His Everlasting LOVE: by TA Sparks

 I love you with an everlasting love. Jeremiah 31:3

"I have borne with you all this time because I love you; anything could have happened to you, but I have not let it, I have shown you infinite longsuffering and patience, and earnest solicitude for your eternal well-being: because I love you, I have kept you alive, and have brought you to this time and to this place; I have not let you go." Oh, that this might come home to us! We may, all unconsciously, be hearing this message now simply because of this infinite love of God which has been preserving us unto this hour to let us know it. You may think it is quite fortuitous that you are hearing it – just one of the chance happenings of life; but if you knew the truth it is this infinite love of God which has held you to this time in relation to the infinite purposes of that love to let you know it. There is nothing casual about it, there is sovereign love here. "Because I have so loved, because, self-sufficient as I am, I cannot do without you" – oh, mystery of Divine love! – "because I so much wanted you I created you, and now at this moment I am drawing you." We cannot take that in, but that is the teaching of the Word of God... God does not want that kind of love that is not love at all because it gets everything that it wants to satiate its own lusts. That is not love. This love of God must make us like itself, it must be after its own kind. And so, strangely enough, many have come to find the love of God through the dark way of suffering – to discover that God was not their enemy but their friend, when they thought that He was pursuing with the object of destroying them....

Listen again, whoever you may be. If you know yourself only a little you must be amazed at this statement, but if it does not come to you as the most wonderful thing that ever was or could be, there is something grievously the matter with you; that such a One should say to such as WE, "I have loved THEE, with an everlasting love." May God Himself bring that home to us with something of its implication, something of its meaning and value, its glory, its wonder. If He should graciously do that, we shall be worshipers for the rest of our lives; there will be something about us that is in the nature of awe and wonder and we shall go softly. The realization of it will smite all our pride to the dust. There is no room for pride here. This will remove all those horrible things - pride, avarice, covetousness, self-interest, worldly ambition - and we shall be very humble, very grateful people, full of a great longing somehow to requite that love, somehow to win for that One His rights.

The Written Word Should ALWAYS Lead to the Living Word: by Andrew Murray

 

All things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning Me.
—Luke 24:44

What the Lord Jesus accomplished here on earth He owed greatly to His use of the Scriptures. In them, He found the way in which He had to walk, the food and the strength from which He could work, and the weapon by which He could overcome every enemy.

In the temptation in the wilderness, it was by His “It is written” (Matthew 4:4) that He conquered Satan. In His conflicts with the Pharisees, He continually appealed to the Word, asking, “Have ye not read?” (See, for example, Matthew 12:3, 5; Mark 12:10, 26; Luke 6:3.) “Is it not written?” (See Mark 11:17; John 10:34.)In His fellowship with His disciples, it was always from the Scriptures that He proved the necessity and certainty of His sufferings and resurrection: “How then shall the scriptures be fulfilled?” (Matthew 26:54). And during His last sufferings, it is in Scripture that He pours out the complaint of being forsaken, and then again commends His Spirit into the Father’s hands.

Jesus was Himself the living Word. He had the Spirit without measure. If anyone could have done without the written Word, it would have been Him. And yet, we see that it is everything to Him. More than anyone else, He thus shows us that the life of God in human flesh and the Word of God in human speech are inseparably connected.

In Christ’s use of Scripture, the most remarkable thing is this: He found Himself there. He saw His own image and likeness, and He gave Himself to the fulfillment of what He found written there.  It is especially in His example that we must find our own image in the Scriptures. To be “changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:18), we must gaze in the Scripture on that image as our own. In order to accomplish His work in us, the Spirit teaches us to take Christ as our Example and to gaze on His every feature as the promise of what we can be.

God’s Silence— Then What? by Oswald Chambers

 

When He heard that he was sick, He stayed two more days in the place where He was. —John 11:6

Has God trusted you with His silence— a silence that has great meaning? God’s silences are actually His answers. Just think of those days of absolute silence in the home at Bethany! Is there anything comparable to those days in your life? Can God trust you like that, or are you still asking Him for a visible answer? God will give you the very blessings you ask if you refuse to go any further without them, but His silence is the sign that He is bringing you into an even more wonderful understanding of Himself. Are you mourning before God because you have not had an audible response? When you cannot hear God, you will find that He has trusted you in the most intimate way possible— with absolute silence, not a silence of despair, but one of pleasure, because He saw that you could withstand an even bigger revelation. If God has given you a silence, then praise Him— He is bringing you into the mainstream of His purposes. The actual evidence of the answer in time is simply a matter of God’s sovereignty. Time is nothing to God. For a while you may have said, “I asked God to give me bread, but He gave me a stone instead” (see Matthew 7:9). He did not give you a stone, and today you find that He gave you the “bread of life” (John 6:35).

