The Whole Heart: by Andrew Murray

"I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands." Psalm 119:10

Notice how often the psalmist speaks of the "all the heart" or the "whole heart" "Blessed are they who keep his statutes and seek him with all their heart." (Psalm 119:2). "Give me understanding, and I will keep your law and obey it with all my heart." (Psalm 119:34). "Though the arrogant have smeared me with lies, I keep your precepts with all my heart." (Psalm 119:69). "I call with all my heart; answer me, O Lord, and I will obey your decrees." (Psalm 119:145). In seeking God, in observing His law, in crying for His help ----- each time it is with his whole heart.
When we want to be successful in business, we put our whole heart into it. Isn't this even more necessary in the service of a holy God? He is worthy. The whole heart is needed in the service of God when we worship Him.
We often forget this. In prayer, in reading His word, in seeking to do His will, we fail to say continually: "I have tried my best ----- with my whole heart ----- to find You." Let us learn to say: "I desire to seek God and to serve Him with my whole heart."
Meditate and pray about this. Spend time before God until you know that you really mean what you say and you have the assurance that God will hear your prayer. Then each morning as you approach God in prayer you can honestly say, "I seek You with my whole heart." You gradually will feel the need of waiting in holy stillness upon God so that He may take possession of your whole heart. You will learn to love Him with your whole heart and your whole mind.

Set on Him: by TA Sparks

Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven, where Christ sits in the place of honor at God's right hand. Colossians 3:1

You never have to say to one whose heart is wholly set upon God: "You must give up this and give up that." Leave such a one with the Lord, and you will find those things go. It is a very blessed thing to see a heart set upon the Lord. You need have no worries in that direction. All the anxiety lies in the realm where the heart is not wholly for the Lord. The apostle’s two letters to the Thessalonians are full of joy. He thanked the Lord on every remembrance of them. He could not speak too highly of them or in terms too glowing, simply because they turned from the world unto God, “to serve the living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven,” and he had no anxiety about them. When you turn to the Corinthians... there is a good deal of trouble. It is the wilderness situation again – a divided heart.

A resurrection basis gives God a chance that is right out to the Lord from the world. All that that means we have to learn. We shall come to things we never expected if we are going on with the Lord. Things on which we were so clearly settled as things being of God, and never for one moment expected to have a question about, become challenged. Not that they were not of God, but they were only of God up to a point, and now there is something more beyond them. And unless we go on to the something more, the good becomes the enemy of the best. And so, because of comparative values, we have to leave what is good for the better; and then later the better for the best. It can only come about as we are really going on with the Lord. But that requires, first of all, that we have made a clean cut and have said: "I am out on resurrection ground. I am out with the Lord utterly."

The Time is Now… it’s JESUS: by TA Sparks

Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.  God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth." John 4:23-24
Jesus said to the woman, "the hour cometh, and now is." Then He dismissed the whole system that had existed up to that time. It was the whole system of Judaism according to the Old Testament. In one sentence, He dismissed the whole dispensation. And He introduced an altogether new order of things.

What did He mean? Because when He said the hour cometh, and now is, He did not mean literally just an hour and so many minutes. He meant that it was the first hour of the new day. With this hour an altogether new day has come. What is the new day? If you would have asked Jesus to put it into a short sentence, He would have said, "Well, I am here." The hour is not just a matter of time but a matter of PERSON. The new dispensation is the dispensation of Jesus Christ. Christ is the new dispensation. "I am here," He said. You go through that Gospel of John. He is centering everything in Himself. "I am the Way; I am the Truth; I am the Life; I am the Shepherd; I am the Vine; I am the Resurrection." It is a Person. It is that which lies behind everything. Christianity is Christ. Christ is Christianity. That is where it all begins and it never departs from HIM. The development of the Christian life is only the development of Jesus Christ in the life.

Obedience: The Final Test of Love for Christ: by AW Tozer

 Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him." John 14:21

The final test of love is obedience, not sweet emotions, not willingness to sacrifice, not zeal, but obedience to the commandments of Christ!

Our Lord drew a line plain and tight for everyone to see. On one side He placed those who keep His commandments and said, “These love Me.” On the other side He put those who keep not His sayings, and said, “These love Me not.”

The commandments of Christ occupy in the New Testament a place of importance that they do not have in current evangelical thought. The idea that our relation to Christ is revealed by our attitude to His commandments is now considered legalistic by many influential Bible teachers, and the plain words of our Lord are rejected outright or interpreted in a manner to make them conform to religious theories ostensibly based upon the epistles of Paul.

The Christian cannot be certain of the reality and depth of his love until he comes face to face with the commandments of Christ and is forced to decide what to do about them. Then he will know!

