Real Rest: from Jesus Calling by Sarah Young

Psalm 46:10 “Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!”

     Rest in the stillness of My Presence while I prepare you for this day. Let the radiance of My Glory shine upon you, as you wait on Me in confident trust. Be still and know that I am God. There is both a passive and an active side to trusting Me. As you rest in My Presence, focusing on Me, I quietly build bonds of trust between us. When you respond to the circumstances of your life with affirmations of trust, you actively participate in the process.
     I am always with you, so you have no reason to be afraid. Your fear often manifests itself in excessive planning. Your mind is so accustomed to this pattern of thinking that you are only now becoming aware of how pervasive it is and how much it hinders your intimacy with Me. Repent of this tendency and resist it, whenever you realize you are wandering down this well worn path. Return to My Presence, which always awaits you in the present moment. I accept you back with no condemnation. 

Romans 8:1There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Truth Is a Person: by Henry Blackaby

And they came to Him and awoke Him, saying, “Master, Master, we are perishing!” Then He arose and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water. And they ceased, and there was a calm. But He said to them, “Where is your faith?”      Luke 8:24-25

Truth is a Person, not a concept. Jesus said He was the Truth (John 14:6). That means that you can never know the truth of your circumstances unless you have first heard from Jesus. The disciples thought they were perishing in the storm. They were fishermen who knew the sea and knew what their condition was. They had allowed their circumstances to convince them that the “truth” was their imminent death. But they were wrong. Truth was asleep in the back of their boat!

Since some of the disciples were fishermen, they trusted in their own expertise and wisdom rather than recognizing that only Jesus knew the truth of their situation. At times, our human knowledge in certain areas of life can blind us to our desperate need to hear a word from Truth.

When Jesus spoke, the disciples saw the real truth of their situation. There was absolute calm. The disciples had seen Jesus perform other miracles, but they had not yet witnessed His power over nature in such a dimension. Often we are like the disciples. God may have recently demonstrated His power to us in a mighty way; we may have experienced many spiritual victories in the past. Yet, when a new and frightening situation comes upon us we, too, panic and say, “Lord save me. I’m perishing!” God will remind us of His provision, saying, “I can handle this situation, too, and you will know more of Me because of it.”

Have you become fearful instead of faithful? If you have, prepare for the rebuke, for it will come.

The Secret of Enlargement: by Watchman Nee

1 John 5:11–12 And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.

It is a blessed thing to discover the difference between Christian graces and Christ: to know the difference between meekness and Christ, between patience and Christ, between love and Christ. Remember again what is said in 1 Corinthians 1:30: “Christ Jesus... was made unto us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption.” The common conception of sanctification is that every item of the life should be holy; but that is not holiness, it is the fruit of holiness. Holiness is Christ. It is the Lord Jesus being made over to us to be that. So you can put in anything there: love, humility, power, self-control. Today there is a call for patience: He is our patience! Tomorrow the call may be for purity: He is our purity! He is the answer to every need. That is why Paul speaks of “the fruit of the Spirit” as one (Gal. 5:22) and not of ‘fruits’ as separate items. God has given us His Holy Spirit, and when love is needed the fruit of the Spirit is love; when joy is needed the fruit of the Spirit is joy. It is always true. It does not matter what your personal deficiency, or whether it is a hundred and one different things, God has one sufficient answer—His Son Jesus Christ, and He is the answer to every human need.

How can we know more of Christ in this way? Only by way of an increasing awareness of need. Some are afraid to discover deficiency in themselves and so they never grow. Growth in grace is the only sense in which we can grow, and grace, we have said, is God doing something for us. We all have the same Christ dwelling within, but revelation of some new need will lead us spontaneously to trust Him to live out His life in us in that particular. Greater capacity means greater enjoyment of God’s supply. Another letting go, a fresh trusting in Christ, and another stretch of land is conquered. ‘Christ my life’ is the secret of enlargement.

The Centrality of the Cross: by Martyn Lloyd-Jones

2 Corinthians 5:14 For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died.

Everything proceeds from the cross. A Christian is a man who glories in the cross. If the cross is not central to you, you are not a Christian. You may say that you admire Jesus and His teaching, but that does not make you a Christian. The apostle tells us that the cross governs his view of himself and

that he has a new view of himself as a result of the cross. This is one of the most glorious aspects of the doctrine of the cross. It gives a man an entirely different view of himself.

