone else, or reading them from a script, but that does not make them a Christian. It takes surrender. A Christian is someone who has given his or her life to Jesus Christ so that they no longer belong to themselves, they belong to the Lord. They live for the Lord; they don’t live for themselves. They do His will, not their own. Christianity is not lip service; it is life service.
Sometimes the promises of God, for which we are waiting to manifest in our lives, come to us in part. We, while disappointed, want to give God the benefit of the doubt, and we say “Well, maybe that’s all God really meant by that promise. He spoke in larger terms, but the results are miniscule.” We say these kinds of things out of our reason. The reality is that only a part has appeared, but the whole will soon arrive. Never dismiss what God has said because so far it doesn’t fit your expectation. God always, and I mean always, does what He says. Patience is not the same as endurance. To endure means to “grit your teeth and wait.” To be patient means to “humble yourself with flaming love and wait for God’s perfect timing.”
I say “flaming love” because we can stand in humility before the Word of God, but the flaming love of humility is to stand before the God who spoke the Word. Ardently loving Him is far more important than standing on His Word. Both are essential, but love always comes first. All the promises of God belong to us, but we can’t “have” them until we are intensely wrapped up in God. When we can let go of how we think things ought to happen—at what time the promise should arrive—when we can let go of our faith in our own feelings, when there is no sense of deserving, when we have done business with God on His Word, and let go completely, then we receive. It comes so naturally that it seems like breathing. God and His ways do not produce histrionics. There’s no drama. There’s just the Kingdom of God settling deeper into our lives with peace and joy. To walk with God means to walk in a perpetual state of faith. Faith is total confidence in God, walking with Him in a state of trust. Remember those exercises we used to do where one partner stood behind you and you, as partner number one, stood with your back to partner number two? You were then required to rigidly fall backward without looking where you were going to land, trusting partner number two to catch you. Those whose bottoms sagged downward to touch the ground first, were not operating in faith. When we walk with God, relying on our own human possibility, we cease being His children, we cease walking in faith. We pay Him court visits now and again, tipping our hats as we bow, curtsying as we swish our skirts to the side, but we don’t walk as a son or daughter. We don’t rely on His possibility, which is always out of the range of human endeavor.
Our walk with God must expect to be tempted. The man who does not believe in God has life so easy. We look at him, and we see him accomplish much in life because his expectations fall so short of God’s possibility. He can do everything he plans to do. But we, like Noah, are given insurmountable tasks to accomplish, things we cannot accomplish on our own. We’d like to pull down the level of expectation so that our faith in ourselves can perform well. But God wants our faith in Him to operate well. What He can accomplish through us is so much greater than what the gentleman who relies on himself can accomplish, and God asks for that kind of acceptance, that kind of trust. In fact, He will accept nothing less. Walk with God, side by side, building the particular Ark He asks you to build, according to His dimensions, His blueprint, and not according to your own. Your plan has “common sense” as god, His plan has God Almighty as God. There is one evolution I believe in; I believe in the evolution of evil.
Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually (Genesis 6:5). Evil can become so bad in a man that he actually takes pleasure in his exercise of depravity. There is a point of no return. The further away from God that the depraved man descends, the more animalistic he becomes, the more society rushes to accept him and his neuroses, the more society becomes corrupted. In our world today evil is blatantly expressed. We watch it on our tellys, cluck our tongues, and change the channel. Why do we do this? Because deep down we know we are the same. We have the same capacity to respond to the devil as the one who practices what the devil wants. When a man becomes brazenly fixed in doing evil, he has assumed a character trait of Satan. If a man persistently tries to justify himself in this, then he destroys the justice of God, and consequently, destroys his own personhood. |
Marty
Delmon
Writer
Evangelist Teacher Writing has been in my blood, so to speak, but when I surrendered my life to Jesus Christ and He told me to write, all my trepidations rolled away and I began in earnest! After all, if God Almighty says it was His idea that I be a writer, who am I to stand in His way? My hope is that you not only like what I write, but that your life is moved by it, and that your party to Jesus and with Jesus turns your life into days of Heaven on Earth.
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