I think we should turn for a while from finespun theological speculations about grace and faith and humbly read the New Testament with a mind to obey what we see there. Love for Christ is a love of willing, as well as a love of feeling, and it is psychologically impossible to love Him adequately unless we will to obey His words!

Love to Sinners: by Andrew Murray

 remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins. James 5:20

What a wonderful thought- that I may save a sinner from everlasting death. This can happen if I bring that person back to the truth. This is the calling of every Christian.

When Christ and His love took possession of our hearts, He gave us this love that we might bring others to Him. This is how Christ's kingdom is extended. Everyone who has the love of Christ is constrained to tell others. In the early Christian Church people went out and shared the love of Christ. Secular writers have told us that the rapid spread of Christianity in the first century was because each convert tried to bring the good news to others.

What a change has come over the Church! Many Christians never try to bring others to Christ. May the time soon come when Christians will feel constrained to share the love of Christ.

In a revival in Korea the converts were filled with such a burning love for Christ that they felt bound to tell others of His love. It was even taken as a test of membership that each one should have brought another to the Lord before being admitted to the church.

Satan Would Bind Us in Our Own Grave Clothes: by AW Tozer

 He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work. 1 John 3:8

It is part of the devil’s business to keep the Christian’s spirit imprisoned. He knows that the believing and justified Christian has been raised up out of the grave of his sins and trespasses. From that point on, Satan works that much harder to keep us bound and gagged, actually imprisoned in our own grave clothes!

He knows that if we continue in this kind of bondage we will never be able to claim our rightful spiritual heritage. He knows also that while we continue bound in this kind of enslavement we are not much better off than when we were spiritually dead.

This is one reason why the Christians in today’s churches are behaving like a flock of frightened sheep—so intimidated by the devil that we can’t even say “Amen!”

I am sure that it is not glorifying to our God that Christians should be so intimidated and silenced in our day. It was Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, who came down and took our human body for Himself. He was a man, born of a woman, a man wearing our own nature—but He was also God!

He went out to the cross and they sacrificed Him there. The Father, God Almighty, accepted His sacrifice as the one, final fulfillment and consummation of all the sacrifices ever made on Jewish altars. After three days, He came out of the grave, then ascended as Victor over death and hell!

Believing this, we ought to be the most fearless, the happiest and most God-assured people in the whole world!

The Bible: More Than a Volume of Facts: by AW Tozer

 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,  so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. 2 Timothy 3:16-17

Charles G. Finney believed that Bible teaching without moral application could be worse than no teaching at all and could result in positive injury to the hearers. I used to feel that this might be an extreme position, but after years of observation have come around to it, or to a view almost identical with it.

There is scarcely anything so dull and meaningless as Bible doctrine taught for its own sake. Theology is a set of facts concerning God, man and the world. These facts may be and often are set forth as values in themselves; and there lies the snare both for the teacher and for the hearer.

The Bible is more than a volume of hitherto unknown facts about God, man and the universe. It is a book of exhortation based upon these facts. By far the greater portion of the book is devoted to an urgent effort to persuade people to alter their ways and bring their lives into harmony with the will of God as set forth in its pages.

Actually, no man is better for knowing that God in the beginning created the heaven and the earth. The devil knows that, and so did Ahab and Judas Iscariot. No man is better for knowing that God so loved the world of men that He gave His only begotten Son to die for their redemption. In hell there are millions who know that.

Theological truth is useless until it is obeyed. The purpose behind all doctrine is to secure moral action!

New Year… Eternal Purposes: by TA Sparks

Called according to His purpose. (Romans 8:28)

God has a very great purpose for His people by their eternal calling and by their wonderful redemption. A very great purpose... so much greater than the majority of Christians have realized. I do not think I am saying a false thing when I say that perhaps the larger number of Christians have got little further than to know that they are saved, and to be very glad that they are saved, to rejoice in being saved. Comparatively few are really in the good of God’s great, great purpose from eternity, “Called according to His purpose” (Rom. 8:28). It is not for us now to say what that purpose is, to explain it. It is sufficient to state the fact. We are called with a very great purpose, not just even to get out of Egypt and the clutches of the devil, but with an object, a tremendous object, nothing less than the infinite fullness of God’s Son, Jesus Christ, and an eternal vocation. It is a great thing to which we are called in Christ, but how many Christians are really in it, and if they know they are in it, are tasting of the meaning of it: that this Life is an inexhaustible Life, that there are new vistas all the time?

I am not exaggerating. The heavens are opened and we see more and more, and ever more, of what it is to which we are called. It is just wonderful.... You are not meant just to be saved and get to heaven, to know your sins are forgiven and to have a certain number of blessings which come with salvation. But there lies before you and reaches out through eternal ages such a purpose of God concerning us all that

“Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him” 1 Corinthians 2:9