Helps For Time Alone With God: by Andrew Murray

 

 Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 1 Peter 1:8

BEGIN WITH PRAISE AND THANKSGIVING

    As you enter your quiet place to be alone with God, let your first work be to thank Him for the unspeakable love which invites you to come to Him, and to converse freely with Him. If your heart is cold and dead, remember that religion is not a matter of feeling, but has to do first with the will. Raise your heart to God, and thank Him for the assurance you have that He looks down on you and will bless you. Through such an act of faith you honor God, and draw your soul away from being occupied with itself.

    Think also of the glorious grace of the Lord Jesus, who is willing to teach you to pray, and to give you the disposition to do so. Think, too, of the Holy Spirit who was purposely given to cry "Abba, Father" in your heart, and to help your weakness in prayer (Rom. 8:15,26). Five minutes spent thus will strengthen your faith for your work in prayer. Once more I say – begin with an act of thanksgiving, and praise God for the quiet time with Him and the promise of blessing there.

PREPARE FOR PRAYER BY BIBLE STUDY

    It is helpful to prepare yourself for prayer by prayerful Bible Study. The great reason why the quiet time is not attractive is that people do not know how to pray. Their stock of words is soon exhausted, and they do not know what further to say because they forget that prayer is not a soliloquy, where everything comes from one side; but it is a dialogue, where God’s child listens to what the Father says, and replies to it, and then asks for the things he needs.

    Read a few verses from the Bible. Do not concern yourself with the difficulties contained in them. You can consider these later; but take what you understand, apply it to yourself, and ask the Father to make His Word light and power in your heart. Thus you will have material enough for prayer from the Word which the Father speaks to you; you will also have the liberty to ask for things you need. Keep on in this way, and the inner chamber will become at length not a place where you sigh and struggle only, but one of living fellowship with the Father in Heaven. Prayerful study of the Bible is indispensable for powerful prayer.

TURN TO PRAYER

    When you have thus received the Word into your heart, turn to prayer. But do not attempt it hastily or thoughtlessly, as though you knew well enough how to pray. Prayer in our own strength brings no blessing. Take time to present yourself reverently and in quietness before God. Remember His greatness and holiness and love. Think over what you wish to ask from Him. Do not be satisfied with going over the same things every day. No child goes on saying the same thing day after day to his earthly father.

    Conversation with the Father is colored by the needs of the day. Let your prayer be something definite, arising either out of the Word which you have read, or out of the real soul needs which you long to have satisfied. Let your prayer be so definite that you can say as you go out, "I know what I have asked from my Father, and I expect an answer." It is a good plan sometimes to take a piece of paper, and write down what you wish to pray for. You might keep such a paper for a week or more, and repeat prayers for the items until some new needs arise.

PRAY FOR NEEDS OF OTHERS

    What has been said is in reference to your own needs. But you know that we are allowed to pray that we may help also in the needs of others. One great reason why prayer in the secret place does not bring more joy and blessing is that it is too selfish, and selfishness is the death of prayer.

    Remember your family; your congregation, with its interests; your own neighborhood; and the church to which you belong. Let your heart be enlarged, and take up the interests of missions, and of the Church through the whole world. Become an intercessor, and you will experience for the first time the blessedness of prayer, as you find out that God will make use of you to share His blessing with others through prayer. You will begin to feel that there is something worth living for, as you find that you have something to say to God, and that He from heaven will do things in answer to your prayers which otherwise would not have been done.

    A child can ask his father for bread. A full-grown son converses with him about all the interests of his business, and about his further purposes. A weak child of God prays only for himself; a full-grown man in Christ understands how to consult with God over what must take place in the Kingdom. Let your prayer list bear the names of those for whom you pray – your minister, and all other ministers, and the different missionary affairs with which you are connected. Thus the secret place will become a wonder of God’s goodness, and a fountain of great joy. It will become the most blessed place on earth.

    It is a great thing to say, but it is the simple truth that God will make your secret place a Bethel, where His angels shall ascend and descend, and where you will cry out like Jacob, "The Lord shall be my God!" (Gen. 28:21). God will make it also Peniel, where you will see the face of God, as a prince of God, as one who wrestled with the angel, and overcame him (Gen. 32:24-30).