A wonderful thing about God’s silence is that His stillness is contagious— it gets into you, causing you to become perfectly confident so that you can honestly say, “I know that God has heard me.” His silence is the very proof that He has. As long as you have the idea that God will always bless you in answer to prayer, He will do it, but He will never give you the grace of His silence. If Jesus Christ is bringing you into the understanding that prayer is for the glorifying of His Father, then He will give you the first sign of His intimacy— silence.

from JESUS Calling by Sarah Young: The Great Love of God

 

Jeremiah 31:3

the Lord appeared to him from far away.
I have loved you with an everlasting love;
    therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.
Hebrews 13:8
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

I Love you with an everlasting Love. The human mind cannot comprehend My constancy. Your emotions flicker and falter in the face of varying circumstances, and you tend to project your fickle feelings onto Me. Thus, you do not benefit fully from My unfailing Love.
     You need to look beyond the flux of circumstances and discover Me gazing lovingly back at you. This awareness of My Presence strengthens you, as you receive and respond to My Love. I am the same yesterday, today, and forever! Let My Love flow into you continually. Your need for Me is as constant as the outflow of My Love to you.

Exodus 15:13
You have led in your steadfast love the people whom you have redeemed;
    you have guided them by your strength to your holy abode.

Right Concept of Jesus—Savior and Judge: by AW Tozer

 

In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my gospel. Romans 2:16

What is your concept of Jesus Christ as Savior and Judge?

If the “ten-cent-store Jesus” that is being preached by a lot of men, the plastic, painted Christ who has no spine and no justice and is pictured as a soft and pliable friend to everybody—if He is the only Christ there is, then we might as well close our books and bar our doors, and make a bakery or garage out of the church!

But that Christ that is being preached and pictured is not the Christ of God, nor the Christ of the Bible, nor the Christ we must deal with.

The Christ we must deal with will be the judge of mankind—and this is one of the neglected Bible doctrines in our day!

The Father judges no man. When the Lord, the Son of Man, shall come in the clouds of glory, then shall be gathered unto Him the nations, and He shall separate them.

God has given Him judgment, authority to judge mankind, so that He is both the Judge and Savior of men.

That makes me both love Him and fear Him! I love Him because He is my Savior and I fear Him because He is my Judge.

God Almighty is never going to judge the race of mankind and allow a mistake to enter. The judge must be one who has all wisdom. Therefore, I appeal away from St. Paul; I appeal away from Moses and Elijah; I appeal away from all men because no man knows me well enough to judge me, finally! Only Jesus Christ qualifies as one who is able to be the judge of all mankind.

God Speaks through His Son - THE WORD: by TA Sparks

 

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son. Hebrews 1:1,2

It says that in times past God spoke "in many ways," not only in different portions, but in different manners. It would take too long for us to go back to the Old Testament to see all the manners in which God spoke. He spoke by a thousand different means: sometimes by words and sometimes by acts. The manners were indeed "diverse." However, the statement here is that at the end He speaks in one way, one all-inclusive way, and that is in His Son. God's Son is His one inclusive way of speaking at the end. On the one side, no one is going to get anything from God apart from Jesus Christ. God will absolutely refuse to speak other than in His Son. If you want to know what God wants to say to you, you have to come to His Son. On the other side, in Jesus Christ we have all that God ever wants to say....

Yes, we have far more of God's speaking in His Son than we have yet come to understand. We have nothing apart from Jesus Christ, and we need nothing apart from Him. You can read everything that has ever been written on Christian doctrine and still be the same man or woman. God's ways are very practical, and He teaches us by experience. That experience is sometimes very difficult and is called here "the training of sons." May the Lord Jesus just impress our hearts again with these things! God is still speaking in His Son, and His speaking is in order to get companions of His Son. Companions of this heavenly calling and of Christ will go into the hard school and have to learn many hard lessons, but in learning them they will come to understand how great is their inheritance in the Lord Jesus.

Abiding in Christ: by Andrew Murray

 

He that says he abides in Him ought himself also so to walk, even as He walked.  —1 John 2:6

Abiding in Christ and walking like Christ are two blessings of the new life presented here in their essential unity. The fruit of a life in Christ isa life like Christ.

To the first of these expressions, “abiding in Christ,” we are no strangers. The wondrous parable of the vine and the branches, with the accompanying command, “Abide in Me, and I in you” (John 15:4), has often been a source of rich instruction and comfort. And though we feel as if we have only imperfectly learned the lesson of abiding in Him, yet we have tasted something of the joy that comes when the soul can say, “Lord, You know all things. You know that I do abide in You.” He also knows how often this fervent prayer still arises, “Blessed Lord, grant to me complete, unbroken abiding.”

The second expression, “walking like Christ,” is no less significant than the first. It is the promise of the wonderful power that abiding in Him will exert. As the fruit of our surrender to live wholly in Him, His life works so mightily in us that our walk—the outward expression of the inner life—becomes like His. The two are inseparably connected. The abiding in always precedes the walking like Him. Yet the desire to walk like Him must equally precede any large amount of abiding. Only then is the need for a close union fully realized. The heavenly Giver is free to bestow the fullness of His grace, because He sees that the soul is prepared to use it according to His design. When the Savior said, “If ye keep My commandments, ye shall abide in My love” (John 15:10), He meant this: the surrender to walk like Me is the path to the full abiding in Me. Many will discover that this is the secret of their failure in abiding in Christ: they did not seek it with the idea of walking like Christ. The words of John invite us to look at the two truths in their vital connection and dependence on each other.