Now, how does that happen? If you read 2 Corinthians 5, you will find that he there expands this aspect in a particularly clear manner. He has two great things to say: “Wherefore,” he says in verse 16, “henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more.” That is one. But here is another in verses 14-15: “For the love of Christ constrains us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again.” What he is saying in that chapter is all summarized in verse 17 when he puts this astonishing statement before us: “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” And among the “all things” that have become new is man’s view of himself. This is one of the most glorious deliverances a man can ever know, to be free and delivered from himself.

RECOGNITION! By TA Sparks

The people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations. Numbers 23:9

Not reckoned among the nations. Oh, that is glorious! That puts Israel not only apart from the nations, but on top of the nations. Now, if there has been one thing which Satan has ever tried to do with the people of God in all ages, it has been to get them reckoned among the nations. I speak solemnly and carefully. Right at the very heart of Christendom as we have it today is the desire to be recognized. Recognition! Everything that organized Christianity does is to gain recognition. What are all these churches? I mean, in this instance, all these elaborate and imposing buildings. They are to gain recognition. They are in order to be reckoned something. To what end is all the procedure, the advertisement, and the much else besides? It is in order to get recognition, to be accredited here on this earth, to be reckoned. Yes, that is Satan's triumph. That is where spiritual power has gone out. That is where the Church has ceased to be something to be reckoned with up there. It has, in spirit, come down here, to be reckoned among the nations. If only Satan can get the people of God into a position where they are taken up by this world, written up by this world, made something of by this world, he has triumphed and pulled the Church down out of its heavenly place and made it an earthly thing. That is the principle right through the Old Testament. That too is seen to be the trouble in the Revelation. God will not have it. Satan's success is along that line. He has pulled the Church out of the heavens. Somewhere he has made it touch earth, form a link in some way with earth.

What we have just said does touch us in so many ways, yes, in countless things, this question of being reckoned among the nations in principle, this coming down from the heavenly position. The Lord never meant His Church on this earth to be something that would be taken up by this world, to be something that would be reckoned among the things of this world, recognized and accredited by this world. What He meant, and what obtained when things were right, was that the world itself could not bear the presence of the Church, did not want it. That is the power of the Church to testify against the world.

“BEING GOOD” by CS Lewis

Colossians 1:26–27 the mystery hidden for ages and generations but now revealed to his saints. To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam---he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts. And that has practical consequences. As long as the natural life is in your body, it will do a lot towards repairing that body. Cut it, and up to a point it will heal, as a dead body would not. A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extent repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble---because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.

That is why the Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or---if they think there is not---at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.

The Unmistakable Voice of God: by Oswald Chambers

Who are you, Lord? —Acts 26:15

Has the voice of God come to you directly? If it has, you cannot mistake the intimate insistence with which it has spoken. It comes to you in the language you know best, not through your ears but through your circumstances.

When we have gone astray, when we have grown too sure of ourselves, God has to come in and set us right. He has to destroy our determined confidence in our own convictions. In these moments, his voice is overwhelming. He speaks to us as he spoke to Isaiah, with a “strong hand,” revealing to us the depths of our ignorance (Isaiah 8:11). He tells us that we’ve been serving Jesus in a spirit that is not his, pushing his message in the spirit of the devil. The words we’ve been speaking might have sounded right, but our spirit was that of the enemy: “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1).

There is no escape when our Lord speaks. I must take his rebuke to heart: “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of” (Luke 9:55). Have I been persecuting Jesus by a zealous determination to serve him in my own way? To do God’s work in the Spirit of Jesus is to have the humble and gentle Spirit kindled inside me. If instead I am filled with self-satisfaction or a grim sense of having “done my duty,” I know that in fact I have not done it. We imagine that anything unpleasant is our duty! Is that at all like the Spirit of the Lord? “I delight to do thy will, O my God” (Psalm 40:8).

The Voice: by TA Sparks

The people of Jerusalem and their rulers did not recognize Jesus, yet in condemning him they fulfilled the words of the prophets that are read every Sabbath. Acts 13:27

We would remind our readers that these messages are constituted by a principle which governs so much of the Bible. It is that, deeper than the words of Scripture, there is a voice; that it was – and is – possible to hear the words and miss the voice. The words are the statements; the voice is the meaning. We have proved this to be the case by such a statement as that in Isaiah 6:9: “Hear ye indeed, but understand not, and see ye indeed (margin: ‘continually’) but perceive not.” This is the condition lying behind our basic quotation in Acts 13:27.

It is sometimes positively amazing and staggering what even Christians – and Christian leaders – can do and say because of this deaf ear to the Spirit. They can take up and pass on most pernicious reports which are sheer lies and do untold harm to others and the Lord's interests because they do not so walk in the Spirit as to have Him say within: "That is not true." It is one thing to include belief in the Holy Spirit as a tenet of Christian doctrine, and it may be quite another thing to know when "the Spirit of truth" witnesses within the heart to the truth or the falsehood. It is significant that both the Remnant and the Overcomer are marked by this "hearing the voice." Jesus placed the ultimate issue of Life or death upon this "hearing the voice (not just the words) of the Son of Man."