CARRY THE ATTITUDE OF THE QUIET TIME INTO YOUR DAY

    Do not forget the close bond between the personal time with God and the outer world. The attitude of the quiet time must remain with us all the day. The object of the time alone with God is so to unite us to God that we may have Him always abiding with us. Sin, thoughtlessness, yielding to the flesh or the world make us unfit for the quiet time and bring a cloud over the soul. If you have stumbled or fallen, return to the inner chamber, and let your first work be to invoke the blood of Jesus, and to claim cleansing by it. Rest not until by confession you have repented of and put away your sin. Let the precious blood give you a fresh freedom of approach to God. Remember that the roots of your life in the secret place strike far out in body and soul, so as to manifest themselves in business life.

    Let the obedience of faith in which you pray in secret rule you constantly. The secret place is intended to bind man to God, to supply him with power from God, to enable him to live for God alone. God be thanked for the inner chamber, and for the blessed life which He will enable us there to experience and nourish.

We Should Always Seek to Know Christ Better: by AW Tozer

 

his strength: seek his face evermore. Psalm 105:4

Are you aware that we have been snared in the coils of a modern spurious logic which insists that if we have found Christ we need no more seek Him?

This is set before us as the last word in orthodoxy, and it is taken for granted that no Bible-taught Christian ever believed otherwise. Thus the whole testimony of the worshipping, seeking, singing Church on that subject is crisply set aside!

The experiential heart-theology of a grand army of fragrant saints is rejected in favor of a smug interpretation of Scripture which would certainly have sounded strange to an Augustine, a Rutherford or a Brainerd.

In the midst of this great chill there are some, I rejoice to acknowledge, who will not be content with shallow logic. They will admit the force of the argument, and then turn away with tears to hunt some lonely place and pray, “O God, show me Thy glory!” They want to taste, to touch with their hearts, to see with their inner eyes the wonder that is God.

Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted!

Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain!

LIFE is in the SON: by TA Sparks

 

I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. John 10:10

Anyone who believes in the Son of God has this testimony in his heart. Anyone who does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because he has not believed the testimony God has given about his Son.  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. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. 1 John 5:10-13

Remember – "In Him was life" (John 1:4). Is He different in nature from other men? Everyone can see that He is different from other men in His very nature, and the difference is made by this Life that is in Him. This Life brings with it a new and different consciousness. Look at the Lord Jesus! What was His real consciousness? This was a thing about which He was always speaking, and it was so very evident in His case. He said: "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30); "I do always the things that are pleasing to Him" (the Father) (John 8:29); "The works that I do in My Father's name" (John 10:25). Oh, this word "Father" in John's Gospel!

The consciousness of Jesus Christ every day was of His union with His Father, the oneness that existed between them: "As Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee" (John 17:21). The consciousness of the Lord Jesus was of the very closest union with God as His Father, and that was because the very life of God was in Him. His life was a God-conscious life; but God-consciousness in the sense of perfect oneness. And that is what it means to have this Life. Man never had that. Jesus came to bring it in His own person: not to talk about union with God, but to live out a life of union with God and to bring His disciples into the same union. "I came that they might have life" – in other words: "I am come that they may have the same consciousness of God as Father that I have and that they may have the same Divine nature in them as I have."

The Missionary’s Goal: by Oswald Chambers

He…said to them, "Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem…" —Luke 18:31

In our natural life our ambitions change as we grow, but in the Christian life the goal is given at the very beginning, and the beginning and the end are exactly the same, namely, our Lord Himself. We start with Christ and we end with Him— “…till we all come…to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ…” (Ephesians 4:13), not simply to our own idea of what the Christian life should be. The goal of the missionary is to do God’s will, not to be useful or to win the lost. A missionary is useful and he does win the lost, but that is not his goal. His goal is to do the will of his Lord.

In our Lord’s life, Jerusalem was the place where He reached the culmination of His Father’s will upon the cross, and unless we go there with Jesus we will have no friendship or fellowship with Him. Nothing ever diverted our Lord on His way to Jerusalem. He never hurried through certain villages where He was persecuted, or lingered in others where He was blessed. Neither gratitude nor ingratitude turned our Lord even the slightest degree away from His purpose to go “up to Jerusalem.”

“A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master” (Matthew 10:24). In other words, the same things that happened to our Lord will happen to us on our way to our “Jerusalem.” There will be works of God exhibited through us, people will get blessed, and one or two will show gratitude while the rest will show total ingratitude, but nothing must divert us from going “up to [our] Jerusalem.”

