The Disciple’s Master: by Oswald Chambers

You call me Master and Lord: and rightly so, for that is what I am. John 13:13

To have a master and to be mastered aren’t the same thing. To have Jesus as a master means that there is someone who knows me better than I know myself, someone who is closer than a friend, who is able to satisfy the deepest longing of my heart. It’s to belong to someone who gives me the secure sense that he has met and solved every perplexity and problem of my mind. To have Jesus as my master is all this and nothing less.

To be mastered is different; it implies coercion or force. Jesus Christ never enforces obedience. At certain times, I wish he would, but he doesn’t. At other times, I wish he’d leave me alone, but he won’t.

“Ye call me Master and Lord.” We call Jesus our Lord and Master, but is he? “Master” and “Lord” have little place in today’s vocabulary. We prefer “Savior,” “Teacher,” and “Healer.” The only word to describe the experience of having Jesus as master is love, and many of us know very little about love as God reveals it. This is proved by the way we use the word obey. We use it to mean the submission of a weaker person to a more powerful person. In the Bible, obedience is based on a relationship of equals: the relationship of the Father and the Son. Our Lord wasn’t God’s servant; he was God’s Son. Jesus obeyed his Father because he loved him.

Our relationship to Jesus is to be the same as his relationship to the Father. If instead we think we are being mastered, it is proof that we have no master. To take this attitude toward Jesus is to be far from the relationship he wants. He wants us in a relationship in which he is easily and effortlessly Master, so much so that we aren’t even conscious of it. All we know is that we love him, and that we are his to rule.

In Union with Christ: from Jesus Calling by Sarah Young

2 Corinthians 3:17-18 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

Mark 8:36 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

I designed you to live in union with Me. This union does not negate who you are; it actually makes you more fully yourself. When you try to live independently of Me, you experience emptiness and dissatisfaction. You may gain the whole world and yet lose everything that really counts.
     Find fulfillment through living close to Me, yielding to Me purposes for you. Through I may lead you along paths that feel alien to you, trust that I know what I am doing. If you follow Me wholeheartedly, you will discover facets of yourself that were previously hidden. I know you intimately--far better than you know yourself. In union with Me, you are complete. In closeness to Me, you are transformed more and more into the one I designed you to be. 

Psalm 139:13-16 For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.

The Faith Life: by Andrew Murray

The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me. Galatians 2:20

If we were able to ask Paul, “What is your part in living life, if you no longer live but Christ lives in you?” he would answer, “The life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me.” His whole life, day by day and all day long, was one of unceasing faith in the wonderful Love that had given itself for him. Faith was the power that possessed and permeated Paul’s whole being and his every action.

Here we have the simple but full statement of the secret of the true Christian life. It is not faith that rests only in certain promises of God or in certain blessings that we receive from Christ. It is a faith that sees how entirely Christ gives Himself to the soul to be his entire life and all that that implies for every moment of the day. Just as continuous breathing is essential to the support of our physical life, so is the unceasing faith in which the soul trusts Christ and depends on Him to maintain the life of the Spirit within us. Faith always rests on the infinite love in which Christ gave Himself wholly for us to be entirely ours and to live His life over again in us. By virtue of His divine omnipresence, by which He “fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:23), He can be to each what He is to all—a complete and perfect Savior, an abiding Guest, taking charge and maintaining our life in us and for us—as if each of us were the only one in whom He lives. Just as truly as the Father lived in Him and worked in Him all that He was to work out, so will Christ live and work in each one of us.

When our faith is led and taught by God’s Holy Spirit, we obtain such a confidence in the omnipotence and omnipresence of Christ that we carry all day in the depths of our hearts this unbroken assurance: “He who loved me and gave Himself for me, He lives in me; He is my life and my all.” “I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13). May God reveal to us the inseparable union between Christ and us, in which the consciousness of Christ’s presence may become as natural to us as the consciousness of our existence.

Crucified With Christ: by Andrew Murray

I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me. Galatians 2:20

As in Adam we died and went out of the life and will of God into sin and corruption, so in Christ we are made partakers of a new spiritual death—a death out of sin and into the will and life of God. Such was the death Christ died; such is the death we are made partakers of in Him. To Paul, this was such a reality that he was able to say, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” Dying with Christ had had such power that he no longer lived his own life; instead, Christ lived His life in him. He had indeed died to the old nature and to sin and had been raised up into the power of the living Christ dwelling in him.

It was the crucified Christ who lived in Paul and made him a partaker of all that the cross had meant to Christ Himself. The very mind that was in Christ—who emptied Himself and took “the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7) and who “humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death” (verse 8)—was at work in him because the crucified Christ lived in him. He lived as a crucified man.