"Every sabbath" they heard the words, but not the voice.... Let us pray for the ear of Samuel –

"Oh, give me Samuel's ear –
An open ear, O Lord!
Alive and quick to hear
Each whisper of Thy word!"

Half-Hearted Desires: by CS Lewis

Matthew 6:19–21 “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative idea of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

The Cross is Proclamation: by Martyn Lloyd-Jones

. . . to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins . . . Romans 3:25

The cross, thank God, is not only exposition. The cross is also proclamation, a mighty declaration. I like the word that the apostle uses there in Romans 3, and especially the way in which he repeats it. He likes it himself obviously. “Whom God hath set forth,” he says “to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins . . . to declare, I say . . .” (Romans 3:25-26). Have you got it, have you heard it, were you listening? says the apostle. Wake up, you sleepy listeners. “. . . to declare, I say . . .” Have you heard the declaration? Have you heard the mighty proclamation? What does this blood declare to me?

Let me sum it up in another word that this same apostle used in 2 Corinthians 5:19, 21. This is the declaration: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them. . . . For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”

What does all this mean? Let me put it in modern terms. The cross tells me that this is the declaration. This, it says, is God’s way of dealing with the problem of man’s sin. It has already said that there is a problem. It is a terrible one; it is the greatest problem of all time and of the whole cosmos. There is nothing greater than this. There is the exposition of the problem. Then comes the mighty declaration. This, it says, is God’s answer.

Now our Lord had been saying that in His teaching, but they could not understand it. They were blinded, even His own disciples. They were thinking as Jews, in terms of a kingdom on earth. Man will always materialize the great and glorious blessings of God’s kingdom.

Do You Walk in White? by Oswald Chambers

We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that . . . we too may live a new life. —Romans 6:4

No one enters into the experience of entire sanctification without going through a “white funeral,” a burial of the old life. If this crisis has never taken place, if you’ve never put your old life to death, sanctification is nothing more than a vision. It is a death followed by one resurrection—a resurrection into the life of Jesus Christ. Nothing can upset such a life. It is one with God for one purpose: to be a witness to him.

Have you come to your last days really? You may have come to them many times in your thoughts and dreams; you may have grown excited at the thought of being baptized into death with your Lord. But have you actually done it? You cannot die in excitement. Death means you stop being, stop striving. Do you agree with God to stop being the kind of striving, eager Christian you’ve been up to now? We circle the cemetery all the time, refusing to actually go to our deaths.

Are you ready to be buried with Christ, or are you playing the fool with your soul? Is there a moment you can identify as your last? Can you go back to it in your memory and say, with a chastened and grateful spirit, “Yes, it was then, at that ‘white funeral,’ that I made an agreement with God”?

“It is God’s will that you should be sanctified” (1 Thessalonians 4:3). When you realize that sanctification is what God wants, you will enter into death naturally. Are you willing to do it now? Do you agree with God that this day will be your last? The moment of agreement depends on you.

Seeking Jesus: by Henry Blackaby

And Simon and those who were with Him searched for Him. Mark 1:36

Simon Peter is well known to us for his foolish, extemporaneous statements throughout the Gospels (Matt. 16:22; 17:4; 26:33). But Peter was always seeking after Jesus. Peter followed Jesus from afar during the night of Jesus’ crucifixion (Matt. 26:58). Peter ran to the tomb when he heard Jesus had risen (Luke 24:12). Peter swam in the sea in his haste to get to Jesus (John 21:7) and even walked on water in order to join Jesus (Matt. 14:29). Peter did not always say or do the right things, but he did constantly seek to be with Jesus. Because of this, he was continually encountering his Lord and growing to be a more faithful disciple.

Whenever we see Peter coming to Jesus he is always accompanied by others. Because Peter was seeking Jesus, others sought Him too. What are you known for by those who know you best? Do they see you searching for fame, power, success, or happiness? Are you known as a person who seeks after Jesus? God promises: “And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart” (Jer. 29:13).

Did you begin today intent on encountering Jesus? Is your search for Him halfhearted, or are you seeking Him with all your heart? Have others grown closer to Jesus because they followed your example and sought Jesus? If your heart is set on pursuing Jesus, you will always find Him. “And the Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ And let him who hears say, ‘Come!’ And let him who thirsts come” (Rev. 22:17).