“…there they crucified Him…” (Luke 23:33). That is what happened when our Lord reached Jerusalem, and that event is the doorway to our salvation. The saints, however, do not end in crucifixion; by the Lord’s grace they end in glory. In the meantime our watchword should be summed up by each of us saying, “I too go ‘up to Jerusalem.’ ”

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Evil, Good and Good, Evil: by Henry Blackaby

 

Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; Who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!      Isaiah 5:20

It is Satan’s practice to convince people that what God calls good is actually evil and what God declares evil is, in fact, good. Satan persuaded Adam and Eve that their disobedience, rather than their obedience, would guarantee a full life. They believed him and immediately began to experience sin’s consequences! Despite the absurdity of Satan’s logic, he continues to deceive people into doubting what God has clearly said.

King Saul sought Samuel’s affirmation for the sacrifice he had offered, even though he had acted in direct disobedience to God’s command (1 Sam. 15:13). Ananias and Sapphira expected praise from the early church for their offering, though they were blatantly lying (Acts 5:1-11). An Amalekite soldier sought David’s gratitude for killing Saul, God’s anointed king (2 Sam. 1:1-16).

We, too, will face the temptation to call something good that God has declared wicked. We may be persuaded that we can accomplish more good by lying than by telling the truth. We may claim that we are mobilizing Christians to pray for someone in sin when, in fact, we are spreading gossip. We may assert that we are following God’s will in our job when, in fact, we are striving to pursue our own ambitions. We will also be tempted to call evil that which God declares is good. God says it is good to love our enemies, yet we might decide our task is to hold them responsible for their actions.

It is so important to hold ourselves accountable to God’s word. God does not need us to find exceptions for His commands. He requires our obedience.

Shrewd as Serpents: by CS Lewis

 

I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. Matthew 10:16

Prudence means practical common sense, taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it. Nowadays most people hardly think of Prudence as one of the ‘virtues’. In fact, because Christ said we could only get into His world by being like children, many Christians have the idea that, provided you are ‘good’, it does not matter being a fool. But that is a misunderstanding. In the first place, most children show plenty of ‘prudence’ about doing the things they are really interested in, and think them out quite sensibly. In the second place, as St. Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary. He told us to be not only ‘as harmless as doves’, but also ‘as wise as serpents’. He wants a child’s heart, but a grown-up’s head. He wants us to be simple, single-minded, affectionate, and teachable, as good children are; but He also wants every bit of intelligence we have to be alert at its job, and in first-class fighting trim. The fact that you are giving money to a charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not. The fact that what you are thinking about is God Himself (for example, when you are praying) does not mean that you can be content with the same babyish ideas which you had when you were a five-year-old. It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any the less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain.

HE HAS ROOM FOR PEOPLE WITH VERY LITTLE SENSE, BUT HE WANTS EVERY ONE TO USE WHAT SENSE THEY HAVE.

A Heart of Flesh: by Henry Blackaby

 

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.      Ezekiel 36:26

From our hearts comes our response to God. Apart from the cleansing work of the Holy Spirit, our hearts are extremely deceitful (Jeremiah 17:9). David prayed that God would cleanse him from the ravages of his sin and purify his heart (Ps. 51:10). God’s greatest desire is that His people love Him with all their hearts (Deut. 6:5). Jesus said we are blessed if our hearts are pure (Matt. 5:8).

Sin hardens the heart (Matt. 13:4, 19). The more sin we allow to pass over our hearts and through our lives, the more resistant we become to a word from God. The sin of unforgiveness stiffens our hearts. We cannot continue to resist the prompting of the Holy Spirit without becoming hardened against Him. Exposing ourselves to evil and ungodly influences desensitizes us to God and His word. Over time, our hearts become like stone, unreceptive to a fresh word from God. We become anesthetized to sin.

Has your heart grown hard toward God? Do you feel as though nothing could soften it? God has a solution. He will separate you from the influences that are destroying you (Ezek. 36:24). He will cleanse you from all filthiness and remove everything that has taken His place in your affections (Ezek. 36:25). He will remove your heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh, tender toward Him and His word. If your love for God is not what it should be, ask Him to renew your heart and restore your devotion to Him.