Christ’s death on the cross was His highest display of holiness and victory over sin. The believer who receives Christ is made a partaker of all the power and blessing that the crucified Lord has won. As the believer learns to accept this by faith, he yields himself as crucified to the world and dead to its pleasure and pride, its lusts and self‑pleasing. He learns that the mystery of the cross, as the crucified Lord reveals its power in him, opens the door into the fullest fellowship with Christ and the conformity to His sufferings. And so he learns, in the full depth of its meaning, what the Word has said: “Christ crucified…the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:23–24). He grows into a fuller understanding of the blessedness of daring to say, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me.” Oh, the blessedness and power of the God‑given faith that enables a man to live all day yielding himself to God and considering himself as “dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ” (Romans 6:11).

Great Thoughts of God part 2: by JI Packer

Give ear, our God, and hear; open your eyes and see the desolation of the city that bears your Name. We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy.  Lord, listen! Lord, forgive! Lord, hear and act! For your sake, my God, do not delay, because your city and your people bear your Name.” Daniel 9:18-19

3) Those who know God show great boldness for God.
Daniel and his friends were men who stuck their necks out. This was not foolhardiness. They knew what they were doing. They had counted the cost. They had measured the risk. They were well aware what the outcome of their actions would be unless God miraculously intervened, as in fact He did. But these things did not move them. Once they were convinced that their stand was right, and that loyalty to their God required them to take it, then, in Oswald Chambers’s phrase, they ‘smilingly washed their hands of the consequences’.

4) Those who know God have great contentment in God.
There is no peace like the peace of those whose minds are possessed with full assurance that they have known God, and God has known them, and that this relationship guarantees God’s favor to them in life, through death, and on for ever. This is the peace of which Paul speaks in Romans 5:1 – ‘being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ’ – and whose substance he analyses in full in Romans 8.

Great Thoughts of God part 1: by JI Packer

I prayed to the Lord my God and confessed: “Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and keep his commandments, Daniel 9:4

1) Those who know God have great energy for God.
In one of the prophetic chapters of Daniel we read: ‘the people that know their God shall be strong, and do exploits’ (11:32)…. This shows us that the action taken by those who know God is their reaction to the anti-God trends which they see operating around them. While their God is being defied or disregarded, they cannot rest; they feel they must do something; the dishonour done to God’s name goads them into action.

This is exactly what we see happening in the narrative chapters of Daniel, where we are told of the ‘exploits’ of Daniel and his three friends. They were men who knew God, and who in consequence felt compelled from time to time actively to stand out against the conventions and dictates of irreligion and false religion.

2) Those who know God have great thoughts of God.
There is not space enough here to gather up all that the book of Daniel tells us about the wisdom, might, and truth of the great God who rules history and shows His sovereignty in acts of judgment and mercy towards individuals and nations according to His own good pleasure. Suffice it to say that there is, perhaps, no more vivid or sustained presentation of the many-sided reality of God’s sovereignty in the whole Bible.

In face of the might and splendor of the Babylonian empire which had swallowed up Palestine, and the prospect of further great world-empires to follow, dwarfing Israel by every standard of human calculation, the book as a whole forms a dramatic reminder that the God of Israel is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, that ‘the heavens do rule’ (4:26), that God’s hand is on history at every point, that history, indeed, is no more than ‘His story,’ the unfolding of His eternal plan, and that the kingdom which will triumph in the end is God’s.

Christ Our Life: by Andrew Murray

For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ! Romans 5:17.

In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Romans 6:11

        We said that Paul teaches us now that our faith in Christ as our righteousness is to be followed by our faith in Him as our life from the dead. He asks (Romans 6:3), "Know ye not that all we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?" We were buried with Him, and raised from the dead with Him. Just as in Adam all his children died, so all believers in Christ actually died too in Him. "Our old man was crucified with Him," with Him we were raised from the dead. And now we are to count ourselves as actually "dead to sin and alive unto God."
        In very deed, just as the new life in us is an actual participation in and experience of the risen life of Christ, so our death to sin in Christ is also an actual spiritual reality. It is when, by the power of the Holy Ghost, we are enabled to see how really we were one with Christ on the cross in His death, and in His resurrection, that we shall understand that in Him sin has no power over us. We present ourselves unto God "as alive from the dead."
        Just as the old Adam lives in the sinner, even in the believer too, who does not know of the new death in Christ which he has died, even so the man who knows that he died in Christ and now is alive in Him, can confidently count upon the word, "sin shall not have dominion over you," not even for a single moment. "Reckon yourselves indeed dead to sin, and alive to God in Christ Jesus." This is the true life of faith.
As what our Lord said about our being in Him and having Him living His life in us, could only come true as the full power of the Holy Spirit is experienced, so it is here too. Paul says (Romans 8:2), "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death," of which he had been complaining that it had kept him in captivity. And he then adds "that the requirements of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit ." Through the Spirit we enter into the glorious liberty of the children of God.
        Oh that God might open the eyes of His children to see what the power is of Christ living in them for a life of holiness and fruitfulness, when they reckon themselves indeed dead unto sin and alive unto God in Christ Jesus.